KABUL, Afghanistan -- A top Taliban commander has told CNN his insurgents are poised and ready to attack Kabul and could strike virtually anywhere in the city.It would be tempting to put this down to Taliban propaganda except one of Kabul's top cops is saying the same thing."We are working on a security strategy for the city and if we don't get it right, they [the Taliban] can attack at any minute, at any hour, any time," says Commander Mohammed Daud Amin, in charge of securing the Kabul district that includes the Presidential Palace and many government ministries.Proof of the menacing threat came just last month when eight Taliban fighters, bristling with weapons and suicide vests, burst into three government buildings in the center of Kabul.Police and security forces managed to kill all the insurgents before they could detonate their vests, but 20 people were killed and dozens were wounded.The attack took many by surprise and it underlined the credibility of Taliban threats. It was also seen as one of the most direct attacks on the government of President Hamid Karzai and gave new authority to claims that the Taliban are isolating the capital, one of the last bastions of security in Afghanistan, compromising many routes in and out of the city."Staff... staff," Amin points to pictures of dead Justice Ministry staff from his evidence book of the crime scene of last month's attack. With every page, the carnage is laid bare. There are several pictures of government employees shot dead as they worked, blood splattering the ministry walls and floors.As Amin continues to flip through the book, he reveals pictures of dead militants and many of those images defy description. In one picture, the militant is missing an arm, which Amin says was torn off as he detonated a hand grenade. In other pictures there are few body parts that can be discerned, save for the militant's head."Police went looking for the insurgents and they went after them inside. We are convinced the insurgents wanted to hold ministry employees hostage." says Amin.Many in Kabul applauded the courage and tactics of individual officers in their handling of the ministry attack. Amin says he and his men managed to prevent a deadly and prolonged hostage situation One of his men is 22-year-old Ahmed Zahir. We found him patrolling the streets of Kabul just outside the Presidential Palace walls. He describes what happened to him that day as dozens of people started pouring out of the Justice Ministry and running towards his police post in a panic.Zahir says he ran into the ministry building and was caught in a firefight, eventually killing one insurgent. While his courage seems commendable, his disillusionment over how his superiors responded to his efforts is less so, and his reactions are disturbing. "The government didn't thank me and they did not help me afterwards," says Zahir, with evident bitterness.
By help, he means money. Police in Kabul earn less than $200 a month, considerably less than it costs to live in the capital, even for those not supporting a family.
With low wages comes low morale and an invitation to corruption -- Afghanistan's police are regularly accused of being on the take.And yet their jobs couldn't be more crucial in trying to keep together the country's fragile security.Take Kabul, a city clogged with somewhere between four and five million people -- no one knows for sure -- and traffic to match that human crush. It's not hard to see how eight Taliban fighters seemed to so easily slip into the city last month. "They used government cars with tinted glass and we have no authority to stop them" says Abdulla Mahbob, a police officer at one of Kabul's key checkpoints.Still, coalition forces have no choice by to keep rooting for Kabul's cops. By the end of the year, NATO will hand over much of the responsibility for securing the capital to the city's police force. And that will be a crucial test to see if this city and this country can stand on its own, even with the Taliban standing at the gate.
Lurid headlines appeared in some papers yesterday ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5888427.ece ) regurgitating a story that was placed in the media by US intelligence agencies. The story claimed that an ex-prisoner of the the Guantanamo torture camp in Cuba is now a leading Taliban commander in Afghanistan, responsible for the change in tactics that has seen their effectiveness increase markedly against occupying troops - especially British troops in the south of the country.
ReplyDeleteI find the timing of this story too good to be true on the part of the UK government, coinciding as it does with the revelations about UK collusion in torture at Guantanamo, Morocco and Pakistan by recently released detainee, Binyam Mohamed.
Conveniently for the authorities it is impossible to cross reference any sources to verify the veracity of their claims.
The man, who has been named as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, was released into the custody of the Afghan government in December 2007 and subsequently released.
According to US intelligence the man has since changed his name - which naturally makes me even more suspicious about the story - to Abdullah Zakir.
Rasoul was originally apprehended by US forces in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and because he had a gun and more than one watch was assumed to be a supporter of the Taliban. But most men in Afghanistan have a gun or access to one given the country has been in a state of near-perpetual war for thirty years, so this apprehension was in fact the typical random kidnapping of anyone US forces came across that they designated as being on the 'battlefield'.
Does this now pose a problem for Obama in keeping his promise of shutting down Guantanamo, or should it be seen as a good excuse for not following through on that particular election promise? I would suggest the latter.
All this comes at a time when the UK and other NATO member states have been complaining that US forces in Afghanistan are not been sharing intelligence information with their 'partners'. The Guardian said that the secret report:
"Based on scores of interviews with British, US, Canadian and Dutch military, intelligence and diplomatic officials - and marked for "official use only" - the book-length report is damning of a US military often unwilling to share intelligence among its military allies"
In addition a US general admitted this week ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/4960902/US-general-admits-coalition-not-winning-in-large-areas-of-Afghanistan-including-British-run-south.html ) that the coalition is losing the war, particularly in the south, which seems like an implicit criticism of the British effort that has seen soldiers' lives being lost every week and won't go down very well at the British Ministry of Defence.
http://gazasolidarity.blogspot.com/2009/03/afghan-lies-from-discredited-us.html