Thu Aug 14, 2008 9:15am EDT

KABUL (Reuters) - An explosion killed three U.S.-led coalition soldiers while they were on a foot patrol in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, the U.S. military said.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan this year as Taliban insurgents step up their effort to oust the pro-Western Afghan government and drive out foreign troops through a campaign of guerrilla warfare backed by suicide and roadside bomb attacks.

The U.S. military did not say exactly where in southern Afghanistan the incident took place and did not release the nationality of the soldiers, but the vast majority of coalition troops are American.

Elsewhere, a rocket landed outside the international civilian airport in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Thursday, but there were no casualties, the NATO-led force said.

more

14 Aug 2008 14:09:53 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Updates with confirmation from party official)

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is recovering from heart surgery in the United States, a senior member of his political party said on Thursday.

The president, who is 74, has not been seen in public since travelling to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota on Aug. 2 for what his office described then as an operation on his left knee.

"Talabani received surgery on one of the blood vessels in his heart. It was a successful operation," Mustafa Sowrash, a senior official in Talabani's PUK party, told Reuters in the party's base, the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.

"The physicians informed him that he may leave the hospital today or tomorrow, and he will go to Washington," he said. "His return to Iraq is not far off."

more

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Aug 14, 2008 8:51:20 EDT

A new study verifies what physicians, company commanders and mental health workers already knew: Service members who see combat are at higher risk for heavy and binge drinking.

The study, reported in the August edition of the Journal of the American Medicine Association, found that National Guard and Reserve members, troops with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and younger service members “are at increased risk of new-onset heavy weekly drinking, binge-drinking and alcohol-related problems.”

But while the statistics sound startling, the study’s definition of “heavy drinking” includes anyone who drinks one glass more per week than the American Heart Association’s definition of “moderation” — one or two drinks a day for men, according to their Web site.

Here are the definitions used in the study:

• Heavy drinking constituted more than 14 drinks a week for men and more than seven drinks a week for women.

• Binge drinking constituted five or more drinks for men and four or more for women per day at least one day a week or at least once in the past year.

• “Alcohol-related problems” included drinking even after a doctor said it was bad for a person’s health; drinking or being hung over while at work, school or other activities; having problems getting along with others while drinking; or driving after drinking. One incident of any of the above meant classification as having an “alcohol-related problem.”

Still, the new research showed an increase in pre- and post-deployment drinking patterns, especially in those who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and witnessed combat-related trauma, such as a dying service member or decomposing bodies.

Among reservists who had no alcohol problems prior to deployment and were exposed to combat during deployment, 9 percent were classified as “new onset” heavy drinkers after returning home, while almost 26 percent met the definition of binge drinkers and more than 7 percent had “drinking-related problems.”

Among active-duty troops who had no alcohol problems prior to deployment and who witnessed combat trauma, 6 percent qualified as heavy drinkers after returning home, while 27 percent qualified as binge drinkers and 5 percent developed drinking-related problems.

“New onset” alcohol problems also were an issue for active-duty and reserve component troops who deployed but did not witness combat trauma.

For active-duty members in that category, about 5 percent became heavy drinkers, about 22 percent became binge drinkers and 3 percent developed alcohol-related problems after deployment, according to the study.

Among reservists in that category, almost 6 percent for the study’s definition of “heavy drinker,” more than 19 percent qualified as “binge drinkers,” and more than 3 percent developed alcohol-related problems after deployment.

more at Army Times

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (IPS) - U.S. officials privately admit being concerned that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki has become "overconfident" about his government’s ability to manage without U.S. combat troops, according to an Iraq analyst who just returned from a trip to Iraq arranged by U.S. commander General David Petraeus.

Colin Kahl, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) -- which has supported a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq -- told the press this week that there was "a certain degree of grudging respect for al- Maliki" among officials with whom we met, "but more often concern about his emerging overconfidence which is making it difficult to interact with him."

That assessment contrasts with statements of George W. Bush administration officials implying that al-Maliki’s public demands for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal are merely negotiating ploys or political grandstanding.

U.S. officials admitted that al-Maliki’s overconfidence has influenced the status of forces negotiations, according to Kahl. None of the U.S. officials in Baghdad would "lead off with badmouthing the prime minister," Kahl said in an interview with IPS, but upon probing further, "you get a sense they are concerned that the al-Maliki regime has an inflated sense of his power."

The Bush administration hoped negotiations with al-Maliki on a status of forces agreement would legitimise a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq and control over a number of military bases, but the Iraqi leader refused to go along with an agreement that lacked a timetable for withdrawal of all U.S. troops.

Al-Maliki’s new sense of confidence has been accompanied by a new political identity as a nationalist foe of the occupation, according to Kahl. "He is successfully fashioning himself as an Iraqi hero who kicked the Americans out. That makes him difficult to negotiate with."

One of the consequences of al-Maliki’s perception of the new power relations in Iraq is that he is even less inclined than before to make accommodations with former Sunni insurgents now on the U.S. payroll in the militias called ‘Sons of Iraq’.

Kahl said in the briefing that, of the 103,000 Sunnis belonging to those militias, the Iraqi government had promised to take into the security forces only about 16,000. But in fact, it has approved only 600 applicants thus far, according to Kahl, and most of those have turned out to be Shi’a rather than Sunni militiamen.

"There’s even some evidence that [al-Maliki] wants to start a fight with the Sons of Iraq," said Kahl. "Al-Maliki doesn’t believe he has to accommodate these people. He will only do it if we twist his arm to the breaking point."

more

Between 100 to 150 US troops have withdrawn from a strategically important district of the the Afghan province of Ghazni, officials say.

They say that soldiers retreated from the district of Nawa after repeated attacks by Taleban insurgents.

A Taleban spokesman told the BBC that the withdrawal after 10 days of fighting was a "great victory".

Correspondents say that the withdrawal further weakens the authority of the Afghan government in rural areas.

There has been no comment from the US-led coalition on the reported withdrawal and it is not clear whether it is permanent.

---

more at the link

Justice Dept. Moves Toward Charges Against Contractors in Iraq Shooting

By Del Quentin Wilber and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 17, 2008; A01

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas. Legal experts have questioned whether contractors working for the State Department can be prosecuted under its provisions.

The sources cautioned that prosecutors are still weighing evidence gathered in a 10-month investigation that began shortly after the shootings. A federal grand jury has heard testimony from about three dozen witnesses since November, including U.S. and Blackwater officials and Iraqis, according to two of the sources.

Target letters, often considered a prelude to indictment, offer suspects the opportunity to contest evidence brought before the grand jury and give their own version of events. The letters were sent this summer, although the sources, who agreed to discuss the case only on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity, said a final decision on whether to indict may not be made until October, about a year after the incident.

The U.S. attorney's office in Washington and the Justice Department's National Security Division are leading the investigation. Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, declined to comment, as did Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd. A spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, which investigated the shooting on the ground in Iraq in the weeks after the incident, also declined to comment.

Anne E. Tyrell, a spokeswoman for North Carolina-based Blackwater, said that the company believes the guards fired their weapons "in response to a hostile threat" and is monitoring the investigation closely.

"If it is determined that an individual acted improperly, Blackwater would support holding that person accountable," Tyrell said in a statement. "But at this stage, without being able to review evidence collected in an ongoing investigation, we will not prejudge the actions of any individual. The company is cooperating fully with ongoing investigations and believes that accountability is important."

more

CSM, By Peter Grier, August 18

Some 190,000 private personnel were working in the Iraq theater as of early this year, a new report says.

Washington - The American military has depended on private contractors since sutlers sold paper, bacon, sugar, and other small luxuries to Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War.

But the scale of the use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in US history, according to a new congressional report that may be the most thorough official account yet of the practice.

As of early 2008, at least 190,000 private personnel were working on US-funded projects in the Iraq theater, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) survey found. That means that for each uniformed member of the US military in the region, there was also a contract employee – a ratio of 1 to 1.

"It is ... exceptional the degree to which the military's currently relying on such contractors," said CBO director Peter Orszag at an Aug. 12 press conference.

In the Korean conflict, the ratio was 2.5 uniformed personnel for each contractor. In Vietnam, the comparable figure was 5 to 1.

The Balkans conflict of the 1990s provided a glimpse of the future, as it also featured a 1-to-1 military-to-civilian worker ratio.

But in the Balkans, the overall deployment numbers "were of a much smaller scale than what we are seeing in Iraq," Mr. Orszag said.

From The Sunday Times
August 17, 2008
Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter

The United States is planning to take control of all military operations in Afghanistan next year with an Iraq-style troop surge after becoming frustrated at Nato’s failure to defeat the Taliban.

Plans are being drawn up to send as many as 15,000 extra troops to Afghanistan with a single US general always in command, as in Iraq, defence sources said.

The Pentagon is also pushing for a permanent “unified command” in the south of the country that would sideline the Dutch and the Canadians.

At present, control of the south is rotated between the British, Dutch and Canadians, the three countries that provide the bulk of the troops.

From October next year, when the UK will take over from the Dutch, command of the south is expected to alternate between the British and the Americans.

Although final decisions cannot be made until the new US administration takes over in January, plans are being drawn up to send two to three US combat brigades – a total of between 8,000 and 12,000 men, the sources said.

Lawrence Korb, a defence expert at the Centre for American Progress, a Democratic think tank in Washington, said: “There is no doubt that the US wants to change the command structure as things have deteriorated in Afghanistan.”

more

Ten French soldiers were killed Tuesday and 21 others were injured in a gun battle with insurgents near the Afghan capital Kabul, President Nicolas Sarkozy's office confirmed in a statement.

The president's office said the soldiers were ambushed on Monday during a joint reconnaissance mission with the Afghan National Army. Media reports said the battle, which continued into Tuesday, was in an area about 55 kilometres east of the capital.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/08/19/base-militants.html

Washington | Aug 20

Xinhua - The U.S. Defense Department said on Wednesday that it had not found any clues showing close U.S. air support resulted in casualties among French troops ambushed in Afghanistan.

"We have no reports of any casualties caused by close air support," said the Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman.

He made the remarks as a response to a report by the French newspaper Le Monde, saying that the injured French troops said NATO air strikes missed their targets and hit French troops.

When asked whether French troops' casualties were resulted from the friendly fire, Whitman said that he had heard of "no report of that."

The French forces were ambushed by about 100 insurgents on Monday when they were on a patrol in a U.S.-controlled sector east of Kabul, leaving 10 killed and 21 others injured, making it the deadliest attack on French troops since 1983.

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

McClatchy, By Leila Fadel, August 20

BAGHDAD — A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

OTTAWA, Aug 21 (Reuters) - A Taliban attack killed three Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan on Thursday, bringing to 93 the number of soldiers killed there since Canada sent troops to the war-torn country in 2002.

The three were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, where 2,500 Canadians are based as part of a NATO combat mission to fight the Taliban and other militants. A fourth soldier was reported injured in the attack.

more

9 hours ago

KABUL (AFP) — Three Polish soldiers and more than 30 militants were killed in Afghanistan, military forces said Thursday, in the latest in weeks of intense attacks that have raised concern about deteriorating security.

The rebels were killed Wednesday after air strikes were called in to respond to an attack on troops operating in Laghman province, which adjoins the Sarobi area where 10 French soldiers died on Monday, the US-led coalition said.

The force said it had only struck after civilians had left the area and there were no casualties among civilians, although an Afghan doctor said at least one child had died and around 20 other villagers were wounded.

more

Jonathan Steele | Aug 21

The Guardian - US negotiators have not yet succeeded in getting Iraqi officials to agree to keep US troops well into the next US president's first term, the US secretary of state confirmed yesterday.

On a surprise visit to Baghdad, Condoleezza Rice, denied earlier reports this week that the two sides had ironed out the last disputes in a heavily-contested draft agreement that is due to replace the UN mandate covering the US occupation.

President Bush wants the pact to authorise a troop presence at least until 2011 so that he can trumpet it as proof of his policy's success. But the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, has adopted the rising nationalism in the Iraqi parliament and public and is insisting on a clear withdrawal timetable, the lifting of judicial immunity for US troops who commit abuses, and an Iraqi veto on US military operations, including the arrest of Iraqis.

The pact has been downgraded into a "memorandum of understanding" so as to avoid the need for the US Senate to approve it. In Iraq it has to go through several hurdles. "Once a breakthrough has really been achieved, the draft will be presented to the Council of Ministers", Raid Fahmi Jahid, the minister of science and technology told the Guardian yesterday.

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

bushco agrees to withdrawal date

BAGHDAD - Iraq and the U.S. pushed close to a deal Thursday setting a course for American combat troops to pull out of Iraqi cities by next June on the way to broader withdrawal from the long and costly war by 2011.

Subject to final approval by the top Iraqi leadership, the exit date for U.S. troops would be December 2011, although the Americans insist on linking that target to additional security and political progress.

President Bush has long resisted a timetable for pulling out, even under heavy pressure from a nation distressed by American deaths and discouraged by the length of the war that began in 2003. But that has softened in recent weeks. . .

I did inhale.

count the dead, resulting from yet another "coalition airstrike" called in by either "ANA" or "US Special Forces", depending upon the source. At least 95 civilians killed, including 50 children, according to a delegation sent out by Karzai to "investigate" complaints from local village leaders. As one may recall, the US military originally claimed "30 'Taliban'" KIA - actually, "suspected" Taliban - and only "3 civilians". This is an ongoing tragedy for which both the US/Nato and Afghan "government" refuse any responsibility, as it has been obvious for several years that villages and their inhabitants are part of "free-fire zones", where the alleged presence of "senior militants" justify massive indiscriminate bombings, missile attacks, etc., in the guise of "collateral damage". If anyone is still interested in this stuff, read the latest from al-Jazeera:

Commanders fired over Afghan deaths

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, has sacked an army general and a major after more than 100 civilians were reported to have been killed in an attack by US-led coalition forces.

The move came after a delegation appointed by Karzai travelled to the Shindand airstrip and Azizabad village in Herat in western Afghanistan to investigate reports that the civilians had died.

Eyewitnesses and local people say more than 100 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in the attack.

US officials say only three civilians were killed along with 25 Taliban fighters.

(more...)
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/08/200882410517833582.html

Sigh...