In this bulletin:

• Conflicting claims on Taliban-held Korean hostages
• Afghanistan-Pakistan Security Talks Continue in Kabul
• Pakistan's Musharraf to Attend Tribal Council Meeting, AFP Says
• Joint declaration of jirga to be unveiled tomorrow
• Day of bloodshed in Afghanistan mars 'peace jirga'
• Afghanistan cannot become a failed state, warns Miliband
• Moscow in bid to challenge foreign mly presence in Afghanistan
• Police terrorized by Taliban
• How a "Good War" in Afghanistan Went Bad
• Taliban a step ahead of US assault
• Taliban mobile radio in parts of Afghanistan
• ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN - WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE OF THE MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT, AND CIVIL AVIATION

Conflicting claims on Taliban-held Korean hostages

Taliban negotiators

Saturday, August 11, 2007 - GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban said on Saturday they had freed two female South Korean hostages, but local and national government officials said they had no knowledge of such a release.

"Today at 6.30 pm (1330 GMT), we released two of the female Korean hostages who were seriously ill, without any condition," Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters by telephone from an unknown location.

"It's possible that at any moment they will reach Ghazni, it all depends on the transport. As far as we are concerned, they are free ... It's a gesture of good faith to the people of Korea and to the Korean delegation in Afghanistan."

However, the governor of Ghazni province, where the group of Korean church volunteers were seized on July 20 and are thought to be held, and a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said they had no knowledge of any release.

The Taliban have already killed two male hostages and threatened to kill more among the remaining 21, 18 of whom are women, unless Taliban prisoners are freed in exchange.

Earlier, the insurgents had said talks with Korean diplomats were going well and the hostages would be freed in a prisoner swap, although a provincial governor was less optimistic.

"We assure you and the whole world that all of the Koreans will be released and will go to their homes," Mawlavi Nasrullah, one of two Taliban negotiators in the talks, told reporters.

"And our prisoners will come to their homes," he said in the city of Ghazni, where the Taliban and Korean diplomats have been holding face-to-face talks since late Friday.

The second Taliban negotiator, Qari Bashir, said: "We are very hopeful that this issue will be resolved today or tomorrow inshallah (God willing)." He said the hostages were well.

The governor of Ghazni, who was present during the talks, said he did not know why the Taliban were predicting an imminent swap of hostages for Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.

"I don't know anything about that. You should ask the Taliban. I don't know why the Taliban are so sure," Merajuddin Pattan told Reuters after the talks had finished for the day. "I don't know how long this drama is going to continue.

"We haven't got any clear result so far and the talks will continue tomorrow. The Taliban are still asking for the release of 21 prisoners. We'll see what will happen," he said.

A government official in Seoul also said the release of the hostages was not imminent. The South Korean government is under intense domestic pressure to secure the safe release of the hostages, but has no power on its own to grant the kidnappers' demand for a swap with Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.

Afghanistan's authorities and allies like the United States fear releasing Taliban prisoners in exchange for the Koreans would encourage more kidnappings. Afghan officials have previously ruled out any prisoner swap and have threatened to free the hostages by force if necessary.

The talks are being held at a Red Crescent building in the city of Ghazni where the Afghan government has guaranteed the safety of the Taliban negotiators. The Taliban say they have split the hostages into small groups and said any use of force to try to free them would put their lives at risk.

(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi in Kabul and Cheon Jong-woo in Seoul)

Afghanistan-Pakistan Security Talks Continue in Kabul

By VOA (Voice of America) News - 11 August 2007

A rocket was fired on the Afghan capital of Kabul Saturday as more than 600 delegates from Pakistan and Afghanistan held a third day of talks aimed at improving security and strengthening bilateral relations.

Interior Ministry officials say the rocket landed in an open area, several kilometers from a high security zone where the meeting was being held. No damage or casualties have been reported.

The four-day peace conference, or grand jirga, focuses on specific issues dividing the two countries. Many Afghans expressed hope that the conference will help reduce violence in both countries.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is expected to attend the closing session on Sunday. A second conference is planned for Pakistan at a later date. Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

Pakistan's Musharraf to Attend Tribal Council Meeting, AFP Says

By Sam Nagarajan - Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf agreed ``in principle'' to address a tribal council meeting in Afghanistan's capital Kabul, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the foreign ministry.

The Grand Jirga meeting, which began on Aug. 9 and runs through tomorrow, according to AFP, is aimed at agreeing on measures to prevent al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters from using bases and crossing the mountainous frontier to carry out attacks in both countries.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz led his country's delegation to Kabul after Musharraf said on the eve of the gathering that he was unable to attend because of engagements at home.

He agreed to address the meeting after a phone call late yesterday from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and an earlier one from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the news agency said.

Joint declaration of jirga to be unveiled tomorrow

Reported by Zubair Babakarkhel - Translated & edited by S. Mudassir Ali Shah 

KABUL, Aug 11 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Results of the Regional Peace Jirga would be announced by its president and Pakistan Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao on Sunday, an Afghan spokesman for the gathering said here on Saturday.

The four-day meeting would conclude tomorrow noon with a joint declaration and the announcement of its outcome, Asif Nang told Pajhwok Afghan News. Around 12 noon, Presidents Hamid Karzai and Gen. Pervez Musharraf would address a joint news conference on the initiative they conceived during their last years meeting with the US leader at the White House.

Also on Saturday evening, Sherpao and his deputy Abdullah Abdullah said the joint declaration could not be finalised because of the delegates hectic schedule and translation inaccuracies. It would be drafted by 10am tomorrow in light of majority opinion, they promised, arguing the declaration needed attention.

According to insiders who did not want to be named, there were serious rifts between the two sides over the allegation that each was meddling in the internal affairs of the other. The squabbles delayed referral of suggestions to the executive body by the working committees.

As per the original schedule, the executive committee was to draft and present the grand assembly with the joint declaration at 3pm on Saturday. But it had to be set back as the five working committees failed to submit in time their recommendations to the executive body. As a consequence, the joint declaration could not be prepared today.

Sorry for the holdup, jirga head Sherpao and his deputy Abdullah told the grand assembly they would deliberate late into the night to finalise the draft of the joint declaration and present it to the forum for discussion on Sunday.

Sherpao said the jirga session would commence an hour ahead of schedule to debate the draft declaration and accord it approval. After the debate, the executive committee is slated to okay the declaration before it is unveiled later in the day.

Meanwhile, jirga secretary from Afghanistan Ismail Yoon told reporters the four-day forum would end with approval of the recommendations submitted by the five working bodies to the executive committee. Hitherto there is no point of contention that may cause disappointment, he assured.

Tens of proposals floated by the committees were overlapping, Yoon said, explaining the executive body would take a careful look at them before their submission to the General Assembly for consideration.

Asked about talks with dissidents, Yoon replied: All those who respect the constitution could join the reconciliation process. The jirga would not take any decision in conflict with Afghanistans basic law, he hoped.

Just before dusk, the five working committees came up with a whole host of recommendations aimed at bringing the neighbours closer, jointly fighting terrorism, denying sanctuary to miscreants, combating drug commerce and organised crime, boosting economic activities in tribal areas, evolving a bilateral mechanism to enforce decisions of the meeting and ending interference in each others affairs.

Issue of Indian consulates delays committee recommendations

KABUL, Aug 11 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Contentious issues pertaining to closure of Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar as well direct talks with the Taliban by the Afghan government delayed the submission of recommendations by first working committee of the Peace Jirga on Saturday.

The two proposals came from the Pakistani members of the committee. However, the Afghan members objected and argued that those were the internal issues of Afghanistan and must be omitted. Later, the two sides agreed to set aside the suggestions.

In its recommendations, the first working committee asked for boosting cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan and acting upon the policy of non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

Member of the committee from Pakistan Ilyas Bilour told Pajhwok Afghan News they agreed to recommend cooperation and non-interference in internal affairs of each other by the neighbours.

Muhammad Kabir Ranjbar, member of the committee from Afghanistan, said the Pakistani members wanted to add a suggestion regarding replacement of foreign troops with soldiers from Islamic countries in Afghanistan.

However, he said, the suggestion was rejected on the ground that it was the matter pertaining to internal and foreign policy of Afghanistan. The suggestion was later removed from the agenda.

Ranjbar said the two sides agreed on non-interference in the internal affairs of each other, increase in economic cooperation, establishment of railway links, cultural cooperation and exchange of specialists and teachers between universities of the two countries.

The agenda assigned to committee No. 1 included strengthening of bilateral ties based on good neighborliness, non-interference in internal affairs of each other, adopting confidence-building measures and setting up of direct contacts between political parties, civil society, intellectuals, media and sportsmen.

The committee was co-chaired by Azizullah Wasifi (Afghanistan) and Ali Muhammad Jan Auragzai (Pakistan) with Muhammad Gul Kochi and Khalid Aziz as their secretaries respectively.

Day of bloodshed in Afghanistan mars 'peace jirga'

by Waheedullah Massoud - Fri Aug 10, KABUL (AFP) - Fresh fighting across Afghanistan left at least 45 people dead Friday, including a British soldier, as a council of Pakistani and Afghan tribal leaders debated ways to end extremist violence in the region.

On a day of bloodshed which marred the "peace jirga" in Kabul, Taliban militants ambushed a joint Afghan and NATO army convoy, sparking a firefight that killed seven Afghan soldiers and 20 militants, the defence ministry said.

Five "important" Taliban commanders were among the dead, including the rebel movement's commander for western Badghis province, defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.

"The militants ambushed our convoy," said Azimi, adding that the army called in NATO warplanes to bomb militant positions after the attack. "We called in friendly forces' air power. Seven Afghan soldiers were martyred in the ambush and 20 enemy elements were also killed," he said. Eight Afghan army vehicles were destroyed, he said.

Elsewhere in western Afghanistan on Friday, tribal villagers repelled an attack by Taliban fighters in a battle that left five rebels and two civilians dead.

Dozens of Taliban attacked the village of Nal in the western province of Farah, but the locals resisted, provincial police chief Abdul Rehman Sarjang told AFP.

"Five Taliban and two villagers were killed in the clash. We have sent a delegation down there to investigate the incident," he said.

Fighters for the Taliban, the Islamic extremists who governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, regularly try to overrun remote areas of the country and already control several districts in the south.

Meanwhile, a British soldier serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was killed while on patrol in southern Afghanistan's flashpoint Helmand province. Another British soldier was wounded in the incident, the British defence ministry said.

The soldiers were part of a patrol checking on a local irrigation project near Jusyalay, northeast of Sangin in the volatile southern province when they came under fire from Taliban fighters.

"It was during this engagement that two soldiers were injured. An emergency response helicopter was requested, but sadly one of the soldiers was pronounced dead at the scene," the ministry said in a statement. "The injuries sustained by the second soldier are not life threatening," it added.

The latest death brings to 129 the number of international troops killed this year, according to an AFP count, most of them in action as the Taliban insurgency has intensified. More than 190 were killed last year.

The US-led coalition earlier announced that air strikes and ground battles between soldiers and insurgents in Helmand on Thursday had killed at least 10 rebels, with many more believed dead or wounded.

Intense clashes have taken place in recent days in the south, a stronghold of the resurgent Taliban, who are seeking to overthrow the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The fighting comes as about 700 Afghan and Pakistani tribal elders, religious clerics, parliamentarians and other figures -- many from the troubled border area -- met for a second day Friday on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda threat.

The four-day meeting is expected to come up with a common approach to rooting out the extremists, although analysts say it is unlikely to have much impact.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who abruptly called off an appearance at the opening day of the jirga on Thursday, has now agreed to address the closing session of the conference, his foreign ministry said late Friday.

About 50,000 international troops, more than half of them Americans, are deployed in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan cannot become a failed state, warns Miliband

London, Aug 11, IRNA - Foreign Secretary David Miliband has defended Britain's increasing military deployment in Afghanistan and rising casualty rate, insisting that the country cannot again be allowed to become a failed state.

"The potential problems emanating from that country are global in scope. Afghanistan is at the centre of international terrorism and the drugs trade," Miliband said.

"If we allow Afghanistan to become a failed state, it will always be a target for terrorist activity," he warned in an article for the pectator magazine.

His defence of Britain's deployment is the latest in a series he made since his first visit to Afghanistan last month. It also coincided with the 69th UK soldier being killed there on Friday, including 25 so far this year.

"We need to send a clear signal to allies and enemies that our commitment will be sustained, and will be matched by partners across the world," the foreign secretary said.

He declined to call on other NATO countries to meet the alliance's deployment commitment, but said that troops contributions had come from Norway to New Zealand, from Latvia to Singapore.

"Afghans need to be presented with a clear choice: the Taleban threat funded by the drugs trade or our offer of real power," Miliband said, insisting it was "not an imperial project."

His appeal comes as Britain is set to further increase its deployment in Afghanistan from some 6,200 troops to around 7,800 by the end of this year.

Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown has welcomed the recent announcement by the United States of its plans to spend Dlrs 500 million on a comprehensive package to support the Afghan government's efforts.

The UK, Brown said, has been working very closely with the US on counter narcotics and was also making an announcement on its own plans, being Afghanistan's G8 "partner" nation to eradicate the drugs problem.

The new package included "enhanced interdiction" to disrupt the operations of influential traffickers, greater focus on military support to counter narcotics and more support for counter narcotics criminal justice.

The announcement comes as Afghanistan is facing another year of record poppy cultivation, with the southern province of Helmand, where the bulk of British troops are deployment, likely to be the main driver.

Moscow in bid to challenge foreign mly presence in Afghanistan

KABUL, Aug 11 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The recent test of a sea-based ballistic missile and a rocket attack on a village in Georgia are pointers to Russia's plans to challenge the presence and increasing influence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO (NATO) in the region, said political and military analysts.

In a statement last month, the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin signed a decree suspending Russia's participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.

It said the treaty had been suspended due to "extraordinary circumstances which affect the security of the Russian Federation and require immediate measures".

Analyst Waheed Muzhda said the mentioned treaty the Collective Security Treaty (CST) was the major source for ensuring security in Europe. However, by withdrawing form the treaty, Russia could deploy increasing troops on its borders.

Russia, both directly and indirectly, wants to prevent expansion of NATO in the region and this is why it is creating hurdles in the way of its expansion. Muzdha mentioned the presence of new rockets with Taliban, that can down NATO aircrafts, as the proof of his claim.

The revolution of Mikheil Saakashvill in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the victory of Victorio Yushenkov and Pink Revolution in Kyrgyzstan were alarm signals for Russia.

Another analyst, who declined to be named, told this writer that Russia wanted to create trouble for the United States and NATO by activities in the region. Therefore, he argued, Russia encouraged the formation of an alliance in the name of Afghanistan National Front to present some sort of resistance to NATO and the Afghanistan government.

At the same, he said, former bases of Afghan mujahideen in Iran were now been used by Lashkar-i-Muhammad Rasulullah led by Yahya Khordtarak who is fighting foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Ahmad Behzad, MP from the western province of Herat, said Quds forces of Iran was member of the Pasdaran soldiers of Iran planned equipping militants inside Afghanistan.

Noorul Haq Uloomi, another parliamentarian in the Lower House, said NATO expansion in Asia and South Asia was not acceptable to Russia because it considered their presence here as a danger to its superiority in the region.

In a meeting, the Defence ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) had decided to hold the biggest-ever joint counterterrorism military exercise, evolving into more of the Defence Alliance aimed at countering US global influence in military action in Afghanistan.

The first anti-Western indication came two years ago when SCO called on the United States and its NATO allies to set a timetable to withdraw its troops from Central Asia.

The Uzbek government also evicted the US forces from Manas airbase which had been a transit point for combat operations in Afghanistan.

At least 1,600 Chinese soldiers, 2,000 Russian military personnel and 2,400 solders from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are part of the this year's exercise called Peace Mission 2007 taking place in Russia's Urals and China's Xingjian regions.

Sher Muhammad Karimi, an official at the Ministry of Defence, told this news agency that Russia was enjoying supremacy in the region and that was why it was opposing efforts by other countries to get a foothold here and challenge its supremacy.

Sensing the United States' efforts to strength its military ties with countries of the region despite being 14,000-kilometer away, Russia accelerated struggle to get closer to the Central Asian countries.

Muhammad Hassan Wolasmal, political analyst, said the United States had long-term plans in the region. It wanted complete dominance here. At the same time, US wanted to install a regime of its liking in Iran to get control over its oil reserves, said Wolasmal.

In order to thwart the US plans for its dominance in the region, Russia wanted to support Taliban and militancy in Afghanistan to convert Afghanistan into another Vietnam by lending support to Iran.

Police terrorized by Taliban

August 10, 2007 - Washington Times - By Jason Motlagh

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Haidari knows that when he graduates from the Kabul police academy this month, he will take on one of the most dangerous — and most poorly paid — jobs in Afghanistan.

But what worries him more than the Taliban extremists, who increasingly are aiming their attacks at the lightly armed and poorly equipped police, is the thought he may be posted to work in a remote region under a corrupt commander.

“My friends who have been sent to the provinces say their officers have told them to steal from the people and take money from criminals,” the 23-year-old recruit said just days before his graduation ceremony. “I"m scared of getting a police commander who works with the Taliban.”

There are plenty of reasons for a new officer to be uneasy. Police are dying at a record rate this year, easy targets for Taliban forces who, after losing hundreds of fighters in head-on confrontations with NATO forces last summer, have turned to suicide and hit-and-run attacks.

The Washington Times reported in early June that more than 200 police officers had been killed in the previous 10 weeks.

“These days, [the Taliban] are killing police, not army soldiers so much,” Mr. Haidari said as several fellow trainees nodded. “We are still ready.”

The Taliban appears to have adopted a deliberate strategy of trying to frighten off new police recruits, demonstrating there is no place where they are safe. At least 35 persons, most of them police trainees, were killed in a June 17 bus bombing directly outside the police headquarters in Kabul.

“Strategically, it makes sense to attack Afghan security forces where ... it gives people a complex about whether it is worth joining,” said Hekmat Karzai, head of the Kabul-based Center for Conflict and Peace Studies.

The police are especially vulnerable because they are spread so thinly. In some districts, there are just 25 to 30 officers to serve a population of 100,000 people, providing daily law enforcement while battling insurgents when necessary and lending a hand in drug eradication.

“In remote areas of the country, the only force that you can find that is active there, that is working there, is the police,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary.

When they do encounter the Taliban, the police are poorly equipped for the fight. While insurgents strike with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, police carry only AK-47s and other dated weaponry.

With all the dangers, police officers earn $70 a month — about half of what army troops are paid — and up to $10 of that is often siphoned off by corrupt officials before payday, said one veteran officer who requested anonymity.

“We love our country and are working without salary sometimes,” said Maj. Gen. Said Zal, a ranking officer at the Kabul academy.

Some officers have not been paid in more than a year, making them more likely to turn to illicit activities such as protecting this year's record opium poppy crop.

District command posts have been sold to the highest bidder, who then can glean drug profits, a recent report from the International Crisis Group said. However, efforts are under way to ensure a more honest and capable national police force.

The European Union is taking over police training duties from Germany, and has committed to sending advisers to restive provinces where they will work with the Afghan government to attract and train new recruits.

The plan is to add 20,000 police to the current level of about 62,000 over the next couple of years, Mr. Bashary said.

The government is also putting together a 5,000-man reserve force to be based in the central provinces, where it can provide “quick-response support wherever police are attacked,” he said. “They will go in and pound the enemy, and then withdraw.”

Another program aims to hire 11,200 auxiliary officers to supplement forces in restive parts of the country, notably southern Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Critics counter that the 10-day training course for auxiliary policemen will undermine the overall strength and integrity of the national police, increasing the likelihood of graft and infiltration by criminal elements.

How a "Good War" in Afghanistan Went Bad

The New York Times, 08/11/2007 By David Rohde and David E. Sanger

A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph -- a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists. With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a "spent force." "Some of us were saying, 'Not so fast,' " Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. "A number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear as a political and military force."

But that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory was so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call "the good war" off course.

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care and education, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan's embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had "definitely deteriorated." One former national security official called that "a very diplomatic understatement."

President Bush's critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America's effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan's myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator drone spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America's trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration's handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.

When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study.

By late last year, when the United States began increasing troop levels in Afghanistan to the current level of 23,500, a senior American military commander in the country said he was surprised to discover that "I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts" in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the economy is agricultural. A $300 million project approved by Congress for small businesses in Afghanistan was never financed by the administration.

Underlying many of the decisions, officials say, was a misapprehension about what Americans would find on the ground in Afghanistan. "The perception was that Afghans hated foreigners and that the Iraqis would welcome us," said James Dobbins, the administration's former special envoy for Afghanistan. "The reverse turned out to be the case."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration's policy, saying, "I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources." Yet she said: "I don't think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq."

In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington's record.

"I said from the get-go that we didn't have enough money and we didn't have enough soldiers," said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. "I'm saying the same thing six years later."

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the United Nations ambassador, said, "I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly," adding that "I think more could have been done earlier on these issues."

And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, "The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn't have to do nation- building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake."

After months of arguing unsuccessfully for a far larger effort in Afghanistan, Mr. Dobbins received an unexpected call in April 2002. Mr. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America's commitment to rebuild Afghanistan.

"I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan," Mr. Dobbins recalled, referring to the American rebuilding of postwar Europe. "I said, 'No, I saw no objections', so they put it in the speech."

On April 17, Mr. Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen. George C. Marshall trained a century ago. "Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings," Mr. Bush said, calling Marshall's work "a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow."

Mr. Bush had belittled "nation building" while campaigning for president 18 months earlier. But aware that Afghans had felt abandoned before, including by his father's administration after the Soviets left in 1989, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure."

"We're not going to repeat that mistake," he said. "We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless. We will stay until the mission is done."

The speech, which received faint notice in the United States, fueled expectations in Afghanistan and bolstered Mr. Karzai's stature before an Afghan grand council meeting in June 2002 at which Mr. Karzai was formally chosen to lead the government.

Yet privately, some senior officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld, were concerned that Afghanistan was a morass where the United States could achieve little, according to administration officials involved in the debate.

Within hours of the president's speech, Mr. Rumsfeld announced his own tough-love approach at a Pentagon news conference.

"The last thing you're going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself," he said. "They're going to have to figure it out. They're going to have to grab ahold of that thing and do something. And we're there to help."

But the help was slow in coming. Despite the president's promise in Virginia, in the months that followed his April speech, no detailed reconstruction plan emerged from the Bush administration.

Former officials now say the stagnation reflected tension within the administration over how large a role the United States should play in stabilizing a country after toppling a hostile government.

After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, argued in confidential sessions that if the United States now lost Afghanistan, it would damage America's image, officials said. In a February 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Powell proposed that American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Mr. Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital.

Mr. Powell said in an interview that his model was the 1989 invasion of Panama, where American troops spread out across the country after ousting the Noriega government. "The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means," he said.

Richard N. Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, said informal conversations with European officials had led him to believe that the United States could recruit a force of 20,000 to 40,000 peacekeepers, half from Europe, half from the United States.

But Mr. Rumsfeld contended that European countries were unwilling to contribute additional troops, according to Douglas J. Feith, then the Pentagon's under secretary for policy. He said Mr. Rumsfeld felt that sending American troops would reduce pressure on Europeans to contribute, and could provoke Afghans' historic resistance to invaders and divert American forces from hunting terrorists. Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment.

Some officials said they feared confusion if European forces viewed the task as peacekeeping while the American military saw their job as fighting terrorists. Ms. Rice, despite having argued for fully backing the new Karzai government, took a middle position, leaving the issue unresolved. "I felt that we needed more forces, but there was a real problem, which you continue to see to this day, with the dual role," she said.

Ultimately, Mr. Powell's proposal died. "The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan," Mr. Haass said. "I didn't see support."

Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy, said Mr. Powell "seemed resigned."

"I said this wasn't going to be fully satisfactory," Mr. Dobbins recalled. "And he said, 'Well, it's the best we could do.' "In the end, the United States deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members, and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul.

As an alternative, officials hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves. The United States would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out changes in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

But that meant no one was in overall command, officials now say. Many holes emerged in the American effort.

There were so few State Department or Pentagon civil affairs officials that 13 teams of C.I.A. operatives, whose main job was to hunt terrorists and the Taliban, were asked to stay in remote corners of Afghanistan to coordinate political efforts, said John E. McLaughlin, who was deputy director and then acting director of the agency. "It took us quite awhile to get them regrouped in the southeast for counterterrorism," he said of the C.I.A. teams.

Sixteen months after the president's 2002 speech, the United States Agency for International Development, the government's main foreign development arm, had seven full-time staffers and 35 full-time contract staff members in Afghanistan, most of them Afghans, according to a government audit. Sixty-one agency positions were vacant.

"It was state building on the cheap, it was a duct tape approach," recalled Said T. Jawad, Mr. Karzai's chief of staff at the time and Afghanistan's current ambassador to Washington. "It was fixing things that were broken, not a strategic approach."

In October 2002, Robert Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.'s counterintelligence center, visited the new Kuwait City headquarters of Lt. Gen David McKiernan, who was already planning the Iraq invasion. Meeting in a sheet metal warehouse, Mr. Grenier asked General McKiernan what his intelligence needs would be in Iraq.

The answer was simple. "They wanted as much as they could get," Mr. Grenier said.

Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Mr. Grenier said in an interview, "the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq," including the agency's most skilled counterterrorism specialists and Middle East and paramilitary operatives.

That reduced the United States' influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to turn over to the central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected as customs payments at border crossings.

While the C.I.A. replaced officers shifted to Iraq, Mr. Grenier said, it did so with younger agents, who lacked the knowledge and influence of the veterans. "I think we could have done a lot more on the Afghan side if we had more experienced folks," he said.

A former senior official of the Pentagon's Central Command, which was running both wars, said that as the Iraq planning sped up, the military's covert Special Mission Units, like Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, shifted to Iraq from Afghanistan.

So did aerial surveillance "platforms" like the Predator, a remotely piloted drone armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the sparsely populated mountains of Afghanistan. Predators were not shifted directly from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the former official, but as new Predators were produced, they went to Iraq.

"We were economizing in Afghanistan," said the former official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. "The marginal return for one more platform in Afghanistan is so much greater than for one more in Iraq."

The shift in priorities became apparent to Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's former comptroller, when Mr. Rumsfeld called him into his office in the fall of 2002, as planning for the Iraq war was in high gear, and asked him to serve as the Pentagon's reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. It was an odd role for the comptroller, whose primary task is managing the Defense Department's $400 billion a year budget.

"The fact that they went to the comptroller to do something like that was in part a function of their growing preoccupation with Iraq," said Mr. Zakheim, who left the administration in 2004. "They needed somebody, given that the top tier was covering Iraq."

In an interview, President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, insisted that there was no diversion of resources from Afghanistan, and he cited recently declassified statistics to show that troop levels in Afghanistan rose at crucial moments -- like the 2004 Afghan election -- even after the Iraq war began.

But the former Central Command official said: "If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We'd have the 'black' Special Forces you most need to conduct precision operations. We'd have more C.I.A."

"We're simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq," the former official added. "Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke."

As White House officials put together plans in the spring of 2003 for President Bush to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq, the Pentagon decided to make a similar, if less dramatic, announcement for Afghanistan.

On May 1, hours before Mr. Bush stood beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared at a news conference with Mr. Karzai in Kabul's threadbare 19th-century presidential palace. "We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities," he said. "The bulk of the country today is permissive, it's secure."

The Afghanistan announcement was largely lost in the spectacle of Mr. Bush's speech. But it proved no less detached from events on the ground.

Three weeks later, Afghan government workers who had not been paid for months held street demonstrations in Kabul. An exasperated Mr. Karzai publicly threatened to resign and announced that his government had run out of money because warlords were hording the customs revenues. "There is no money in the government treasury," Mr. Karzai said.

At the same time, the American-led training of a new Afghan Army was proving far more difficult than officials in Washington had expected. The new force, plagued by high desertion rates, had only 2,000 soldiers. The Germans' effort to train police officers was off to an even slower start, and the British-led counternarcotics effort was dwarfed by an explosion in the poppy crop. Already small groups of Taliban fighters had slipped back over the border from Pakistan and killed aid workers, stalling reconstruction in the south.

A senior White House official said in a recent interview that in retrospect, putting different countries in charge of different operations was a mistake. "We piecemealed it," he said. "One of the problems is when everybody has a piece, everybody's piece is made third and fourth priority. Nobody's piece is first priority. Stuff didn't get done."

A month after his announcement in Kabul, Mr. Rumsfeld presented a new strategy to the White House aimed at weakening warlords and engaging in "state building" in Afghanistan. In some ways, it was the approach Mr. Rumsfeld had rejected right after the invasion.

Defense Department officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld's views began to shift after a December 2002 briefing by Marin Strmecki, an Afghanistan expert at the Smith Richardson Foundation, who argued that Afghanistan was not ungovernable and that the United States could turn it into a moderate, Muslim force in the region.

He said that the United States needed to help Afghans create credible national institutions and that Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and historically the Taliban's base of support, needed a more prominent role in the government. Mr. Rumsfeld, according to aides, was impressed by Mr. Strmecki's emphasis on training Afghans to run their own government and hired him.

Then another personnel change helped alter Afghanistan policy. Mr. Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who was a senior National Security Council official and a special envoy to Iraq exiles, was appointed ambassador to Afghanistan.

Mr. Khalilzad said he accepted the job after Mr. Bush promised that the effort in Afghanistan would be vastly expanded. "We had gotten the president to a significant increase," Mr. Khalilzad recalled in an interview.

A leading neo-conservative, Mr. Khalilzad could get Ms. Rice or -- if need be -- Mr. Bush on the phone. He had been a counselor to Mr. Rumsfeld and had worked for Dick Cheney when Mr. Cheney was the first President Bush's defense secretary. "Zal could get things done," said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former American military commander in Afghanistan.

When Mr. Khalilzad arrived in Kabul on Thanksgiving 2003, he was carrying nearly $2 billion -- twice the amount of the previous year -- as well as a new military strategy and private experts to intensifying rebuilding.

They started a reconstruction plan dubbed "accelerating success" that involved the kind of nation-building once dismissed by the administration. General Barno expanded the military's "Provincial Reconstruction Teams" to build schools, roads and wells and to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans. The teams amounted to a smaller version of the force Mr. Powell had proposed 18 months earlier.

By January 2004, Afghanistan had reached a compromise on a new Afghan Constitution. With American backing, Mr. Karzai weakened several warlords. In October 2004, Mr. Karzai, who had been appointed president, was elected. At the same time, NATO countries steadily sent more troops to Afghanistan, and soon Mr. Rumsfeld -- pressed for troops for Iraq -- proposed that NATO take over security for all of Afghanistan. By the spring of 2005, Afghanistan appeared to be moving toward the success Mr. Bush had promised. But then, fearing that Iraq was spinning out of control, the White House asked Mr. Khalilzad to become ambassador to Baghdad.

Before departing Afghanistan, Mr. Khalilzad fought a final battle within the administration. It was a fight that revealed divisions within the American government over Pakistan's role in aiding the Taliban, a delicate subject as the Bush administration tried to coax cooperation out of Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

In an interview with on Afghan television, Mr. Khalilzad noted that Pakistani journalists had recently interviewed a senior Taliban commander in Pakistan. He questioned Pakistan's claim that it did not know the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders -- a form of skepticism discouraged in Washington, where the administration's line had always been that General Musharraf was doing everything he could.

"If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country, which has nuclear bombs, and a lot of security and military forces, not find them?" Mr. Khalilzad asked.

Pakistani officials publicly denounced Mr. Khalilzad's comments and denied that they were harboring Taliban leaders. But Mr. Khalilzad had also exposed the growing rift between American officials in Kabul and those in Islamabad.

Mr. Grenier said that when he was the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad the issue of fugitive Taliban leaders was repeatedly raised with senior Pakistani intelligence officials in 2002. "The results were just not there," Mr. Grenier recalled. "And it was quite clear to me that it wasn't just bad luck."

Pakistani had backed the Taliban throughout the 1990s as a counterweight to an alliance of northern Afghan commanders backed by India, Pakistan's bitter rival. Pakistani officials also distrusted Mr. Karzai.

Deciding that the Pakistanis would not act on the Taliban, Mr. Grenier said he urged them to concentrate on arresting Qaeda members, who he said were far more of a threat.

"From our perspective at the time, the Taliban was a spent force," he said, adding that "we were very much focused on Al Qaeda and didn't want to distract the Pakistanis from that."

But Mr. Khalilzad, American military officials and others in the administration argued that the Taliban were crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan and killing American troops and aid workers. "Colleagues in Washington at various levels did not recognize that there was the problem of sanctuary and that this was important," Mr. Khalilzad said.

But it was not until 2006, after ordering a study on Afghanistan's future, that Mr. Bush pressed General Musharraf on the Taliban. Later, Mr. Bush told his aides he worried that "old school ties" between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban had not been broken, despite General Musharraf's assurances.

The Pakistanis, said one senior American commander, were "hedging their bets."

"They're not sure that we are staying," he added. "And if we are gone, the Taliban is their next best option" to remain influential in Afghanistan.

As 2005 ended, the Taliban leaders remained in hiding in Pakistan, waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. Soon, they would find one.

To Afghans, a Fickle Effort

In September 2005, NATO defense ministers gathered in Berlin to complete plans for NATO troops to take over security in Afghanistan's volatile south. It was the most ambitious "out of area" operations in NATO history, and across Europe, leaders worried about getting support from their countries. Then, American military officials dropped a bombshell.

The Pentagon, they said, was considering withdrawing up to 3,000 troops from Afghanistan, roughly 20 percent of total American forces.

NATO's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said he protested to Mr. Rumsfeld that a partial American withdrawal would discourage others from sending troops.

In the end the planned troop reduction was abandoned, but chiefly because the American ground commander at the time, Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, concluded that the Taliban were returning and that he needed to shift troops to the east to try to stop them. But the announcement had sent a signal of a wavering American commitment.

"The Afghan people still doubt our staying power," General Eikenberry said. "They have seen the world walk away from them before."

To sell their new missions at home, British, Dutch and Canadian officials portrayed deployments to Afghanistan as safe, and better than sending troops to Iraq. Germany and Italy prevented their forces from being sent on combat missions in volatile areas. Those regions were to be left to the Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch.

Three months after announcing the proposed troop withdrawal, the White House Office of Management and Budget cut aid to Afghanistan by a third.

A senior administration official said all of the money allocated to Afghanistan the previous year had not been spent. "There was an absorption problem," Ms. Rice said. Mr. Neumann, then the ambassador, said he argued against the decision.

But even so, American assistance to Afghanistan dropped by 38 percent, from $4.3 billion in fiscal 2005 to $3.1 billion in fiscal 2006, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.

By February 2006, Mr. Neumann had come to the conclusion that the Taliban were planning a spring offensive, and he sent a cable to his superiors.

"I had a feeling that the view was too rosy in Washington," recalled Mr. Neumann, who retired from the State Department in June. "I was concerned."

Mr. Neumann's cable proved prophetic. In the spring of 2006, the Taliban carried out their largest offensive since 2001, attacking British, Canadian and Dutch troops in southern Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Taliban swarmed into the south, setting up checkpoints, assassinating officials and burning schools. Suicide bombings quintupled to 136. Roadside bombings doubled. All told, 191 American and NATO troops died in 2006, a 20 percent increase over 2005. For the first time, it became nearly as dangerous, statistically, to serve as an American in Afghanistan as in Iraq.

Mr. Neumann said that while suicide bombers came from Pakistan, most Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan were Afghans. Captured insurgents said they took up arms because a local governor favored a rival tribe, corrupt officials provided no services or their families needed money.

After cutting assistance in 2006, the United States plans to provide $9 billion in aid to Afghanistan in 2007, twice the amount of any year since 2001.

Despite warnings about the Taliban's resurgence from Mr. Neumann, Mr. Khalilzad and military officials, Ms. Rice said, "there was no doubt that people were surprised that the Taliban was able to regroup and come back in a large, well-organized force."

Divisions Over Strategy - In July 2006, NATO formally took responsibility for security throughout Afghanistan. To Americans and Europeans, NATO is the vaunted alliance that won the cold war. To Afghans it is little more than a strange, new acronym. And NATO and the Americans are divided over strategy.

The disagreement is evident on the wall of the office of Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of the 35,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan, where he keeps a chart that is a sea of yellow and red blocks. Each block shows the restrictions that national governments have placed on their forces under his command. Red blocks represent tasks a country will not do, like hunting Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Yellow blocks indicate missions they are willing to consider after asking their capitals for approval.

In Washington, officials lament that NATO nations are unwilling to take the kinds of risks and casualties necessary to confront the Taliban. Across Europe, officials complain the United States never focused on reconstruction, and they blame American forces for mounting air attacks on the Taliban that cause large civilian casualties, turning Afghans against the West.

The debate over how the 2001 victory in Afghanistan turned into the current struggle is well under way.

"Destroying the Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was an extraordinary strategic accomplishment," said Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, "but where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not. We were going to face this long war in Afghanistan as long as we and the Afghan government couldn't bring serious economic reconstruction to the countryside, and eliminate the Taliban's safe havens in Pakistan."

But Henry A. Crumpton, a former C.I.A. officer who played a key role in ousting the Taliban and became the State Department's counterterrorism chief, said winning a war like the one in Afghanistan required American personnel to "get in at a local level and respond to people's needs so that enemy forces cannot come in and take advantage."

"These are the fundamentals of counterinsurgency, and somehow we forgot them or never learned them," he added. He noted that "the United States has 11 carrier battle groups, but we still don't have expeditionary nonmilitary forces of the kind you need to win this sort of war."

"We're living in the past," he said.

Among many current and former officials, a consensus is emerging that a more consistent commitment by the United States may have improved the situation in Afghanistan.

Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to "take its eye off the ball" in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure "are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq."

"Symbolically, it's more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq," he said. "If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, you're sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated."

. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.

Taliban a step ahead of US assault

By Syed Saleem Shahzad- Asia Times Online / August 11, 2007

KARACHI - The ongoing three-day peace jirga (council) involving hundreds of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan is aimed at identifying and rooting out Taliban and al-Qaeda militancy on both sides of the border.

This was to be followed up with military strikes at militant bases in Pakistan, either by the Pakistani armed forces in conjunction with the United States, or even by US forces alone.

The trouble is, the bases the US had meticulously identified no longer exist. The naive, rustic but battle-hardened Taliban still want a fight, but it will be fought on the Taliban's chosen battlegrounds.

Twenty-nine bases in the tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan that were used to train militants have simply fallen off the radar.

The US had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets. But Asia Times Online has learned that since early this month, neither the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led coalition in Afghanistan nor Pakistan intelligence has detected any movement in the camps.

Human intelligence on both sides suggests the bases have been dismantled, apart from one run by hardline Islamist Mullah Abdul Khaliq. All other leading Taliban commanders, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, Gul Bahadur, Baitullah Mehsud and Haji Omar, have disappeared. Similarly, the top echelons of the Arab community that was holed up in North Waziristan has also gone.

The al-Qaeda leadership (shura) has apparently now installed itself in Jani Khel village in the Bannu district of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This includes Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Taliban leadership, most prominently Haqqani, is concentrated in the Afghan provinces of Khost and Gardez, where much fighting is expected to take place.

A spillover of al-Qaeda's presence in Jani Khel is likely to spread to Karak, Kohat, Tank, Laki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan. Kohat in NWFP is tipped to become a central city in the upcoming battle, as the office of the Pakistani Garrison commanding officer is there and all operations will be directed through this area. In addition, Kohat is directly linked with a US airfield in Khost for supplies and logistics.

A second war corridor is expected to be in the Waziristans, the Khyber Agency, the Kurram Agency, Bajaur Agency, Dir, Mohmand Agency and Chitral in Pakistan and Nanagarhar, Kunar and Nooristan in Afghanistan.

The fiercest battleground, however, will be in Khost and Gardez, making the previous Taliban successes in Helmand and Kandahar during the spring offensive of 2006 a distant memory.

The death in May of Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah in Afghanistan during a coalition raid set in motion a major change within the Taliban's command structure.

The loss of the heroic commander was a huge blow for the Taliban in southwestern Afghanistan, as a major symbol of success had been killed - and there was no one of his stature to replace him, as another top Taliban commander, Mullah Akhtar Osmani, had earlier been killed in Helmand.

Amid the demoralization, the entire Taliban leadership left Helmand, Urzgan, Zabul and Kandahar and sat idle in Satellite Town in Quetta, Pakistan, for several weeks.

Finally, in June, Taliban leader Mullah Omar outlined new guidelines, which included:

• No members of the central military command would work in southwestern Afghanistan.
• Group commanders would be given control of specific districts and be allowed to develop their own strategy.
• This strategy would be passed on only to the Taliban-appointed "governor" of the area, who in turn would relay it to the Taliban's central command council. From these various inputs, the council would develop a broader strategy for particular regions.
• The Taliban would discourage personality cults like Dadullah's, as the death of a "hero" demoralized his followers.
• Four spokesmen were appointed to decentralize the Taliban's media-information wing. Each spokesman would look after only a specific zone so that in case of his arrest, only information about that zone could be leaked. They also have all been given the same name, at present it is Qari Yousuf Ahmedi.

This "unschooled" program produced results within weeks as the Taliban gained new ground in Helmand and Urzgan through widespread grassroots support, and Jalaluddin Haqqani's commanders gained prominence.

Where does Pakistan stand? - Pakistan's stance throughout the "war on terror" has been problematical, especially with regards to the Taliban, whom its intelligence agency had long nurtured. Certainly Islamabad distanced itself from the Taliban after their fall in 2001, and has periodically cracked down on them in Pakistan, but sections in the military, intelligence agencies and general public remain sympathetic.

But once the peace jirga concludes this weekend, a war has to be fought: the US is simply running out of patience. Pakistan has said it is committed to such a battle against Taliban and al-Qaeda elements on its soil. Interestingly, though, of late the military establishment has activated its anti-American segment in the ruling coalition.

First, the secretary general of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Mushahid Hussain Syed, called for a crushing response in the event of any US attack in Pakistan. Then retired Major Tanveer Hussain Syed, secretary for the parliamentary committee on defense, said ties with the US should be severed and the Taliban should be promoted in Afghanistan. Minister of Religious Affairs Ejaz ul-Haq weighed in by calling for a review of Pakistan-US relations and the country's participation in the "war on terror". One can dismiss this as rhetoric. Washington might consider, though, that Pakistan has changed horses in midstream many times before.

Taliban mobile radio in parts of Afghanistan

Hamid Mir / The News International (Pakistan) - August 11, 2007

KABUL: Taliban have launched their mobile radio station in the eastern and central provinces of Afghanistan. Two days ago Radio Shariat of Taliban started its transmission in Paktia, Paktika, Khost and Ghazni provinces.

Some people listened Radio Shariat in Wardag and in rural areas of Kabul but it was jammed within a few hours. However, its transmission is still going on in the eastern areas and in troubled Ghazni province where Taliban had kidnapped South Koreans a few weeks ago.

Taliban have launched Radio Shariat after six years. They converted Radio Kabul into Radio Shariat in 1996 after capturing Kabul. Afghan government officials have confirmed the existence of Radio Shariat in some parts of the country but they were sure that it would be difficult for Taliban to continue the transmission successfully because they were facing a lot of technical problems and also short of good contents.

“How can they run a radio without music?” commented one Afghan official on Friday. In its transmission, the Radio Shariat criticised the Grand Jirga on Friday and said there can be no peace in Afghanistan as long as foreign invaders are present on Afghan soil.

During the last three days, Radio Shariat urged Afghans many time to rise and join Jihad against the infidels. But more surprisingly, this radio is silent on suicide bombings and also on the kidnapping of 21 South Koreans.

Government sources in Kabul were trying their best to jam the transmission of Radio Shariat In eastern provinces. These sources are sure that Taliban are running this mobile radio from Mazda truck which is changing its location continuously.

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN - WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE OF THE MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT, AND CIVIL AVIATION

HTTP://WWW.CAA-AF.ORG/INDEX.HTM

We are happy to provide travelers, businessmen, officials and others with airport information and guidance on a variety of topics of interest through this developing Afghanistan Airports website.

The civil aviation sector is central to Afghan overall reconstruction efforts. The Afghan Ministry of Transport

and Civil Aviation is working with international partners and donors for the rehabilitation, organization and management of Afghan Airspace. This process will lead to the transfer of Airspace Authority and Responsibility from the International Security Assistance Force to the Afghan government - Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. We strive to keep this website up to date with relevant airport information that could be of use to our visitors and would welcome your comments.

After the visit of CES to Kabul in December 2004 for evaluation of the current situation of the Afghan air traffic management system and its potential for further development, a study was launched to evaluate the necessary investments in the country’s CNS infrastructure. The final report will be the basis for an air transport CNS infrastructure program. Afghanistan has a privileged geographical situation in relation to international overflight corridors. Despite the fact that the country currently does not provide any positive air

traffic control, it nonetheless generated an income from ATC of over US$ 25 million annually. However, for the future sustainable development of air traffic, investments in infrastructure for a modern ATM system are

necessary. In addition, the Bank is financing satellite based (GNSS) non-precision approaches to five airports in the country. The contract was awarded to Jeppesen, and is expected to be implemented end of 2006 or early 2007.

Finally, the Bank is also financing urgently needed airport equipment, such as fire/crash vehicles and snow removal engines. This, as well as the preparation of future capacity building projects, is done in constant communication with both US and European authorities, as well as with NATO, which coordinates several development activities for the country. CES continues to provide internal cross-support to the project unit. He also coordinates communication and information exchange with the US FAA. The project financed the ILS and its approach procedure for Kabul International Airport. In addition, for the airports of Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-I-Sharif, as well as for Kabul, the project is implementing satellite based GNSS approaches, which will greatly enhance flight safety.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]