Does Pakistan Urge On the Taliban

Members of Pakistan's spy agency are pressing Taliban field commanders to fight the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan, some U.S. officials and Afghan militants say, a development that undercuts a key element of the Pentagon's strategy for ending the war. The explosive accusation is the strongest yet in a series of U.S. criticisms of Pakistan, and shows a deteriorating relationship with an essential ally in the Afghan campaign. The U.S. has provided billions of dollars in military and development aid to Pakistan for its support. The U.S. and Afghanistan have sought to persuade midlevel Taliban commanders to lay down their weapons in exchange for jobs or cash. The most recent Afghan effort at starting a peace process took place this week in Kabul. But few Taliban have given up the fight, officials say. Some Taliban commanders and U.S. officials say militant leaders are being pressured by officers from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency not to surrender.

"The ISI wants to arrest commanders who are not obeying [ISI] orders," said a Taliban commander in Kunar province. U.S. officials say they have heard similar reports from captured militants and those negotiating to lay down their arms. A senior Pakistani official dismissed the allegation, insisting Islamabad is fighting militants, not aiding them. "Whenever anything goes wrong in Afghanistan, ISI is to be blamed," said the senior Pakistani official. "Honestly, they see ISI agents behind every bush in Afghanistan." The explosive accusations of ISI efforts to keep Taliban commanders on the battlefield are the strongest yet in a series of U.S. criticisms of Pakistan, and show a deteriorating relationship with an essential ally. The U.S. has provided billions of dollars in military and development aid to Pakistan in return for its support for the Afghan war and its own fight against extremists; the reports suggest some Pakistani officials are undermining that strategy.

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Senior al-Qaeda leader reportedly killed in Afghanistan

Reports say Al-Qaeda's number three leader and Afghan operations chief, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, has been killed. Mr Yazid, also known as Sheikh Said al-Masri, died along with his wife and three children, Islamist websites said, quoting a statement from al-Qaeda. US officials say they believe he was killed recently in the tribal areas of Pakistan in an American drone attack. Previous reports of his death have been wrong, but this is the first time al-Qaeda has acknowledged such claims. American officials often refer to the Egyptian-born militant as the main conduit to leader Osama Bin Laden. As al-Qaeda's operational commander in Afghanistan, he is believed to have had a hand in everything from finances to operational planning.

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Afghani drugs becoming a major Australian problem

AFGHAN heroin has been smuggled into Australia in increasing quantities in recent years, surpassing Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle as the principal source, as the deepening insurgency and a shift in US counter-narcotics policy block efforts to curb Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade. The Australian Crime Commission and Australian Federal Police say Afghanistan is becoming the dominant source of heroin in this country, accounting for as much as two-thirds of the drug imports in recent years. The latest International Narcotics Control Strategy report from the US State Department says that despite a decade of counter-narcotics efforts, Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium poppies, responsible for 90 per cent of the opium gum used to manufacture heroin worldwide, worth $2.8 billion a year. UN figures show opium production has exploded in the decade since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, with curbing the heroin trade a key objective. In 2001, poppy fields covered 7600ha and produced 185 tonnes of opium, last year they covered 131,000ha and produced 6900 tonnes.

IN May last year, Afghan national army commandos backed by coalition forces made an eye-popping find when they raided an insurgent stronghold in the town of Marjah in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province. Along with a large stash of bomb-making materials, they stumbled on the biggest opium cache located in Afghanistan. There were 18,000kg of raw opium, 200kg of heroin, 1000kg of hashish, 72,000kg of poppy seed and more than 20,000kg of precursor chemicals used to process opium into morphine and heroin. The discovery of the stash was proof of Afghanistan's emergence as not only the world's largest supplier of opium, responsible for more than 90 per cent of global stocks, but as a leading producer of processed heroin, which is flowing into Western markets including Australia. The narcotics factory at Marjah was one of 25 drug laboratories discovered and destroyed in Afghanistan last year. Tonnes of narcotics have been burned, several big traffickers imprisoned and others extradited to face trial in the US.

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Opium production in Afghanistan may fall in 2010, UN reports

Productivity could stay stable or fall, continuing a trend since 2007 which has seen a one-third drop in production, according to a new UNODC study. The report is based on farmers' intentions at the start of the planting season and gives an early picture of the 2010 crop. The cultivation of opium – raw material for the world's deadliest drug, heroin – in Afghanistan could drop this year, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said today, as bad weather is forecast during the country's current growing season.

It also found a correlation between insurgency and high cultivation, with nearly 80 per cent of villages with very poor security conditions growing poppies but in only 7 per cent of villages untouched by violence. The UNODC report pointed out that in parts of Afghanistan where the Government is more able to enforce the law, nearly two thirds of farmers said they did not grow opium because it is banned, whereas in the southeast, where authorities' reach is weaker, just under 40 per cent of farmers cited the ban as a reason for not cultivating poppies.

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Afghanistan Condemns NATO 'Friendly Fire' Incident

A joint U.S.-Afghan force called in an airstrike on what turned out to be an Afghan army post after taking fire from there before dawn Saturday, killing four Afghan soldiers and prompting an angry demand for punishment from the country's defense ministry. Both NATO and Afghan authorities described the clash around a snow-covered outpost in Wardak province southwest of Kabul as a case of mistaken identity. NATO called the attack "unfortunate" and promised a full investigation. Nevertheless, the deadly strike threatens to strain relations between NATO and the Afghan government at a time when both sides are calling for closer partnership in the fight against the Taliban. The fighting came on the heels of several cases of bloodshed between Afghans and Americans in recent weeks.

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Americans thought 'jihad must be waged,' Pakistani report says

Several American men arrested in Pakistan this week amid suspicion that they were plotting terrorist attacks planned to go to Afghanistan, a Pakistani police interrogation report said. The report, dated Thursday, sheds more light on a case that led Pakistani police to arrest five Americans Wednesday at a home in Sargodha, a town about 120 miles south of Islamabad. The men will be transferred to Lahore, Pakistan, for security reasons, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told CNN on Friday.

The report carries details about the men and shows pictures of Internet sites, laptops, mobile phones, an iPod and an external hard drive seized by police. "They had deep interest in the religion, and they were of the opinion that a jihad must be waged against the infidels for the atrocities committed by them against Muslims around the world," said the report, which refers to the five as college student.

The report focused on one of the suspects identified as Ahmed Abdullah Minni, a 20-year-old American born in Virginia. It said he regularly went online to watch attacks on the U.S. military in Afghanistan and that he left comments praising the actions. That caught the attention of militants, and he was eventually contacted by a person named Saifullah, the report says.

A Yahoo! e-mail account was set up so the men and militants could communicate, the report says. E-mails were never sent from the account, but people would leave messages in the draft folder and delete them after reading, the Pakistani police report said. "This mode of communication enabled them to pass on messages without fear of interception by the FBI," it said.

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Flow of Western terrorist recruits increasing

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people -- not necessarily the same individuals -- have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets. "We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is," said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan

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Taliban suspected of stockpiling Afghan opium

Violent Helmand province—a Taliban stronghold—accounts for more than half of Afghanistan's opium production. Antonio Maria Costa of UNODC said that the Taliban militants levy a tax on farmers and also provide protection for convoys smuggling opium into neighboring countries.

A recent UN survey says that the net value of Afghanistan's annual poppy crop is a billion U.S. dollars. The street price is much higher. Opium is processed into heroin, and the UNODC report states that in the short-term, the world's heroin market will be determined by what happens with opium production in southern Afghanistan.

Enough Afghan opium to supply world demand for two years has effectively gone missing, with the Taliban suspected of stockpiling supplies in a bid to corner the market, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has revealed.

Afghanistan is the world's leading narcotics supplier. Earlier this month, a U.N. study revealed Afghanistan's opium production had dropped dramatically this year partly because of new aggressive drug-fighting tactics in the country. According to the UNODC report, production dipped by 10 percent this year while cultivation fell by 22 percent.

However, a senior U.N. spokesman warned that this positive news should be treated with caution. "We figure the world needs around 4,000 tons of opium a year for licit and illicit purposes. But this year around 6,900 tons was produced, with 7,700 tons delivered last year and more than 8,500 the year before that. So if the world only needs around 4,000 tons of opium and a further 1,000 is seized, where is the rest of it going?"

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Russia, Plagued by Heroin Use, to Press U.S. on Destroying Afghan Poppy Crops

During talks this week with his American counterpart, Russia’s top drug enforcement official, Viktor P. Ivanov, will press the United States to step up efforts to destroy Afghan poppy cultivation, which he said was feeding a devastating drug problem in Russia.

The request comes just as American policy makers have swung sharply away from Bush-era programs to eradicate the opium poppy crop, which is used to produce heroin. After a visit to Afghanistan in July, the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said poppy eradication had alienated poor farmers and was “driving people into the hands of the Taliban.”

Mr. Ivanov, head of the federal drug control service and a trusted adviser to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, said Tuesday that eradication programs had failed in Afghanistan because they were too weak, and that the United States should apply the more muscular methods it used recently in Colombia, where vast coca fields were sprayed aerially with the herbicide glyphosate.

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'Sharp drop' in Afghan opium crop

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says opium cultivation has fallen by 22% in a year and production by 10%, with the biggest fall in Helmand province. But the figures are still higher than three years ago, when British troops began fighting Taliban militants there.

The UN says the drugs trade, which helps fund the insurgency, threatens the legitimacy of the Afghan state. It has called on the international community to sustain progress in Afghanistan, which produces 90% of the world's heroin.

It said 20 of the country's provinces are now poppy-free, but the BBC's Chris Morris in Kabul says that does not mean they are free of the refining and trafficking of drugs. The UN report concludes that the bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market, with the price of opium at a 10-year low. The UNODC report praised the introduction of UK-backed "food zones", which distribute wheat seed for farmers to plant.

• "The Opium Poppy", Opioids.com.
• "Heroin", DEA.
• "Afghanistan: Opium Winter Assessment", UNDOC.
  

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Told You So: Disguised Taliban Strike in Afghanistan

In a follow-up to an earlier report, Taliban fighters, most of them disguised in women's burqas, have killed six people in attacks on government buildings and a military base in Afghanistan, Afghan officials have said.

The raids in Gardez, the provincial capital of Paktia province, and Jalalabad on Tuesday came amid a surge in violence ahead of Afghanistan's presidential and provincial elections.

Six suicide bombers wearing wigs and women's clothing and armed with rifles and suicide vests, tried to enter government buildings in Gardez, Afghan officials said.

"At 10:50 am [06:20 GMT] ... six suicide attackers armed with Kalashnikovs, grenade-launchers and suicide vests arrived near the intelligence office in a Corolla car," the Afghan National Directorate for Security (NDS) said in a statement.

The attackers "dressed as women ... walked towards the guards at the NDS gates, pretending to submit an application paper" before one set off his suicide belt, the statement said.

"Disguised Taliban hit Afghan bases", Al-Jazeera, 7/21/09.

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American Indicted for Ties with Al Qaeda

A 26-year-old American-born Long Island man who traveled to Pakistan and trained in a Qaeda camp there last year has been charged with taking part in a rocket attack against a United States base in Afghanistan, according to court papers unsealed on Wednesday. The man, Bryant Neal Vinas, who was arrested in Peshawar, Pakistan, last November, was also charged with assisting Al Qaeda by providing “expert advice and assistance” that was “derived from specialized knowledge of the New York transit system and the Long Island Rail Road, communications equipment and personnel,” according to the papers.

The court papers, a criminal information charging Mr. Vinas with conspiracy and carrying out the attempted missile attack, providing material support to Al Qaeda and receiving military support from the group, did not mention a specific New York City plot involving the Long Island Rail Road. The papers, filed by prosecutors in the office of the Brooklyn United States attorney, Benton J. Campbell, also say that he attempted the attack and received “military-type training” from and on behalf of Al Qaeda between March and August 2008.

• "LI terrorist: LIRR knowledge came from riding it", Newsday, 7/23/09.
• "Long Island Traitor Trained To Be Suicide Bomber", New York Post, 7/23/09.
• "Long Island Man Charged in Attack on U.S. Base in Afghanistan", New York Times, 7/22/09.

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