Drop Afghan pullout deadline, Barack Obama told

BARACK Obama is being urged to drop his deadline of July next year to start US troop withdrawals from Afghanistan Fears are rising that the deadline has emboldened the Taliban.
The US President's deadline was yesterday branded unrealistic and the cause of uncertainty about the White House's long-term commitment to the Afghan war.

Critics said it sent the wrong message to the Taliban, that they only had to wait for the US-led forces to leave the country. Afghanistan's ambassador to Washington, Said Jawad, was blunt in declaring the date to start withdrawing troops was unhelpful.
"If you over-emphasise a deadline that is not realistic, you are making the enemy a lot more bold," Mr Jawad said. "You are prolonging the war. That deadline should be realistic. The line should be based on the reality on the ground, and we should give a clear message to the enemy, to the terrorists who are a threat to everyone, that the US, NATO, Afghans, are there to finish this job."
Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain cast aspersion on a "firm date" for the US pullout.
He said Mr Obama's message about withdrawal while at the same time committing not to "turn out the lights in the middle of 2011" was indecipherable.
It made a long-term US commitment appear uncertain. "I'm all for dates for withdrawal, but that's after the strategy succeeds, not before," Senator McCain said.
Mr Obama faces growing pressure over his decision in December to declare -- in the same speech he announced plans to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan -- that the troop withdrawal would start in the middle of next year.
With 93,000 US troops and 43,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan, including 1500 Australians, new allied commander General David Petraeus insists: "We are in this to win."
But progress in the eight-year war is not as fast as the Obama administration would like. The Taliban is entrenched in key parts of Kandahar, and a military surge in the town of Marja this year delivered mixed results. But Mr Obama is sticking with the deadline to begin a US withdrawal, which he is believed to have added to his December troops announcement to appease opponents of the war in his Democratic Party.
The remarks by Mr Jawad, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai's top envoy to Washington, indicate nervousness in Kabul about the US strategy and the message it send to Mr Karzai's enemies.
Prominent Republican Lindsey Graham sounded a warning about the White House strategy. "If you send a signal to your enemy you're going to leave at a certain date, they'll wait you out," he said.
But not all the criticism went against Mr Obama yesterday, as Republican national committee chairman Michael Steele faced pressure to resign after claiming the US could not win the Afghan conflict, which he called a war "of Obama's choosing".
The remarks, made by the Republicans' titular head at a fundraiser, prompted outrage in his own party.
Senator McCain said Mr Steele would have to assess whether he could still lead the Republican Party, which supports the Afghan conflict as a war against terrorism over the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001. "Those statements are wildly inaccurate, and there's no excuse for them," Senator McCain said.
Republican Tom Cole said Mr Steele's gaffe, the latest in a long line to have embarrassed his party, would justify his resignation. Mr Steele has not spoken publicly since his comments, but issued a clarifying statement yesterday: "There is no question that America must win the war on terror."
Source:theaustralian
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Seabee battalions to deploy to Afghanistan after holidays

Two battalions of Navy Seabees will deploy to Afghanistan in coming months as part of the 30,000 additional U.S. forces deploying to the region.

NMCB 133 from Gulfport and NMCB 4, based in Port Hueneme, Calif., will deploy in March.

Each battallion contains about 580 Seabees.

The buildup is part of the buildup of additional troops in support of the President Barack Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan. The Seabees’ mission is to help provide infrastructure such as bases, berthing facilities, roads and airfields for the increasing number of U.S. forces in country.

Although the deployment schedule is a March date, the battalions could leave as early as January. As part of their normal rotation cycle, NMCB 4 and NMCB 133 were originally scheduled for deployment in February. NMCB 133 was scheduled to go to Afghanistan, and NMCB 4 was originally scheduled to deploy to the Pacific Region.

“Since World War II, the Seabees have supported the Marine Corps in every major conflict. This is our legacy, and we are proud to be part of this important mission,“ said Rear Adm. Mark Handley, commander of the First Naval Construction Division, in a press release.

Read more about this story in Wednesday’s Sun Herald.

Source:sunherald.com/

Japanese PM Asks for Iran's Help in Rebuilding Afghanistan

TEHRAN (FNA)- Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama lauded Iran's regional role and clout, and asked for Tehran's assistance with Tokyo's aid plans to Afghan reconstruction.





"Rendering help to Afghan reconstruction is Japan's strategy and Tokyo needs the Islamic Republic of Iran's help to play a constructive role in the region," Hatoyama said in a meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday with the visiting Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Saeed Jalili.

He praised Iran-Japan age-old and intimate ties, and expressed the hope that the two countries' cooperation in different fields would further expand.

The Japanese premier viewed Jalili's upcoming visit to Kashiwazaki nuclear plant and the city of Hiroshima as important parts of his itinerary, saying that Japan enjoys an advanced technology in grounds of nuclear plants safety and has valuable experiences in the construction of such nuclear facilities.

Jalili, who is also Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, arrived in Tokyo on Sunday to meet with senior Japanese officials.

Jalili's 4-day visit to Japan came at an official invitation by the Tokyo officials.

During the meeting, Jalili reminded the different fields available for the two countries' mutual, regional and international cooperation, and said that joint efforts by the two countries for nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation as well as Iran-Tokyo cooperation within the framework of Tehran's package of nuclear and security proposals to the West could serve as the most important fields of interaction between the two sides.

He also underlined that military approaches will not necessarily resolve current problems in the region, and noted, "Deployment of new forces in Afghanistan means repeating the experience of past failures."

Source:english.farsnews.com/

Afghanistan's Elections: How Dr. House Can help

The fictional Dr. House is no diplomat, as I would judge from watching this brilliant TV series. But he does have one saying that is useful for diplomats to learn. Whenever there are two diagnoses and no way to judge between them, he takes the one which means the patient has a chance. The other option might be more likely, but it also would mean there is nothing he can do to stop the patient dying.

Likewise, in foreign policy. Let's say there are two diagnoses for Afghanistan -- one means it has a chance if we do things right. The other means that there's no hope whatever we do -- withdrawal means a moral defeat but so, ultimately, does staying put. The arguments for hopelessness are set out eloquently here.

Being trained as a diplomat, I'm instinctively drawn to that first diagnosis. In general, I am unashamed to be proposing practical solutions based on the assumption that the situation is not hopeless -- and based on where we are, not where we might want to be or where we might have been.

The Afghan elections might seem a backward-looking, hopeless kind of issue. Because of the UN internal division between Kai Eide and Peter Galbraith being still in the news, though, it's impossible for me to forget it. (I am also reminded of it every time I look at my bank balance, since my unhappiness with that process and its aftermath led me to resign from the UN before I started to receive a stipend from Harvard. And as the poet Juvenal said, integrity is all very well, but it doesn't pay your bills.)

I am happy to pass over the Eide-Galbraith story, which was an unpleasant enough experience at the time without my re-living it here. But the fact that Galbraith has been the only person to have lost his job as a result of the fraud in those elections -- this is not about past history. It's about over $200 million in donor funds that were, in part, misused. This was an Afghan election, an exercise which was rightly led by Afghans (even if the Electoral Commission's head was appointed by one of the candidates, which was always an obvious flaw in the process). But it was also a donor-funded project, and donors have the right -- even the duty -- to verify that taxpayers' money was well spent.

It's also about $100 million or more in donor funds that may be required to fund parliamentary elections next year, in the same circumstances as the 2009 elections. Here's a piece suggesting there are four scenarios for those elections. Having lived through the 2009 experience, I am personally a big advocate of postponing the parliamentary ones. The problems in these elections that have just passed were not just that the IEC was mistrusted by the opposition, nor that over a million votes appear to have been fraudulent, but that many people were afraid to vote. In Zabul province, a remote and dangerous area in the south of Afghanistan, the official turnout was less than 8% of the estimated population, even assuming all those votes were valid. In a constituency-based election this will give ludicrously unrepresentative results. The tiny minority of people who live in the safer areas of Zabul will decide who represents Zabul in Parliament.

But unless action is taken to address the fraud then the problems next year will be even worse than they were this year, because the stakes are very high for some powerful local players in Afghanistan who want to win seats in Parliament. Violence, intimidation and ballot-stuffing are very likely. Even postponement will just defer these issues.

Finally, it's about the relationship of the international community with the Karzai government. It's right for the Afghans to run their own democratic process, but the international community cannot be seen entirely to have backed off in the face of pressure. If a new UN chief comes in to replace Kai Eide in March next year, and immediately tries to put pressure on President Karzai for reforms to the electoral system, then that new UN chief will risk being shut out by Karzai altogether. It has happened before.

The patient is not dead. But it does need urgent treatment. Now that President Karzai is back in the saddle and has chosen his new Ministers, can there please be some pressure for electoral reform: postponing next year's elections, yes, but also investigating and punishing past abuses. And an inventive new look at how to solve the problem of disenfranchisement in the country's insecure areas -- on which I want to write more in a future post.

Source:huffingtonpost.com/