AFEGANISTÃO

[marcelo l.]

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201 ... fghanistan

A guerra zumbi no Afeganistão

Talvez você tenha notado os dois seguintes manchetes de hoje do New York Times (edição impressa, a manchete on-line é diferente) :

" EUA vai ampliar guerra contra militantes dentro do Paquistão "e" A Alemanha vai começar Sair Afeganistão no próximo ano. "

Essas duas histórias dizem muito sobre a situação na Ásia Central, especialmente quando se lida no contexto da revisão mais recente estratégia. Surpresa, surpresa: que a fiscalização reafirmou praticamente todas as justificações da administração Obama para continuar a guerra, e ofereceu apenas o suficiente avaliações otimistas para suportar um esforço continuado. Ao mesmo tempo, fornece apenas pessimismo suficiente profilática para aparecer "realista".

Mas o que está faltando em tudo isso role-playing foi uma declaração clara e convincente de custos e benefícios. Para toda a conversa de derrotar a Al Qaeda (que não é mais no Afeganistão), ou impedir " portos seguros ", a administração escrupulosamente evitado a questão de saber se o dinheiro gasto, vidas perdidas, eo tempo consumido é presidenciais vale a pena em termos do avanço do núcleo interesses americanos. Ao analisar as evidências de que ele está a fazer progressos, o governo evita cuidadosamente a questão de saber se os recursos destinados a atingir algo que pode ser definida como "sucesso" se vale a pena gastar. Da mesma forma, evita-se a perguntar se os custos da retirada seria tão significativa, ele simplesmente assume que sair levaria à catástrofe. Então, ele apenas repete as afirmações habituais que "é preciso ...." e "nós ...." evitando o mais importante questão muito de saber se devemos. Nossos aliados alemães parecem ter se perguntado a essa pergunta, e chegar a uma resposta diferente.

E a notícia de que os Estados Unidos pretende ampliar ainda mais a guerra no Paquistão é especialmente preocupante. Por um lado, ele sugere que a administração tenha descoberto que ela não pode nunca vencer no Afeganistão desde que o Taliban tem um porto seguro do outro lado da fronteira (ou ativo eo apoio tácito de alguns elementos-chave para os militares paquistaneses). Mas, como Anatol Lieven notas em The Nation, desencadeando mais violência no Paquistão pode ter a longo prazo conseqüências desestabilizadoras que seria muito mais significativo do que o que finalmente acontece no Afeganistão.

E é difícil não ver ecos da decisão de Nixon de invadir o Camboja em 1970, em uma tentativa falhada para erradicar bases Viet Cong lá. As duas situações são praticamente idênticas, mas ambos ilustram a tendência para as guerras de expansão tanto no âmbito ea extensão da violência, especialmente quando eles não estão indo bem. Você envia mais tropas, mas isso não mudar as coisas. Assim que você enviar um pouco mais, e você amplia a guerra para novas áreas. Mas isso não quer trabalhar, então você decide que você tem que alterar as regras de engajamento, use mais mísseis, bombas ou drones, ou o que quer. Talvez isso irá funcionar, mas está olhando cada vez mais como o equivalente estratégica do passe Ave Maria. E assim temos uma situação bizarra em que o presidente que ganhou o Prêmio Nobel da Paz em seu primeiro ano no cargo já escalou a guerra duas vezes, expandiu o uso de drones, e agora pretende ampliar a guerra no Paquistão ainda mais.

Não nos esqueçamos de que a invasão do Camboja em 1970, também ajudou a desestabilizar o país, e ajudou a inaugurar o regime brutal do Khmer Vermelho. Eu não estou prevendo um resultado semelhante aqui, mas esse exemplo é um lembrete cruel que a força militar é um instrumento grosseiro cuja última efeitos são difíceis de prever com antecedência.

Décadas a partir de agora, os historiadores olharão para trás e me pergunto como os Estados Unidos permitiu-se a ficar atolados em uma guerra longa e custosa para determinar o destino político do país sem litoral, cujo produto interno bruto nacional inteiro é de cerca de um quarto do tamanho da cidade de Nova York orçamento. E, quando refletem sobre o fato de que os Estados Unidos fizeram isso mesmo depois de um grande colapso financeiro e na cara dos défices orçamentais persistentes e desequilíbrios macroeconômicos, eles balançam a cabeça com espanto.

[marcelo l.]

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/ ... _captu.php

Coalition and Afghan special operations teams have captured a Taliban commander who doubles as an Iranian Qods Force operative and helped ship weapons from Iran into Afghanistan.

The Taliban/Qods Force operative, who was not named, was detained during a Dec. 18 raid in the Zhari district in Kandahar province, the International Security Assistance Force reported in a press release. ISAF and Afghan forces are currently working to secure Zhari and the neighboring districts of Panjwai and Arghandab from the Taliban.

"The joint security team specifically targeted the individual for facilitating the movement of weapons between Iran and Kandahar through Nimroz province," ISAF stated. "The now-detained man was considered a Kandahar-based weapons facilitator with direct ties to other Taliban leaders in the province."

In the initial press release, ISAF did not identify the Taliban commander as a Qods Force operative. But, in response to an inquiry by The Long War Journal, ISAF confirmed that the target of the raid was indeed a member of the Qods Force, the special operations branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

"According to intelligence reports, the targeted insurgent is a member of the Qods Force," a public affairs official at the ISAF Joint Command press desk told The Long War Journal.

This is the first reported instance of the capture of a Qods Force operative in Afghanistan. US forces in Iraq captured several senior Qods Force commanders and operatives during operations in that country from 2006 to 2008.

Background on Iran's covert support for the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan

The Qods Force has tasked the Ansar Corps, a subcommand, with aiding the Taliban and other terror groups in Afghanistan. Based in Mashad in northeastern Iran, the Ansar Corps operates much like the Ramazan Corps, which supports and directs Shia terror groups in Iraq. [See LWJ report, Iran's Ramazan Corps and the ratlines into Iraq.]

On Aug. 6, 2010, General Hossein Musavi, the commander of the Ansar Corps, was one of two Qods Force commanders added to the US Treasury's list of specially designated global terrorists, for directly providing support to the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

ISAF and Afghan forces have targeted several Taliban commanders with known links to Iran's Qods Force - Ansar Corps. [See LWJ report, Taliban commander linked to Iran, al Qaeda targeted in western Afghanistan.]

In addition to Taliban fighters entering from Iran, Al Qaeda is known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to move its operatives into Afghanistan. [See LWJ report, Return to Jihad.]

A Qods Force-supported al Qaeda network is currently operating in the western province of Farah, according to an investigation by The Long War Journal.

ISAF and Afghan special operations teams have been active in the remote province of Farah since early October. There have been five reported raids in Farah since the beginning of October, and 10 raids total since March 2010. In the course of the 10 raids, ISAF has killed three al Qaeda-linked commanders (Mullah Aktar, Sabayer Sahib, and Mullah Janan), and captured another. All of these commanders have been linked to Iran's Ansar Corps.

ISAF has refused to comment to inquiries about this network. "Due to operation security concerns we are not able to go into further detail at this time," an ISAF public affairs official told The Long War Journal at the end of November.

For years, ISAF has stated that the Qods Force has helped Taliban fighters conduct training inside Iran. As recently as May 30, 2010, former ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal said that Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons.

"The training that we have seen occurs inside Iran with fighters moving inside Iran," McChrystal said at a press conference. "The weapons that we have received come from Iran into Afghanistan."

In March of 2010, General David Petraeus, then the CENTCOM commander and now the ISAF commander, discussed al Qaeda's presence in Iran in written testimony delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Al Qaeda "continues to use Iran as a key facilitation hub, where facilitators connect al Qaeda's senior leadership to regional affiliates," Petraeus explained. "And although Iranian authorities do periodically disrupt this network by detaining select al Qaeda facilitators and operational planners, Tehran's policy in this regard is often unpredictable."

Iran has recently released several top al Qaeda leaders from protective custody, including Saif al Adel, al Qaeda's top military commander and strategist; Sa'ad bin Laden, Osama's son; and Sulaiman Abu Gaith, a top al Qaeda spokesman. [See LWJ report, Osama bin Laden's spokesman freed by Iran.]

In March 2010, a Taliban commander admitted that Iran has been training teams of Taliban fighters in small unit tactics. "Our religions and our histories are different, but our target is the same - we both want to kill Americans," the commander told The Sunday Times, rebutting the common analysis that Shia Iran and Sunni al Qaeda could not cooperate due to ideological differences.



Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/ ... z18yScu06y

[marcelo l.]

Para não dizer que tudo é ruim no Afeganistão, tem a nova música, muito influenciada pelo rap americano ou bollywood...

[Hader]

US spy agencies paint grim picture of Afghan war
Bill Van Auken - Dec 16, 10
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/us-s ... n-war-4249
December 16, 2010
Global Research


Summary

Two reports produced by US intelligence agencies sharply contradict the American military's claims of success in the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.


Analysis

The National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan were recently presented in secret to members of the Senate and House intelligence committees. They represent the consensus view of Washington's 16 separate intelligence agencies, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department and the various arms of military intelligence.

Coming on the eve of the formal presentation by the Obama White House of its review of the US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the reports stand in sharp contradiction to the rosy estimates being peddled by the US military.

This month marks one year since President Barack Obama, in a speech at West Point, ordered his military “surge” in Afghanistan. This escalation saw the deployment of 30,000 more US troops into the impoverished, war-torn country, bringing the total US force there to nearly 100,000. Another 50,000 NATO and other foreign troops are participating in the US-led colonial-style war.

On Tuesday, President Obama signed off on a report prepared by Gen. David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, which claims that the escalation of the war has proved successful.

Previewing the report, which will be formally presented by the president today, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday, “There has been some important progress in halting the momentum of the Taliban in Afghanistan.” He also claimed that the US has “seen greater cooperation over the course of the past 18 months, with the Pakistani government.”

According to unnamed senior government officials quoted in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, however, US intelligence agencies challenge the veracity of such claims.

The classified intelligence reports contend that large swaths of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the Taliban, according to officials who were briefed on the National Intelligence Estimates,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

The paper also reported that the reports, presented at a closed-door hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee recently, state that the Pakistani government “remains unwilling to stop its covert support for members of the Afghan Taliban who mount attacks against US troops from the tribal areas of the neighboring country.”

According to the New York Times, the reports conclude that “there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.”

The Washington Post carried an article Wednesday indicating that the administration's own review, at least in regard to Pakistan, appears to concur in part with the intelligence estimates. It quoted an official familiar with the review as stating that Pakistan has not “fundamentally changed its strategic calculus” regarding the use of the country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas by armed Afghan opposition groups as sanctuary.

The Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus has longstanding ties to the Taliban, which it views as a counterweight to the attempt by its regional rival, India, to exert its influence in Afghanistan.

The logic of this shared assessment of the role played by Pakistan is the escalation of US pressure on the government in Islamabad and the increasing extension of the US military intervention into Pakistani territory.

White House spokesman Gibbs advised that the results of the policy review will “not surprise” anyone who has been familiar with the administration's policies.

Indeed, the long-awaited review has become virtually a non-event. The Obama administration already spelled out its intentions at the NATO summit in Lisbon last month, where it embraced a new timeline that effectively jettisoned the pledge made by the US president last December to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in July of 2011.

The new deadline embraced in Lisbon is the end of 2014 when, supposedly, Afghan security forces would be capable of taking over most combat operations in the country. July 2011 will, at most, see a token withdrawal, that will leave the bulk of US forces in the country. And military commanders have indicated that they expect American troops to remain in Afghanistan well past 2014.

The inability of the Obama administration to hold off announcing this new policy until its policy review was formally presented is indicative of the crisis gripping the US enterprise in Afghanistan, and in particular the fear that any illusion that Washington planned a major withdrawal by next year would only strengthen the Taliban and other armed opposition groups.

The extreme sensitivity of the US military to any questioning of its claims of success was expressed in the Pentagon's reaction to the National Intelligence Estimates.

Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times quoted an unnamed senior Pentagon official as dismissing the intelligence reports as out-of-date and irrelevant, having been produced by Washington bureaucrats unfamiliar with the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.

“They are not on the ground living it day in and day out like our forces are, so they don’t have the proximity and perspective,” the official told the Times.

But, as the New York Times pointed out, the CIA has built its largest station since the Vietnam War in Kabul and is commanding secret armies and death squads that number in the thousands in Afghanistan.

The Los Angeles Times article included an angry retort from an unnamed senior intelligence official. “The notion that intelligence officers aren't on the ground in Afghanistan and on the front lines in the fight against terrorism is preposterous,” he said.

This kind of backbiting within the US military-intelligence apparatus is symptomatic of the crisis atmosphere pervading the entire imperialist venture in Afghanistan.

The military's claims of progress in Afghanistan are linked to what is referred to by the Pentagon as the rise in “kinetic activity,” i.e., the escalating use of deadly force that has accompanied the Obama surge. It has resurrected the discredited method of “body counts,” claiming, for example, to have killed 952 “insurgents” during a 90-day period ending December 2. Many of these were the victims of special forces death squads, which have frequently assassinated unarmed civilians in the course of controversial night raids.

The US military has also sharply escalated the use of aerial bombardment, having dropped 5,465 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan in the first 11 months of this year. This already considerably outpaces the 4,184 that were dropped in all of 2009.

Now, for the first time, the Pentagon is bringing heavy battle tanks into Afghanistan, a move that will significantly increase the US military's firepower and the overall carnage.

The predictable result of this increased violence is a rise in civilian casualties, a sharp deterioration in economic and social conditions and growing popular anger against the foreign occupation.

More than 2,400 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan between the months of January and September alone, the most intense bloodshed since the US invaded the country in 2001. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported a 31 percent rise in civilian casualties for the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2009.

In the latest incident, NATO acknowledged on Wednesday that it is investigating a bombing by a US warplane in the Marjah district of Helmand province in which an Afghan civilian was killed and two children were wounded. “We are here to protect the Afghan people and initial indications are that in this case we may have failed,” a military spokesman said. Marjah was supposedly one of the “success” stories after the US Marines carried out a major offensive there earlier this year.

The International Committee of the Red Cross organized a press conference in Kabul Wednesday to decry what the agency said was the worst violence it has seen in Afghanistan in 30 years.

The proliferation of armed groups threatens the ability of humanitarian organizations to access those in need,” said Reto Stocker, head of the ICRC in Afghanistan. “Access for the ICRC has over the last 30 years never been as poor.”

Stocker said that the agency had called the press conference because it is “extremely concerned of yet another year of fighting with dramatic consequences for an ever-growing number of people in by now almost the entire country.” While the US has concentrated its surge in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the Red Cross representative said that the growth of the insurgency had cut off its access to the previously peaceful north of the country.

This assessment was shared by a group of aid workers and others working in Afghanistan who addressed an open letter to President Obama last week.

The situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country,” they wrote. “It is now very difficult to work outside the cities or even move around Afghanistan by road. The insurgents have built momentum, exploiting the shortcomings of the Afghan government and the mistakes of the coalition.”

The growing hostility of the Afghan people to the US occupation produced by the Obama surge found expression in a poll conducted earlier this month by the Washington Post, ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corporation and Germany’s ARD television.

The survey found that more than half of the Afghan population wants the US and other foreign forces to begin their withdrawal by mid-2011, if not immediately. Three-quarters of those surveyed supported negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the insurgent force that the US military is attempting to annihilate. And support for the Taliban in Kandahar province, the main focus of the ongoing US surge, has increased markedly, with 45 percent saying that they view the movement favorably.

Given the inherent dangers in expressing hostility to the US occupation and support for the Taliban, there is no doubt that the poll is a pale indication of both the popular outrage over the US military offensive and the level of support for the armed groups fighting against the occupation.

[FoxTroop]

Bom texto, caro Hader. Apenas uma pergunta, se me permite. O Sr. tem alguma raiz escocesa?

[Hader]

Bom texto, caro Hader. Apenas uma pergunta, se me permite. O Sr. tem alguma raiz escocesa?

Sim Fox. Raiz e frutos...

Abraço!

[FoxTroop]

Bom texto, caro Hader. Apenas uma pergunta, se me permite. O Sr. tem alguma raiz escocesa?

Sim Fox. Raiz e frutos...

Abraço!

Deduzi por um pormenor quase inconfundivel Um Bom Natal na companhia daqueles que realmente te são importantes.

Abraço.

[Hader]

Obrigado Fox! A você e a todos os teus muita Paz e alegria!

Nollaig Chridheil Agus Bliadhna Mhath ùr !

Abraços!

[cabeça de martelo]

Portugueses e espanhóis têm uma longa história de cooperação militar, mas nas operações reais, no exterior, tal não acontece. Ninguém o admite mas na realidade sempre que se fala da constituição de uma nova força multinacional para actuar num qualquer ponto do planeta, espanhóis e portugueses acabam sempre por ficar sob comandos diferentes…por “acaso”. Mas “no terreno” as coisas acontecem e aqui fica mais um caso.

http://www.operacional.pt/afeganistao-o ... -hermanos/

[marcelo l.]

Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year's fighting season, countering the Obama administration's optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago.

The Wall Street Journal was able to view two confidential "residual risk accessibility" maps, one compiled by the U.N. at the annual fighting season's start in March 2010 and another at its tail end in October. The maps, used by U.N. personnel to gauge the dangers of travel and running programs, divide the country's districts into four categories: very high risk, high risk, medium risk and low risk.

n the October map, just as in March's, virtually all of southern Afghanistan—the focus of the coalition's military offensives—remained painted the red of "very high risk," with no noted security improvements. At the same time, the green belt of "low risk" districts in northern, central and western Afghanistan shriveled considerably.

The U.N.'s October map upgraded to "high risk" 16 previously more secure districts in Badghis, Sar-e-Pul, Balkh, Parwan, Baghlan, Samangan, Faryab, Laghman and Takhar provinces; only two previously "high risk" districts, one in Kunduz and one in Herat province, received a safer rating.

A Pentagon report mandated by Congress drew similar conclusions when it was released last month. It said attacks were up 70% since 2009 and threefold since 2007. As a result of the continued violence, the Taliban still threaten the Afghan government, according to the report. The White House's National Security Council declined to comment.

The director of communications for the U.N. in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, said he couldn't comment on classified maps. But, he said, "in the course of 2010, the security situation in many parts of the country has become unstable where it previously had not been so. There is violence happening in more parts of the country, and this is making the delivery of humanitarian services more difficult for the U.N. and other organizations. But we are continuing to deliver."

U.S.-led coalition forces operate in Afghanistan under a U.N. Security Council mandate, and the U.N. works hand-in-hand with the coalition on building up Afghan government institutions. The Taliban have repeatedly attacked U.N. buildings and personnel, labeling the U.N. an instrument of American imperialism.

A senior coalition official, asked whether security in Afghanistan has deteriorated this year, said that coalition forces "have taken the offensive and are making deliberate and steady progress, though progress right now is still fragile and reversible."

He highlighted advances in Kandahar, Helmand and around Kabul, and said that a new program to raise local police forces "will reduce the insurgents' ability to intimidate the population" in areas where regular troop density isn't sufficient to maintain security.

The assessments of the U.N. accessibility maps, based on factors such as insurgent activity, political stability, coalition operations and community acceptance, contrast with President Barack Obama's recent statements that hail the coalition's progress in the war.

"Today we can be proud that there are fewer areas under Taliban control and more Afghans have a chance to build a more hopeful future," Mr. Obama told American troops during a visit to the Bagram Air Field northeast of Kabul earlier this month.

Most of the 30,000 U.S. surge troops deployed this year were sent to the Taliban heartland in the southern Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where they have been able to capture key insurgent strongholds. Though no longer under uncontested Taliban control, most of these areas remain a war zone, with frequent ambushes, shootings and bombings.

As the coalition focused on the south, the insurgents fanned out during the year to the north and the west. In recent months, the Taliban seized control in areas of dozens of districts in those previously secure parts of the country, taking advantage of the sparse international troop presence there.

Many nongovernment organizations, or NGOs, operating in Afghanistan dispute that any progress has been made by the coalition this year. According to preliminary statistics compiled by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, which provides security advice and coordination to NGOs working in the country, the number of insurgent-initiated attacks surged by some 66% in 2010 from the previous year.

"The country as a whole is dramatically worse off than a year ago, both in terms of the insurgency's geographical spread and its rate of attacks," said Nic Lee, director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office. "Vast amounts of the country remain insecure for the unarmed civilians, and more and more areas are becoming inaccessible."

[P44]

Commander: US can't seal Afghan-Pakistan border
By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Anne Flaherty, Associated Press 2 hrs 8 mins ago

WASHINGTON – American troops are focusing on fighting Taliban militants and defending vulnerable towns on Afghan soil, as it has become practically impossible to stop insurgents from slipping across Afghanistan's vast border with Pakistan, a senior U.S. military commander said.

"To secure the border in the traditional sense" would "take an inordinate amount of resources," Army Col. Viet Luong acknowledged Tuesday. It also would require far more cooperation from the tribes inside Pakistan who often provide Taliban fighters safe passage, he said.

Other senior U.S. military officials have said they hope the Pakistan military does more to shut down Taliban hideouts. But the U.S. has denied reports that American forces are pushing to expand special operations raids inside Pakistan's tribal areas to target militants.

Luong said he is choosing to fight insurgents outside Afghan villages, where they are more vulnerable anyway.

"It's naive to say that we can stop . . . forces coming through the border," said Luong, who oversees troops in a part of eastern Afghanistan that includes the volatile Khost province and 162 miles of border.

He said troops under his command are still working to control the border. But he recently shut down one platoon-sized checkpoint known as "Combat Outpost Spera," confident that it would be more useful to protect more populated areas.

Khost province has been the site of frequent enemy attacks, including a high-profile suicide bombing at a remote CIA outpost last year.

The area's proximity to Pakistan puts it on the front lines of the U.S. fight for control in Afghanistan. Pakistan is host to the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, a militant movement based in its North Waziristan region that carries out operations in Afghanistan.

Luong said he has seen "subtle signs of hope" for Khost after the U.S. and Afghanistan stepped up operations against the Haqqani network. The number of operations and patrols increased fourfold, up to 12,000 in the past year, while the effectiveness of enemy fire has been cut in half, he estimated.

"Local atmospherics are indicating that the people of Khost are beginning to feel that security is much, much better," he said. "And more importantly, for the first time, they're feeling that the provincial government is now working for the people."

Pakistan's government is believed to give the Haqqani group some degree of freedom as a way of securing Islamist support against archrival India. Islamabad also faces other problems, including massive flooding this year and government instability. In the latest sign of trouble, a key party in Pakistan's ruling coalition said Tuesday it would quit the cabinet.

This year has been by far the deadliest in the nearly 10 years for coalition troops in Afghanistan, with 700 killed so far, according to an Associated Press count. Last year, 504 were killed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101229/ap_ ... stan/print

[kurgan]

Insurreição talibã ganha força e aumenta a insegurança
27 de dezembro de 2010 • 12h07

CABUL, 27 dez 2010 (AFP) -A insurreição dos talibãs se ampliou nos últimos meses para regiões do Afeganistão que nunca haviam sido afetadas, afirmou um alto funcionário da ONU em Cabul.

"Paralelo à intensificação do conflito em certas partes do país, vimos surgir grupos insurgentes em distritos que anteriormente não haviam sido um alvo", afirmou à AFP Kieran Dwyer, integrante da Missão da ONU no Afeganistão (Unama).

O Wall Street Journal publicou nesta segunda-feira dois mapas confidenciais das Nações Unidas que mostram uma clara deterioração da segurança durante 2010, especialmente nas regiões norte e noroeste do país.

"Em certas partes do país se tornou incrivelmente difícil trabalhar durante 2010, em consequência da insegurança que afeta principalmente os trabalhadores humanitários e os funcionários do governo responsáveis pelos serviços prestados à população", completou Dwyer, que disse não ter lido a reportagem do jornal americano e que não estava autorizado a fazer comentários sobre os mapas publicados.

Segundo os mapas, a situação permanece de "risco muito alto" no sul e parte do leste, onde se concentram grande parte das operações das forças internacionais. Em 16 distritos do norte e noroeste, o nível de risco passou de "baixo" ou "médio" para "alto", enquanto em apenas dois - nas províncias de Kunduz e Herat - caiu de "alto" para "médio".

kah-ayv/fp

http://noticias.terra.com.br/mundo/noti ... 94,00.html

[marcelo l.]

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201 ... k_together

The news that various Afghan and Pakistani insurgent groups are coordinating their activities more extensively is neither surprising nor encouraging. This outcome is exactly what balance of power theory (or if you prefer, balance of threat theory) would predict: as the United States increases its military presence and escalates the level of violence, its various opponents put aside their differences for the moment in order to deal with the more imminent danger.

This pattern of behavior has a long-tradition in Afghan internal politics, as my former student Fotini Christia* showed in a terrific Ph.D. thesis a few years back. It's also a phenomenon we've seen in earlier foreign interventions. The various mujaheddin warlords put aside their various quarrels in order to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, just as China, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam set aside their mutual fears and rivalries when the United States was fighting in Indochina.

Once the Soviets withdrew, of course, divisions within Afghan society re-emerged and made the place nearly ungovernable before the emergence of the Taliban. Something similar happened in Indochina: as soon as the United States withdrew from Vietnam, rivalries between the various communist nations and the Khmer Rouge eventually led to a Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea and a short border war between China and Vietnam. It was our presence that held them together and our departure that allowed long-standing resentments to burst forth anew.

The obvious lesson is that there is little danger of some sort of powerful jihadi monolith emerging in Central Asia. It is our war effort there that is leading these groups to make common cause with each other, and the longer the war goes on, the more we can expect them to cooperate. Because our strategic interests in Central Asia are very limited (i.e., we just don't want people organizing attacks on American soil from there) our real objective should be to reduce the U.S. presence, play "divide-and-conquer," and let the natural centrifugal tendencies in this region reassert themselves. That's not necessarily the "heroic" play (which is why our commanders aren't embracing it), but wouldn't it make more sense than giving a set of un-natural allies more reason to work together?



* offtopic meu, é gata.

[FOXTROT]

terra.com.br

Dois soldados da Otan são mortos no Afeganistão
31 de dezembro de 2010

Dois soldados da Força Internacional da Otan no Afeganistão (Otan) morreram esta sexta-feira, no último dia do ano de 2010, o mais mortal para os militares estrangeiros desde o começo do conflito no país asiático, em 2001.
Um militar da Isaf morreu no sul do Afeganistão, na explosão de uma bomba artesanal e o segundo morreu no oeste do país, durante ataque de insurgentes, informou a Isaf em dois comunicados, sem dar maiores detalhes. Segundo contagem feita na noite de sexta-feira pela AFP a partir do site independente icasualties.org, pelo menos 711 militares da Isaf - ou seja, dois por dia, em média - morreram em operações no Afeganistão em 2010, o pior ano para os soldados estrangeiros desde o começo da invasão.

[P44]

mais uma confirmação do "sucesso"

Balanço do Governo
Afeganistão: número recorde de mortos civis em 2010

03.01.2011 - 09:52 Por PÚBLICO

O número de civis mortos no Afeganistão atingiu números recorde em 2010, o ano mais violento desde o derrube do regime dos estudantes de Teologia há cerca de uma década, anunciou hoje o Governo afegão.

Apesar da presença de mais de 150 mil tropas da NATO no país, a rebelião taliban regista actualmente um dos seus períodos mais fortes, e o ano passado acabou com um total de 6716 incidentes violentos, incluindo a explosão de bombas de beira de estrada, emboscadas, ataques bombistas suicidas e com rockets.

Em comunicado, o Ministério afegão do Interior, divulgou um balanço de 2043 civis mortos e outros 3570 feridos – um número ligeiramente mais baixo do que o que os Estados Unidos contaram entre Janeiro e Outubro de 2010 (de 2412 mortos e 3803 feridos civis, então representando uma subida de 20 por cento em relação a 2009).

O ano passado saldou-se ainda com a morte de 821 soldados e 1292 polícias afegãos, e outros 2447 ficaram feridos. A estes números acrescem, ainda, segundo o Governo de Cabul, a morte de 5225 rebeldes.

Segundo o website independente iCasualties.org, as forças militares estrangeiras no Afeganistão tiveram igualmente um ano de mortes recorde em 2010, de 711 soldados, quase dois terços deles de nacionalidade norte-americana. No ano anterior, a mesma organização contara 521 militares estrangeiros mortos no Afeganistão, então o ano mais sangrento para a NATO desde o início da guerra.

http://www.publico.pt/Mundo/afeganistao ... 10_1473347