Afghan talks offer not for Mullah Omar: US

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday that while the United States backed the Taliban integration programme, the offer did not include the group’s top leadership.

Earlier, the Pentagon had expressed similar sentiments about the integration plan approved at a meeting of more than 60 nations in London on Thursday.

Secretary Clinton, who also attended the conference, told America’s National Public Radio network that she understood the military action alone was not enough to win the war in Afghanistan but the London peace proposal was not meant for senior Taliban leaders.

In her interview to NPR, Mrs Clinton acknowledged that most modern conflicts don’t end with a victory on the field of battle and therefore political and development work was essential.

“I think everyone has realised, as we did in Iraq, that you have to begin to go right at the insurgents and peel those off who are willing to renounce violence, renounce Al Qaeda, agree to live by the laws and constitution of Afghanistan and re-enter society,” Mrs Clinton said.

“That is not going to happen with (Taliban chief) Mullah Omar and the like,” she added. “But there are so many fighters in the Taliban that are there, frankly, because it’s a way to make a living in a country where the Taliban pay them more than they can make as a farmer or in some other line of work out in the countryside.”

Earlier, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told a briefing in Washington that the US government was still working to figure out which mid-level Taliban officials it might be possible to integrate into the current Afghan political structure.

He said that top Taliban figures, like the country’s former leader Mullah Omar, would probably be what he called “a bridge too far”.

“Omar is probably the extreme,” said Mr Morrell. “The foot-soldiers are probably the other extreme. The question is what happens to the others. Can they be won over? Can they become a part of the political fabric? And that’s, I think, what we’re all trying to figure out. And I don’t know that we have an answer yet.”

Secretary Clinton’s remarks came a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the London conference that he planned to convene a grand Jirga and invite low-level Taliban militants and “disenchanted brothers who are not part of Al Qaeda or other terrorist networks”.

Secretary Clinton claimed that there had already been some progress on reintegration. “There already have been Taliban who have left,” she said, adding that how the reconciliation process evolved “will be a little bit like jazz … we can’t lay it out completely”.

The secretary, however, insisted that the shift in policy towards accommodation of some fighters did not constitute an exit strategy; instead, it was one element of a comprehensive plan.

“You have to have a very tough-minded attitude about this. This is not sweetness and light,” the secretary of state said. “You’re dealing with a very difficult, complex phenomenon.”

In response to a recent remark by Mr Karzai that he expected western troops to be in Afghanistan for the next decade, Mrs Clinton said she did not think “most western troops will be in a combat role”.

“It won’t be like today, where we are putting in thousands more troops, 30,000 from our own and from other countries,” she said.

In Washington, other US officials told the media that it was up to the Afghan government to decide which Taliban leaders could be integrated.

But the Pentagon spokesman said he expected officials in Kabul to make their decisions in consultation with US President Barack Obama.

Mr Morrell indicated that senior Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar who, in his words, “has the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands”, would likely not be acceptable candidates for “reintegration”.

On Tuesday, the United Nations announced it had removed five former Taliban officials, including a former foreign minister, from its list of terrorists, ending restrictions on their travel and bank accounts. That could be a first step toward involving them in a reconciliation process.

Source:dawn.com

London conference paves ways for reconciliation in Afghan: Chinese FM

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi has welcomed the move to find a way out of the conflict in Afghanistan. He says the London conference has played an important role in supporting the Afghan government.

Yang said, "The conference has provided a very important supporting role. What we are trying to do is to help the Afghan government to realize national reconciliation to ensure internal stability, to bring about economic and social progress and to make the international and regional framework more effective within which the Afghan government can further improve its capacity for better governance."

Yang Jiechi also asked the international community to help Afghanistan develop, and promised to support the work of the UN. He urged the Afghan government to work out better rules and regulations to uproot corruption. Nations have agreed that Afghan forces should aim to take the lead in providing security in a number of provinces by late 2010 or early 2011, opening the way for a reduction in foreign troops.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi has welcomed the move to find a way
out of the conflict in Afghanistan. He says the London conference has
played an important role in supporting the Afghan government.

Source:english.cctv.com/

New LAVs for Afghanistan have more armour, less punch

Canadian soldiers from the Royal 22nd Regiment conduct a foot patrol in a volatile area in Panjwayi district, Kandahar province, in this November 2006 file photo, supported by a Light Armourved Vehicle (LAV) manned by soldiers from the 2nd Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Canada has "rushed" scores of fighting vehicles with five tonnes of additional armour plating to Afghanistan to try to counter the Taliban's lethal success with larger homemade landmines.Photograph by: John D. McHugh, AFP/Getty ImagesKANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — Canada has "rushed" scores of fighting vehicles with five tonnes of additional armour plating to Afghanistan to try to counter the Taliban's lethal success with larger homemade landmines.

The latest response to improvised explosive devices that have killed more than 100 Canadian troops involves putting a smaller, remotely controlled mobile gun system atop what had been an anti-tank variant of Canada's light-armoured vehicles instead of the turret-mounted cannon commonly found on the LAVs, Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie and a Canadian improvised explosive device specialist based in Afghanistan confirmed in recent interviews.

The cannon-less LAVs now entering service in Panjwaii, Dand and Daman districts were the only ones if the Canadian inventory that had not already been deployed to Kandahar, they said.

"We took those 66 LAVs and built on the lessons of Afghanistan," Leslie said, adding that as well as more belly plating, there was shock frame seating and straps to hold soldiers in place like fighter pilots in a cockpit.

There will not only be frank political discussions about what role Canada intends to play in Afghanistan when the current combat mission ends in July 2011 when Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, meets this Thursday in Ottawa with senior Canadian officials. Among the many military issues to be discussed, none has a higher priority than how to reduce the number of coalition deaths and catastrophic injuries caused by IEDs.

Canada and the U.S. have both established anti-armour task forces to examine this vital issue. The U.S. spent more than $26 billion to develop (mine-resistance ambush protected) vehicles, but as Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell explained to McClatchy Newspapers last month, there had still been "real problems . . . off road in Afghanistan" recently, so another $5 billion has been spent on a new variant that is more manoeuvrable.

The U.S. army's 5th Stryker Brigade, which uses a high-tech version of the Canadian-designed light armoured vehicle, also quickly ran into difficulties when it deployed to Kandahar this summer, losing more than a dozen soldiers to IED strikes in a few weeks.

The changes to the new Canadian LAVs entering Afghan service "sacrifice a bit of weapon power" in return for "the most up-to-date armour," said Capt. Olivier Sylvain of Montreal, who as chief of battle damage assessment for Task Force Afghanistan is a forensic specialist of sorts on IEDs.

Sylvain studied the effects of IED strikes on armoured vehicles for a year before an Afghan deployment that was only three months long, so that he could bring the latest insights back to Canada as soon as possible.

"In general terms, no vehicle is invulnerable," Sylvain said. "What we are doing is assessing the threat and reacting very quickly. The threat is changing and we adapt. In many cases, we are pro-active."

What Canada learned from IED strikes was constantly exchanged with U.S. forces and other NATO allies, he said.

"It is a very sharing relationship. The threat is a lot different than in Iraq so the Americans used a lot of our research when they brought the Strykers here."


Whenever a Canadian vehicle gets hit by an IED, Sylvain and a small team make a first-hand assessment, sending the information and suggestions for improvements directly back to offices in Ottawa, Toronto and Valcartier, Que., where vehicles are blown up to test them against the types of threats that are seen here.

"I find the work intellectually fascinating," the young Van Doo officer said. "It is like a puzzle. You have a piece of a vehicle and you try to reconstruct what happened."

Of the Taliban's IED capabilities, Sylvain said: "We are not in a closed bottle. There is a lot of communication between insurgents about what works and what our developing tactics are. It's a fluid environment. What was true a year ago has changed, and it changed from the year before, too.


The "new, old LAVs" now in Kandahar were what Leslie called "a bridging mechanism" until Canada can complete a $5.2-billion upgrade to the entire fleet that is slated to begin in 2012.

"When completed, it will reset our LAV fleet for the next 15 to 20 years," the army commander said, "because it is a fair assumption that wherever we go next after Kandahar, we will be facing an asymmetric threat from suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices."

Source:vancouversun.com/