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By Professor Joseph B. Varner
U.S.-led troops backed by warplanes battled militants in southwestern Afghanistan, killing 28 rebels including several Taliban leaders, an Afghan official said Monday.
Other reported violence claimed the lives of two Afghan soldiers, two militants and a government employee, while the Pentagon said a bomb killed an elite U.S. soldier last week. Fighting between insurgents and security forces is escalating, damping the prospect of the Western-backed effort to stabilize the country succeeding any time soon.
The violence has killed more than 2,000 people so far this year. In the bloodiest of the latest incidents, the U.S.-led coalition said its troops came under fire Sunday in the Khash Rod district of Nimroz province as they searched compounds for a Taliban leader suspected of involvement in suicide attacks. The troops killed "multiple militant groups" with small-arms fire, and airstrikes killed two more groups of attackers. There were no coalition casualties. While the coalition said only that "several" militants died and another was detained, Nimroz Governor Ghulam Dastagir Azad said 28 rebels were killed. He said some of the victims were torn apart in the late-night bombing, making the body count difficult. Azad said local officials had told him that four civilians also died.
His account could not be independently verified. The governor said the slain militants included three Taliban commanders, each of whom controlled a group of some 40-50 fighters. He said they were suspected of targeting road construction crews with bombs and planning attacks on food relief convoys. The U.N. reported Sunday that one of its relief convoys was attacked on its way to Nimroz and neighboring Helmand province, and that several trucks were burned. Other convoys have been looted. Elsewhere, the Afghan Ministry of Defense said it lost two soldiers to a roadside bomb in the Zurmat district of Paktia province on Monday. Three more soldiers were wounded. The two militants were killed in a clash with Afghan soldiers in Helmand province. In Logar province, just south of the capital, officials said militants attacked the government office in the town of Azra on Monday morning, killing one civilian employee and wounding three police. The American Special Forces soldier was fatally wounded by a bomb during a patrol on June 27, the Department of Defense said. The coalition said the incident occurred in Ghorak, a district of the southern province of Kandahar. (Source: AP)
Afghanistan will not be secure as long as insurgents are allowed to operate freely in sanctuaries on the Pakistan side of the border, a NATO spokesman said on Sunday.
With international forces in Afghanistan struggling against what the U.S. Pentagon describes as a "resilient insurgency", Pakistan is coming under increasing pressure to stop militants operating out of remote enclaves in ethnic Pashtun border lands. "We know that as long as the insurgents operate safely on the Pakistan side of the border, then there can not be security in Afghanistan," NATO spokesman Mark Laity told a regular news conference in Kabul. Pakistani forces launched an offensive in the Khyber region on Saturday to clear militants from the approaches to the city of Peshawar. But the militants being attacked are from a faction that does not have a reputation for crossing into Afghanistan to fight Western troops backing the government of President Hamid Karzai.
According to a U.S. general in Afghanistan, attacks by insurgents have jumped by 40 percent in eastern areas bordering Pakistan in the first five months of this year compared with the same period last year. (Source: AP)
Pakistani paramilitary forces expanded their push into the northwestern city of Peshawar and a nearby tribal area Sunday, taking control of much of the troubled region a day after launching an attack on insurgent strongholds there. The operation began Friday when hundreds of paramilitary troops, soldiers and police swept into Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, as Islamist insurgents massed near the city and a tribal area known as the Khyber Agency. On Sunday, about 400 additional paramilitary troops arrived in the insurgent stronghold of Bara, the main town in Khyber Agency, and set up checkpoints across the area, according to local officials. Security forces destroyed a private jail run by insurgents and took control of several insurgent redoubts in the area. Skirmishes between government forces and insurgents in parts of Bara continued Sunday.
A top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, vowed through a spokesman Sunday to seek revenge for the military incursion. Mehsud, who, along with other top insurgent leaders, has been involved in months-long peace talks with the military, declared an end to a fragile truce negotiated before the country's newly-elected government came to power in February. About two months ago, Mehsud had called on his fighters to halt attacks in North and South Waziristan, the two tribal agencies where he holds the greatest sway. (Source: Washington Post)
United States
A nearly 700-page study released Sunday by the Army found that "in the euphoria of early 2003," U.S.-based commanders prematurely believed their goals in Iraq had been reached and did not send enough troops to handle the occupation. President George W. Bush's statement on May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over reinforced that view, the study said. It was written by Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese of the Contemporary Operations Study Team at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., who said that planners who requested more troops were ignored and that commanders in Baghdad were replaced without enough of a transition and lacked enough staff. (Source: AP)
The Bush administration told Congress last year of a secret plan to dramatically expand covert operations inside Iran as part of a long-running effort to destabilize the country's ruling regime, according to a report published yesterday. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from spying on Iran's nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country's ruling clerics, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker magazine. While the administration has been waging a low-grade covert campaign against Iran for at least three years, consisting mainly of cross-border raids targeting groups tied to attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, the new policy represents a significant expansion, the report contends. The prospect of a broader covert presence inside Iran also has raised concerns among some congressional and military officials about a possible escalation leading to a broader military conflict, it states. (Source: Washington Post)
Africa
As Robert Mugabe was inaugurated Sunday to a new five-year term as Zimbabwe's president, critics and analysts warned that his pattern of violent revenge against opponents could be repeated in coming months in an attempt to destroy his chief rival's party. The announcement of Mugabe's inauguration at the State House in Harare and the issuing of invitations were so hasty that both came several hours before the results of Friday's one-man presidential runoff were released. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission eventually reported that Mugabe had received 2.1 million votes to 233,000 for Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change, who withdrew from the race June 22 because of intensifying violence against opposition supporters. In a significant blow for Mugabe's bid to be accepted as Zimbabwe's legitimate president, regional observers from the Southern African Development Community rejected the election as not representing the will of the people. The group's observers, rarely critical of a member nation's election, raised concerns about the political violence and displacement of people. Observers with the Pan-African Parliament also condemned the election and strongly criticized the violence and intimidation. (Source: LA Times)
Asia
North Korea dynamited the dirty gray cooling tower at its deactivated Yongbyon nuclear facility on Friday, a made-for-TV event intended to show the United States and the world that it is serious about abandoning its nuclear weapons program. After a loud explosion, the 60-foot tower imploded within seconds, melting into a thick white cloud of smoke and dust. The late-afternoon demolition was recorded by television news crews invited from the five countries that for years have been pressing Kim Jong Il's totalitarian state to back away from nuclear confrontation. The tower was the most visible part of a plant that manufactured the plutonium used in the nuclear device North Korea exploded in the fall of 2006. The test explosion frightened the world and prompted the Bush administration to rethink its refusal to negotiate directly with Kim's government. The slow, fitful and often-frustrating negotiations that have taken place since that explosion produced high-visibility results this week, with the cooling tower's destruction a day after the North Koreans handed over a declaration of details of their nuclear program. That document has not been made public. But Charles D. Ferguson, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department expert on nuclear safety, said that in it, North Korea declares that it produced about 81 pounds of plutonium. "You could use that to make probably about a half-dozen nuclear bombs," he told reporters Friday. A senior U.S. official said this week in Kyoto that the State Department believes North Korea may have produced up to 110 pounds of plutonium. But the official added that the North now has agreed to a verification process, including on-site inspection that should allow experts to determine precisely how much plutonium was made. The next stage will include collecting plutonium, perhaps removing it from existing weapons, and taking it out of North Korea. (Source: New York Times)
Police and soldiers scoured a remote ravine in India's east on Monday looking for dozens of elite anti-insurgency officers feared dead after Maoist rebels attacked and sank their boat in a reservoir. Police said 29 officers, some with gunshot wounds, had survived, but 37 others were still missing after the rebels fired from hilltops at their boat passing through a narrow gorge in Orissa state's Malkangiri district on Sunday. Although police said the well-trained officers would be able to survive, a top official of the local administration said "30-40 people" could have died in the attack. The anti-insurgency unit was looking for rebels in their jungle stronghold when they were attacked, police said, adding that many of the officers jumped into the water. (Source: Reuters)
Europe
A soldier using live ammunition instead of blanks wounded 16 people at a demonstration of hostage-rescue techniques in France on Sunday. The Defense Ministry said investigators will look into why real bullets were used during the demonstration at the Laperrine military barracks in southeast France. The soldier who fired the shots has been detained, Bernard Lemaire, chief of the regional administration in Aude, said on France-3 television. He said the shooting was probably accidental but that it could have been a criminal act. Four of the wounded were in serious condition, including a 3-year-old. Fifteen were civilians. (Source: AP)
Middle East
Israel reopened three of its border crossings with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Sunday following a halt to Palestinian cross-border shelling attacks that had strained an Egyptian-brokered truce. An Israeli military spokesman said Sufa commercial crossing, the Nahal Oz fuel-transfer deport and the Erez border terminal for travelers resumed operations at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT), with some restrictions in force. Another commercial crossing, Karni, remained closed. Peter Lerner, an Israeli defense official, cited a policy decision for the closure but did not elaborate. Israel shut the crossings on Wednesday after an Islamic Jihad rocket salvo which the Palestinian faction called retaliation for Israel's killing of one of its West Bank chiefs. Other Gazan militants fired a rocket and two mortar bombs in two separate incidents. There were no Israeli casualties. The truce, which began on June 19, calls for Hamas to stop cross-border rocket fire and for Israel to gradually ease its embargo on Gaza. It does not apply to the West Bank. (Source: Reuters)
Joe Varner is Assistant Professor and Program Manager for Homeland Security at American Military University
