Government Executive - Authors - Yochi J. Dreazen

General retracts controversial suicide comments

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:58:00 -0400

In a highly unusual move, a senior Army general publicly retracted blunt comments about suicide that drew criticism for appearing to deride troops struggling with serious mental problems.

Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, the commander of the sprawling Fort Bliss Army installation in Texas, issued a statement on Thursday apologizing for having described suicide as "a selfish act."

"Thanks to many of you and your feedback, I have learned that this was a hurtful statement," Pittard wrote. "I also realize that my statement was not in line with the Army’s guidance regarding sensitivity to suicide. With my deepest sincerity and respect towards those whom I have offended, I retract that statement."

National Journal reported on Pittard's initial comments, which were posted on his official blog.

“I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act,” Pittard wrote in the controversial posting. “I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.”

The post was subsequently scrubbed from the Fort Bliss website, but the comments drew criticism for conveying the wrong message to emotionally fragile troops.

“Soldiers who are thinking about suicide can’t do what the general says: They can’t suck it up, they can’t let it go, they can’t just move on,” said Barbara Van Dahlen, the founder of Give an Hour, an organization that matches troops with civilian mental-health providers. “His statement — whatever motivated it — can do little good for those who are already on the edge."

Pittard's initial comments drew new attention to the military’s struggle against the suicide epidemic ravaging its forces. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing for years, and last year a record 164 active-duty, National Guard, and Reserve soldiers took their own lives, compared with 159 in 2010. In 2008, the Army’s suicide rate exceeded that of the civilian world for the first time.

Many who work with Pittard were surprised by his blog comments, given the high priority he puts on suicide prevention. Fort Bliss, home to more than 100,000 troops and civilians, has an unusually large staff of 160 psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental-health professionals.

But Fort Bliss, like most other bases, continues to struggle to bring down its suicide numbers. So far this year, two troops from the base have killed themselves, putting the total Fort Bliss roughly on pace to match the six who took their lives last year. In 2010, five troops from the base killed themselves there.

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General's blog post reignites Army suicide debate

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:51:02 -0400

Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard commands Fort Bliss, one the nation’s largest Army bases, so his blunt comments about suicide has raised eyebrows throughout the military.

“I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act,” he wrote on his official blog recently. “I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.”

The posting was subsequently scrubbed from the Fort Bliss website, but the comments are adding new fuel to a contentious debate about whether the record numbers of troops who are taking their own lives are acting out of weakness and selfishness or because of legitimate cases of depression and other psychological traumas.

Pittard is expected to formally retract his comments later this week, but suicide-prevention experts believe that Pittard’s blog posting has already conveyed precisely the wrong message to emotionally-fragile troops.

“Soldiers who are thinking about suicide can’t do what the general says: They can’t suck it up, they can’t let it go, they can’t just move on,” said Barbara Van Dahlen, the founder of Give an Hour, an organization that matches troops with civilian mental-health providers. “They’re not acting out of selfishness; they’re acting because they believe they’ve become a burden to their loved ones and can only relieve that burden by taking their own lives.”

Van Dahlen said that Pittard was expressing the raw feelings of anger and betrayal which many feel when a friend or loved one commits suicide. But she stressed that those of Pittard’s prominence and rank “usually don’t say those kinds of things out loud.”

“His statement -- whatever motivated it -- can do little good for those who are already on the edge,” Van Dahlen added.

Lt. Col. Dennis Swanson, a spokesman for Fort Bliss, declined to comment. Army spokespeople at the Pentagon likewise declined to say anything about the substance of Pittard’s remarks.

With the Afghan war winding down, the military’s struggle against the suicide epidemic ravaging its forces has become one of its top priorities. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing for years, and last year a record 164 active-duty, National Guard, and Reserve soldiers took their own lives, compared with 159 in 2010. In 2008, the Army’s suicide rate exceeded that of the civilian world for the first time.

The Army has responded by hiring thousands of new mental-health professionals, setting up 24-hour confidential hotlines for troops feeling depressed or suicidal, and mandating that all troops undergo training on suicide prevention and broader mental-health issues.

But the efforts have registered only modest signs of progress, in large part because of the stigma that prevents many troops from seeking help. A host of studies have found that the vast majority of troops displaying some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychological maladies never ask for assistance because of fears that doing so will harm their chances for promotion or leave them looking weak in the eyes of their fellow troops.

Senior military commanders stress that suicide is one of the most complicated issues facing the Army, with its exact causes defying easy explanation. The stresses of repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan doubtlessly play a part, but many troops take their own lives without ever deploying overseas.

In January, the Army released a massive report, "Generating Health and Discipline in the Force," which said that alcohol abuse and the moribund national economy also likely contributed to the spike in suicides.

Pittard, for his part, is far more devoted to suicide prevention than his comments might suggest. Fort Bliss -- which houses roughly 40,000 troops, 40,000 military family members, and 13,000 other civilians in Texas and New Mexico -- has an unusually large staff of 160 psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental-health professionals.

At Pittard’s direction, the base has also constructed a “Wellness Fusion Campus” designed to provide education on resilience, suicide prevention, and spotting signs of depression or other mood disorders in one’s self or fellow troops.

“I was stunned when I heard about the controversy [over Pittard’s comments],” said Lt. Col. Leonard Gruppo, who runs the new center. “General Pittard is the most aggressive, most visionary, and most innovative installation commander in the Army when it comes to mental health and suicide prevention.”

The remarks may reflect Pittard’s own frustration and emotional exhaustion after a grim few months at Fort Bliss. A total of 14 soldiers from the post were killed in traffic accidents and training mishaps between October and December of last year, along with several suicides. Pittard himself had just come from a memorial service for a soldier who killed himself in front of his twin 6-year-old daughters.

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New FBI probe of bomb plot highlights administration’s tough stance on leaks

Yochi J. Dreazen and Olga Belogolova, National Journal — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:36:07 -0400

The FBI has launched a criminal probe designed to identify the government officials who leaked key details of a foiled al-Qaida bomb plot, the latest indication of the Obama administration’s unrelenting push to find and punish those sharing classified information with the media.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, said that the agency was trying to identify which officials had spoken to reporters about the foiled attack, helping the Associated Press report that the scheme was part of an al-Qaida plot to down a U.S.-bound airliner with an sophisticated underwear bomb. The agency is also looking for who told media outlets that the plot was broken up with the help of an undercover agent working for the Saudi Arabian intelligence service, a detail first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

The Saudi assistance doubtlessly saved significant numbers of American lives, and Mueller -- like other Obama administration officials -- warned that future cooperation could be hampered by the disclosure of the Saudi role.

“Leaks such as this threaten ongoing operations, puts at risk the lives of sources, makes it much more difficult to recruit sources, and damages our relationships with our foreign partners,” Mueller said. “And consequently, a leak like this is taken exceptionally seriously, and we will investigate thoroughly.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pressed Mueller on whether the information had been leaked by the administration for political gain, likening the details on the bomb plot to what he described as the "authorized leaks from the White House about the operation to kill Osama bin Laden.” The FBI director declined to answer the question.

The hearing offered an unusually vivid illustration of the Obama administration’s hard-line approach to the news media.

The administration took office with a promise of unprecedented transparency, including – in a sharp change from the Bush administration -- posting the names of those visiting the White House onto its website. The White House also offered strong support for a so-called shield law preventing reporters working national-security stories from being forced to identify confidential sources.

But those moves have been increasingly outweighed by the administration’s aggressive effort to crack down on those responsible for sharing classified information with the news media.

The White House’s main tool has been the Espionage Act, a 1917 law passed during the height of World War I as a way of finding and punishing officials passing useful information to enemy countries. The legislation had been used to bring cases against suspected leakers a grand total of three times in the previous 91 years; the Obama administration has invoked it to prosecute six such cases in the past three years alone. If the FBI believes it has found the official or officials who spoke to the AP, that tally will increase to seven.

The first case brought under the Espionage Act targeted Thomas Drake, a whistle blower from the National Security Agency who was indicated for giving a reporter information detailing massive waste, fraud, and inefficiencies at the secretive agency. The Justice Department’s case against Drake fell apart days before the trial was set to begin last summer, highlighting the difficulties of winning convictions in such cases.

That hasn’t stopped the administration from trying. In January, the Justice Department indicted John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer accused of providing classified information about waterboarding and other controversial interrogation methods to journalists and misleading the agency while trying to get permission to publish a memoir about his time there. The case is ongoing.

The others facing potential prison time for their dealings with the media are former FBI translator Shamai Leibowitz, State Department contractor and analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, and Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking thousands of classified military and State Department documents to online whistle-blower WikiLeaks. Leibowitz was sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2010 for leaking classified information to a blogger regarding Israel’s efforts to influence Congress and public opinion; the other cases are continuing.

The new investigation began earlier this month when news leaked that the CIA had helped to foil a Yemeni-based attempt to use a sophisticated underwear bomb to bring down a Western airliner. The Los Angeles Times soon reported that an undercover Saudi agent had penetrated the al-Qaida affiliate there, volunteered for the supposed suicide mission, and then secreted the bomb safely into the hands of other intelligence operatives.

The leak infuriated the Saudis, who said it put the agent at risk and endangered other undercover operatives elsewhere in the field. The unnamed agent and his family were subsequently placed into protective custody. The anger was felt just as fiercely in Washington, where an array of powerful lawmakers warned that disclosing the source and method of the information would make the Saudis less likely to work with the U.S. in the future and make it harder to foil new plots.

The AP has defended its reporting, with spokesman Paul Colford saying in a written statement that the news service “acted carefully and with extreme deliberation in its reporting on the underwear bomb plot and its subsequent decision to publish.”

That argument fell on deaf ears on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with Mueller saying that he didn’t want to say the leak would have a “devastating” impact on U.S. intelligence gathering efforts -- but then effectively saying just that.

“The relationship with your counterparts overseas are damaged and which means that an inhibition in the willingness of others to share information with us where they don't think that information will remain secure,” he said. “So it also has some long-term effects which is why it is so important to make certain that the persons who are responsible for the leak are brought to justice.”

Those who leaked the new information may or may not be caught. But the ferocity of Mueller’s comments mean that the administration’s war against those who disclose such information won’t wind down anytime soon.

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Bomb plot underscores terrorist threat from Yemen

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:00:00 -0400

A sophisticated bomb built in Yemen as part of an apparent terrorist plot to destroy Western jetliners is fresh evidence that militants based in Yemen -- not in Afghanistan or Pakistan -- now pose the biggest terror threat to the U.S. and its allies.

U.S. counterterrorism officials said on Monday that the CIA had foiled the plot and taken possession of the bomb, which was described as significantly more powerful than the hidden explosives which another Yemeni-affiliated militant had attempted to detonate aboard a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 28, 2009.

The officials stressed that the plot had not advanced to an operational phase and that they were unaware of any current threats to American or European aircraft. They also said they were not sure if the new bomb was a solitary prototype or part of a larger number that had been constructed for potential future use.

Still, the fact that the bomb appears to have been designed and built in Yemen is another indication that the impoverished, politically unstable Middle Eastern country is now the epicenter of transnational terrorism.

In another sign of Yemen's growing centrality to the terror fight, word of the new plot came just a day after a U.S. airstrike killed a militant on the FBI's Most Wanted List for his alleged role in the deadly attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

The Obama administration has reacted to al-Qaida's growing foothold in Yemen by sharply ramping up the number of airstrikes there. The U.S. conducted 10 drone, air, and cruise-missile strikes in all of 2011, according to The Long War Journal, which tracks such strikes. So far this year, it has conducted at least 14, The Journal said.

Those numbers are also set to rise: The CIA recently asked for and received permission to target Yemen-based militants even when American intelligence officials didn't know their names or identities.

With strikes increasing in Yemen, the number of American aerial incursions into Pakistan has begun to decline after years of steady increases. In the first three months of the year, suspected CIA drones launched 11 strikes there, a sizable decrease from the 21 conducted there in the first quarter of 2011, according to data from the New America Foundation.

President Obama's surprise trip to Afghanistan last week was meant to show war-weary Americans that the long conflict there was finally winding down. But the new plot offers a dispiriting reminder that al-Qaida may already have a new home.

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Sex scandal hits Secret Service as most expensive presidential race gets under way

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:23:00 -0400

The sex scandal engulfing the Secret Service comes at a particularly bad time for the agency, now readying itself for weeks of harsh congressional scrutiny just as the costliest presidential campaign ever gets under way.

Six of 12 Secret Service agents caught up in the case have already been forced out, and the agency announced the fates of the remaining agents Tuesday night. In a statement, the Secret Service said two more agents had chosen to resign and three had been cleared of "serious misconduct" but faced other penalties. The agency said it was moving to permanently revoke the security clearance of the final agent, a move that could effectively lead to his termination. The House and Senate Homeland Security committees have sent the Secret Service detailed questions about the incident, and public hearings are virtually certain. An array of Republican lawmakers are calling for Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to resign or be fired.

The scandal comes just as the agency's overall budget is going down despite its workload increasing exponentially, with President Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney preparing to spend the next six months campaigning across the country.

The 2012 campaign is shaping up to be the most expensive in Secret Service history. The agency has budgeted $113 million for candidate protection, a record high which is nearly double the $65 million spent in 2004. At the same time, the administration has proposed cutting the agency’s overall budget to $1.6 billion, a loss of $65.8 million, or roughly 4 percent.

The high costs of the coming presidential campaign can also be measured in human terms. The Secret Service is planning to borrow personnel from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bureau and convert some of its own agents from credit card fraud and counterfeit money investigations to temporary protective work for Romney and Obama.

Those moves reflect the manpower needs stemming from the agency’s growing workload, which includes missions as disparate as handling security for high-profile events like the Super Bowl and upcoming NATO summit in Chicago to guarding high-ranking U.S. officials and hundreds of visiting foreign dignitaries. In recent congressional testimony, Sullivan said his agency handled security for 216 visiting heads of state last year.

All of that comes on top of the agency’s primary missions: guarding Obama and senior members of his administration while also protecting Romney and his eventual vice presidential nominee.

Those costs are higher than usual this time around, in part because of the lengthy Republican primary. In the heat of the GOP campaign, the Secret Service was providing details for four candidates: Romney, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. Cain and Santorum lost their details when they ended their campaigns, but Gingrich -- whose own campaign is on life support -- has insisted on keeping his guards, at an estimated cost of roughly $44,000 per day.

Romney already had round-the-clock protection and agents doing advance work before his campaign stops, but the Secret Service has boosted the size of his detail since the former Massachusetts governor effectively wrapped up the Republican nomination.

The demands are far greater for Obama, who has received unusually large numbers of death threats. The agency spends weeks doing advance work for overseas trips like the president’s Colombia visit, while even short domestic stops require days of preparations. In campaign season, when Obama may do several events per day, that adds up to an enormous amount of work for the Secret Service -- and a correspondingly hefty price tag.

Still, it’s far from clear that the moves will be enough to ensure an incident-free 2012 campaign. Ronald Kessler, who wrote a best-selling book about the Secret Service and has since emerged as one of its toughest critics, believes the agency has grown so lax and careless that Obama’s safety could be at risk.

Kessler, who broke the Colombia scandal, told CBS News earlier this month that the Secret Service was routinely cutting corners and relaxing important security standards. He argued that the couple who managed to crash a White House state dinner without an invitation was indicative of a broader problem.

“They don’t have enough agents, they don’t even put people through metal detectors sometimes because there’s pressure to let everybody in,” he told CBS. “It’s like letting passengers in an airplane without putting them through metal detectors.... It’s a culture that leads to this kind of problem.”

Kessler believes that Sullivan should lose his job, but the Obama administration has -- at least so far -- repeatedly expressed its full confidence in the embattled Secret Service director.

Still, there’s no question the scandal is risks undermining confidence in the agency and even turning it into a laughingstock. One of the ousted agents, David Randall Chaney, had posted photos on Facebook showing him guarding Sarah Palin in 2008 and wrote that he had been “really checking her out, if you know what I mean.” When Chaney lost his job, Palin told Fox News: “Check this out, bodyguard -- you’re fired.”

That, at least, is one gaffe the agency isn’t likely to repeat.

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Can the military police itself?

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:27:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has apologized for grisly new photos showing American soldiers posing with the body parts of Taliban suicide bombers and promised that “anyone found responsible for this inhuman conduct will be held accountable.” If similar recent events are any indication, those punishments will be a long time coming.

The U.S.-led command in Afghanistan has been rocked by a series of missteps in recent months, from the January release of videos showing Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters to the February report that Korans had been burned at a sprawling American base in eastern Afghanistan. To date, however, no officers or enlisted personnel have been disciplined for their roles in the gaffes.

The worst such incident occurred last month when Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales walked off his base in a small town in southern Afghanistan and killed at least 17 civilians. Bales’s attorneys say his actions may have been motivated by an earlier brain injury but don’t dispute his culpability in the crimes. No one from Bales’s unit—including the commander of his small combat outpost in Kandahar—has yet been relieved or otherwise punished, according to Army officials.

Spokesmen for the Marines and Army point out that officers and enlisted personnel could face punishments up to and including courts martial depending on the results of the various probes into the incidents.

The investigations into the Marine video have been completed, and a senior Marine general in Quantico is currently weighing if any troops should be disciplined, and how harshly. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman for the Marines, said there was no timetable for a final determination.

The two services’ refusal to more quickly take action contrasts sharply with the Navy, which has relieved dozens of senior officers of command over the past 16 months for far smaller offenses. Last summer, for example, Navy Capt. Eric Merrill was relieved of command after his ship hit a buoy in the waters off Bahrain. At least 28 Navy officers have lost their posts since January 2011, many while the investigations into their behavior were still under way.

The U.S.-led military command in Kabul has also fired some officers for comparatively minor missteps. Last fall, Army Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller was removed from his post after he criticized Afghan President Hamid Karzai and told Politico that the Karzai administration was “isolated from reality.”

Fuller lost his post almost immediately, with Gen. John Allen, the top Afghan war commander, slamming him on the way out the door for making “inappropriate public comments.”

Navy Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. command in Kabul, said the investigation into the pictures published on Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times was just getting under way and that “it would be premature to get ahead of that process.” The probes into the Kandahar shootings and Koran burnings are also ongoing, military officials said, though the Koran probe should be completed soon.

Speaking via e-mail, Kirby also emphasized said that such gaffes have been carried by only a tiny fraction of the U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan. Those troops, Kirby said via e-mail, are notable for “the respect they show daily for Islam and for the Afghan people, the courage under the fire they take almost every day, and the humility with which they do it.”

Still, Kirby declined to answer questions about why no soldiers or Marines had yet been disciplined for the Kandahar shootings, Taliban urination videos, or Koran burnings, referring those queries to the individual military services.

Spokesmen for the Army and Marines said no discplinary measures would be taken until the internal probes had been completed. The Navy, for its part, routinely removes officers from command while such investigations are ongoing; in March, Cmdr. Jon Haydel was relieved for “personal misconduct” even though the probe into his behavior hadn’t been completed.

Army spokesman George Wright referred a question about the status of troops involved in the Koran burning back to NATO, which had specifically refused to talk about it. Wright confirmed that no one besides Bales has to date faced any disciplinary proceedings in connection to the Kandahar shootings. In the Pentagon, many officers believe that Bales’s commanders bear some responsibility for failing to put measures in place which would have prevented him from leaving the base and carrying out his rampage.

Gibson, the Marine spokesman, said there had been a pair of investigations into the Taliban videos, one by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and one within the Marine Corps itself. Gibson said Lt. Gen. Richard Mills was reviewing the results and weighing whether to order further investigation, courts martial, or lesser forms of reprimands. There is also the chance, Gibson said, that Mills will opt for no punishment whatsoever.

Either way, it could be weeks or months longer before an answer comes. “The commanding general is considering his possible courses of actions,” Gibson said, “but no final decision has been made.”

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Dempsey: 'We let the boss down' in Colombia

Yochi J. Dreazen and Alexandra Jaffe, National Journal — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:32:41 -0400

The nation's top military officer apologized on Monday for American troops' alleged role in a widening sex scandal in Colombia, acknowledging that the flap had "distracted" from President Obama's visit to the key Latin American ally.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the military was "embarrassed" that at least five troops may have joined Secret Service agents in hiring prostitutes there.

"We let the boss down," Dempsey said.

Dempsey's comments come as the number of service members implicated in the incident may rise, as Pentagon press secretary George Little said on Monday that while he didn't have an exact number, the original number may be too low. The U.S. Southern Command had previously said only five service members were under investigation.

"We believe that there may be more than five involved in this incident," Little said, according to the Associated Press.

Eleven Secret Service officers have been accused of hiring prostitutes at a hotel in Columbia, all of whom were sent home, and the military members under investigation were staying at the same hotel, the Associated Press reports.

However, the number of Secret Service officers under investigation may be as large as 20, NBC is reporting.

The incident has raised questions about the judgement of the agents charged with protecting Obama and it is being investigated by both the Secret Service and the military's Southern Command.

Dempsey said the troops would be punished if the probe concluded that they'd violated military rules.

"We'll hold those accountable if it turns out that they violated orders or policies," he said.

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Details emerge on coming U.S. offensive in eastern Afghanistan

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:06:56 -0400

The last major U.S. offensive of the Afghan War is set to begin later this year in eastern Afghanistan, the region where the conflict began and where senior NATO officials hope their involvement will effectively come to an end.

U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington have provided National Journal an array of details about the coming push, which represents a high-stakes – and politically complicated - attempt to better secure Kabul as well as Afghanistan’s porous border with Pakistan before the American exit from the country accelerates. With Washington planning to shift U.S. troops out of their lead combat role next year, it is also likely to be the last major American offensive of the long war.

That foray will be led by thousands of troops from the 1st Brigade of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, set to deploy to eastern Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province in the coming months. The brigade will be augmented with additional combat, support and training personnel, which means the new U.S. influx could include roughly 5,000 additional troops.

A senior U.S. government official in Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the new troops will have three primary missions. First, they will work to expand the so-called “security bubble” surrounding the Afghan capital, which has been battered by a spate of insurgent attacks in recent months. Second, they will try to better connect Kabul with the key southern city of Kandahar, a hotbed of resistance NATO forces largely reclaimed last year.

The third mission will be the most important, the most complicated, and potentially the most dangerous. The troops, the senior government official said, will move towards the Afghan-Pakistani border as part of a broad push to reduce the numbers of anti-government fighters, weaponry and bomb-making material flowing in from Pakistan, where militants operate freely from large safe havens.

The new operations along the border will put the U.S. reinforcements against battle-hardened militants from the Haqqani network, which has emerged as the most skilled U.S. adversary in either country. Eastern Afghanistan’s mountains, unpaved roads, and rugged terrain will make it a difficult fight for both sides.

Navy Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, the spokesman for Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the overall goals of the campaign in eastern Afghanistan will be “for the forces to focus on an expanded Kabul security perimeter, the link between Kabul and Kandahar, and the border areas.”

The spokesman declined to discuss the exact timing or size of the new push, citing the need for operational security. Information on the coming deployment of the 82nd Airborne brigade, which hasn’t yet been disclosed by the Pentagon, came from the unit’s official Facebook page and a US. official with knowledge of the plans.

The new military push will unfold very differently from those which followed the Obama administration’s initial troop surge into Afghanistan, in part because all of those 33,000 are set to return to the U.S. by the end of this summer.

The surge troops were almost entirely deployed to the restive southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, long-standing Taliban safe havens which held special significance for the armed movement because many of its key leaders were born there. U.S. forces built a network and set up combat outposts throughout both provinces and manned them for more than a year.

Violence across the south has fallen since the push, but it’s far from clear that the largely unproven Afghan security forces will be able to hold – or expand – those modest gains when U.S. troops begin to depart the region to shift east or return home.

The new offensive into eastern Afghanistan won’t involve such a sustained effort. Instead, U.S. officials here and in Kabul say it will involve short assaults against specific targets. Troops may stay in a given area for a few days or weeks, but the current plans don’t call for them to set up large numbers of combat outposts or to remain in the region’s valleys or towns for months at a time.

American officials familiar with the coming offensive freely admit that its success is far from guaranteed. Defeating the Taliban or forcing them to come to the negotiating table will be virtually impossible so long as they can rearm inside Pakistan or use bases there to plan new strikes. But Pakistan has rolled back its modest counter-terror efforts because of widespread fury there over the unannounced U.S. raid into the heart of the country to kill Osama bin Laden and by a recent incident where an errant U.S. strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

The U.S. has identified the specific Pakistani factories where most of the ammonium nitrate used in the bombs to kill and maim NATO troops is produced. Asked if Islamabad had taken any steps against the facilities, the senior U.S. official in Kabul didn’t hesitate. “As of this moment, they haven’t acted at all to shut down the factories on their side.”

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New Afghan attack raises doubts about U.S.-funded militias

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:58:00 -0400

The killing of another American soldier by a purported Afghan ally doesn’t simply add to the grim tally of U.S. troops shot dead by their Afghan counterparts. It also raises questions about a key aspect of the American plan for gradually winding down the war.

The soldier, who hasn’t yet been identified, wasn’t killed by members of the Afghan army or police, the insurgent-riddled security forces responsible for the overwhelming majority of fratricidal attacks on NATO forces. Instead, he was killed by a member of the Afghan Local Police, a network of small militias funded – and in some cases armed - by the U.S. to fill the void left behind when American forces withdraw from remote parts of Afghanistan.

The program is central to the Obama administration’s plan for stabilizing Afghanistan as much as possible before withdrawing in 2014, but the attack suggests its members aren’t being properly vetted and overseen.

The program borrows a tactic from Iraq, and is meant to create local fighting forces capable of preventing the Taliban from returning to their former strongholds and keeping a measure of order in areas which are largely beyond the purview the fragile Afghan central government.

The number of fighters in the so-called “Afghan Local Police” initiative is set to more than triple over the next 18 months, rising from roughly 9,800 now to roughly 30,000 by the end of next year. Top American generals routinely describe it as a cornerstone of their broader strategy for the war.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2011, for instance, then-Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus called the ALP initiative “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capability to secure itself.”

The initiative was deeply controversial even before this latest attack. Last fall, a blistering assessment by Human Rights Watch found that ALP personnel were routinely breaking into houses, using checkpoints to demand bribes from motorists, improperly taxing local residents and arresting – and in some cases killing – local villagers.

“While some community defense force programs have been more successful than others, all have been plagued by failures of vetting and oversight, and, too often, impunity for human rights abuses,” the group concluded. “The ALP is a high-risk strategy to achieve short-term goals in which local groups are again being armed without adequate oversight or accountability.”

The program’s future will be further called into question if there are more incidents like Monday’s bloody shooting in eastern Afghanistan’s volatile Paktika Province. NATO officials say a member of an Afghan Local Police unit fired on American soldiers approaching a checkpoint, killing one American.

The Paktika attack came just hours after an Afghan soldier killed two British soldiers at a joint base in Lashkar Gah, a large city in southern Afghanistan. The three deaths brought the total number of NATO personnel killed this year in so-called “green on blue” attacks to 16. That makes them the second leading cause of coalition fatalities in 2012, trailing only the 22 troops killed by roadside bombs.

The shootings have been a cause of growing cause of anger throughout Washington and the other coalition capitols, where leading politicians are openly questioning why their troops don’t need to worry about the Taliban remotely as much as they’ve had to worry about the Afghan troops living, patrolling and walking beside them.

Earlier this year, France suspended its training operations inside Afghanistan after four of its soldiers were killed by one of their Afghan counterparts, though Paris later resumed the program.

Top American officials, meanwhile, insist their forces will continue to work alongside Afghan security personnel, but U.S. forces are taking steps which made clear just how big of a trust gap has developed between the two sides.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said American troops assigned to small joint bases were changing their sleeping arrangements to ensure that American personnel were constantly monitoring their side of the compound and setting up other internal defenses to prevent Afghans from crossing over to kill U.S. personnel.

Actions speak louder than words, and those are the actions of a nation beginning to pull further away from a nominal ally.

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Bales charged on 17 counts of pre-meditated murder

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:03:22 -0400

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales has been charged Friday with murdering 17 civilians and wounding six others, paving the way for what will be a long and politically charged trial.

The miltary said the attack was premeditated. Bales is the sole suspect in the shooting deaths of 17 Afghan civilians in southern Afghanistan this month. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Military officials believe they have a strong case. They say they have surveillance videotape showing Bales leaving the base shortly before the shootings and returning shortly afterward.

But Bales' civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, has said he plans to mount an aggressive defense based on an assertion that Bales was temporarily insane because of a severe head injury suffered during an earlier tour in Iraq.

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Charges in Afghan shooting will be start of long legal journey

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:14:00 -0400

The Army’s decision to formally charge Staff Sgt. Robert Bales with 17 counts of homicide for his alleged role in a mass shooting in southern Afghanistan will mark the start of a long legal process that is virtually certain to continue long after U.S. troops have withdrawn from the country.

Army prosecutors will charge Bales with the 17 counts of homicide on Friday, according to a U.S. official. The full charge sheet is virtually certain to also include an array of other charges, including attempted murder, assault, and dereliction of duty. Bales is the sole suspect in the crime; if convicted, he could face the death penalty.

The charges begin what is likely to be a long and complex trial. Military officials believe they have a strong case, pointing to surveillance videotape which they say shows Bales leaving the base shortly before the shootings and returning not long afterwards. Senior military officials say Bales turned himself in after returning to the base and surrendered his weapon. They believe, in the words of one military official, that he simply “snapped.”

Bales’s family is fighting back hard. They’ve hired a high-profile criminal defense attorney, John Henry Browne, who has said he plans to mount an aggressive defense. Browne has challenged the military’s account of what took place that bloody night and argued that there may not be forensic evidence definitively linking his client to the crime. He has also indicated that he might mount an insanity defense tied to a brain injury Bales is said to have received during an earlier tour in Iraq. A spokeswoman for the attorney said they have not yet received any formal notification of the pending charges as of Thursday evening.

Afghans have demanded Bales be tried in Afghanistan, but the military has already made clear that the suspect -- currently being held at the maximum-security facility at Kansas’s Fort Leavenworth -- is virtually certain to be tried here.

The legal proceedings to come will be largely governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. After the charges are “preferred” on Friday, the military will hold an Article 32 pretrial hearing designed to convince a higher-ranking officer to recommend a full court martial. If such a recommendation is made, military lawyers will also lay out whether or not they want to seek the death penalty. The court-martial trial itself -- which could take anywhere from several months to several years -- will first determine Bales’s guilt or innocence and then decide on his sentence.

Any verdict could be appealed within both the military legal system and the civilian one, a process that could add additional years of wrangling. Browne could argue that Bales was insane or that the trial was tainted by “undue command influence” or remarks from higher-ranking officials like Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that could have influenced the proceedings. Those defenses may not be enough to earn a non-guilty verdict, but they could preclude Bales from receiving the death penalty.

Either way, the case will take years to unwind. Browne has said he may travel to Afghanistan to interview witnesses and family members of the dead. He may also move to have them brought to the U.S. to testify at the eventual trial. Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who was convicted of the murders of two fellow troops and sentenced to death in 2006, is still languishing on death row. The last soldier executed was put to death in 1961, a half-century ago.

Bales’s trial may be just getting under way as tens of thousands of U.S. troops begin streaming out of Afghanistan. That would make the case an unwelcome and unwanted coda to a long and unpopular war.

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Afghan war commander: We stick to the plan

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:11:02 -0400

Afghan war commander Gen. John Allen on Thursday pushed back for the first time at suggestions that the U.S. withdraw more than 23,000 troops from Afghanistan this year, laying down a marker of sorts as the debate over future U.S. troop levels heats up.

Allen, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, was quick to caution that he needed to conduct more analysis before making a formal recommendation to President Obama. He said he was unlikely to present those findings to the White House until sometime this fall or winter.

"My opinion is that we will need significant combat power in 2013," Allen said in response to repeated questioning by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "Sixty-eight thousand is a good 'going-in' number, but I owe the president some analysis on that."

At issue is the future size of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. The military is set to withdraw the last 23,000 of the 33,000 surge troops from Afghanistan by this fall, leaving open the question of when the remaining 68,000 troops should return home.

Some in the Obama administration believe that tens of thousands of those remaining troops should withdraw later this year. Senior military commanders, speaking on background, have consistently argued that no additional troops should leave in 2012, in part to help the U.S. and its allies safeguard recent security gains through next summer's fighting season. Allen's comments made clear that he shares that belief.

The testimony comes as the Afghan war debate, long dormant, has begun to intensify because of U.S. weariness with the long conflict. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 60 percent of the country feel the war is no longer worth fighting and that Republican support, for years higher than that of the country as a whole, had fallen sharply.

On the ground in Afghanistan, meanwhile, the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai reacted furiously to U.S. failures like the massacre of 16 civilians earlier this month, allegedly by an American soldier.

Formal charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the sole suspect in the shootings, are expected to come on Thursday or Friday. But it's far from clear that will mollify Karzai, who reacted to the shootings by calling for American troops to withdraw from small outposts and likening the U.S. to a "demon."

Allen has to walk a careful line when it comes to Karzai, making clear to skeptical lawmakers that he wouldn't accept such a tongue-lashing from Karzai while simultaneously not doing anything that would sever the already-fragile U.S. relationship with the mercurial Afghan leader or make it harder to work with him.

During Thursday's hearing, Allen said he understood how Karzai's frustration and anger could have led him to use such harsh language, but pushed back at it all the same.

"I reject the use of the word 'demon,' " Allen said. "And I reject the equivalence of our forces with the Taliban in the same sentence."

Allen also rebuffed Karzai's long-standing accusations that American night raids - targeted missions, normally carried out by U.S. commandos designed to kill or capture specific militants - had caused significant Afghan civilian casualties. Allen argued that 83 percent of those raids had found their targets, while less than 1.5 percent caused civilian casualties. The raids, he indicated, were a vital part of the overall U.S. war effort and would not be discontinued anytime soon.

In two days of hearings on Capitol Hill, Allen - who hadn't testified since his initial confirmation hearings last year - showed skill in deflecting politically charged questions and staunchly defending the current American war strategy in Afghanistan. Whether he will be successful in tamping down political opposition to the war, both in the U.S. and Afghanistan, remains to be seen.

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Commander grilled over Afghanistan future

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:55:18 -0400

A U.S. soldier stands accused of massacring 16 Afghan civilians, the worst such attack in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently responded by describing the U.S. as a "demon" and demanding a faster U.S. withdrawal. Here at home, domestic support for the war has plunged to new lows, with Republicans as well as Democrats telling pollsters that the conflict is not worth its cost and that American troops should come home sooner than is currently planned.

But the Capitol Hill appearance on Tuesday of Marine Gen. John Allen, U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, passed with virtually no sparks of any kind. Few lawmakers cited the polls or raised specific demands for a faster withdrawal. There were only a couple of questions about Karzai's diatribes against the U.S., and Allen parried them by stressing that those were the comments of a government assuming more of the powers of a fully sovereign government.

The first reference to the Kandahar shooting, meanwhile, came nearly an hour into the hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. Shortly after Allen's brief answer -- that there was a criminal probe into the alleged shooter, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, as well as an administrative probe into his full chain of command -- many of the small number of journalists covering the hearing began streaming out.

The lack of any real fireworks at the hearing appears to have come about for two reasons. Despite the war's unpopularity, Afghanistan remains of such little interest to most voters that lawmakers likely saw little reason to publicly question a decorated and respected four-star general like Allen. An Allen, Allen, for his part, showed surprising skill in deflecting potentially explosive questions and avoided giving any answer that could add fuel to the political debate over the war.

It was Allen's first appearance on Capitol Hill since his confirmation hearing last year, but Allen handled himself like a seasoned pro. Take an early exchange between Allen and Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon R-Calif. McKeon has been a harsh critic of the Obama administration's war policy, and asked Allen a series of questions clearly designed to elicit answers to bolster McKeon's contentions that the White House was ignoring military advice and pushing for a faster withdrawal than Allen and other commanders would prefer.

"Has the White House always followed your best military judgement?" McKeon asked.

"As the commander in Afghanistan, it has," Allen answered.

At the same time, the commander took pains to avoid giving the impression that he was simply parroting the administration's positions. When McKeon asked if the White House had given him assurances that he could have the forces he needed to get through the 2013 fighting season, the commander replied that he'd been "given assurances by the White House that we are in a strategic conversation."

Allen also tried to bat down recent media reports -- criticized by many Republican lawmakers and cheered by many Democratic ones -- that the Obama administration was kicking around various specific plans for withdrawing a greater numbers of troops than are currently planned. The stated White House policy is that 23,000 U.S. troops will depart this year, but recent reports indicated that more than 10,000 additional forces could depart. Allen insisted that he hadn't made any decisions yet on how many U.S. forces should be withdrawn in 2013 and wouldn't do so until the end of the year. And he said he hadn't had conversations with the administration about additional troop withdrawals this year.

"There has been no number mentioned," Allen said. "There has been no number that has been specifically implied."

Politics aside, there were several revelations that came during the hearing. Allen said 13 NATO troops had been killed by Afghan troops since the start of the year, a higher number than many officials had previously cited, even as overall violence in the country had fallen when compared to last year. He said many of the killings appeared to be motivated by Afghan fury over the recent U.S. burnings of several Korans, but the general didn't speak to the widespread belief inside and outside the military that such fratricidal attacks reflect the grim fact that many Afghan troops harbor extremist tendencies and quiet allegiance to the Taliban.

Allen also laid out, more expansively, the likely American shift of troops and resources from southern Afghanistan to the east. The commander said he hadn't made a final decision of the number or mix of troops to be reallocated to the east, but made clear that he saw the east as a source of growing concern to the overall war effort.

Senior U.S. generals like Allen have long argued that the east contains the main transit routes for the militants seeking to cross into Afghanistan from their havens inside Pakistan, as well as their preferred paths for reaching Kabul to mount new attacks there.

Allen also tried to bat down a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday that the U.S. was weighing various options for giving Afghans greater say over the night raids -- typically conducted by Navy SEALs and other special operations forces -- which are a great source of public fury in Afghanistan.

Allen said the reports were premature. He said he hadn't personally taken part in any negotiations over whether it was required that Afghans be given advance word of such missions or that Afghan warrants were needed before new ones are launched.

Taken together, those types of comments were a vivid reminder of the differences between the substantive war on the ground in Afghanistan and the political war over the conflict here at home. Army commanders routinely argue that wars can only be fought as long as political support remains. The hearing illustrated how completely Afghanistan has flipped that on its head. Support for the war has been steadily evaporating, but the war itself will grind on all the same.

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Suspect in Afghan shootings identified

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:14:30 -0400

The Pentagon successfully kept the name of the alleged Kandahar shooter bottled up for nearly a week, but the floodgates are finally opening.

An array of detail had leaked out about the sole suspect in last weekend’s killings of 16 Afghan civilians, from the brain injury he reportedly suffered in Iraq to the wife and two children he left behind in Washington state. Late Friday, the Defense Department identified the shooter as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.

Bales enlisted in the Army in 2001 and is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He's received a number of awards, including six Army Commendation Medals, the Army said.

Bales, who has retained a high-profile defense attorney, was flown out of Afghanistan and brought to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the military’s main detention facility, earlier on Friday. He’ll be held in pretrial confinement as officials from the Army Criminal Investigation Command interview survivors, analyze shell casings, and try to get a clearer sense of what may have motivated the attack. A military official familiar with the matter said on Friday that Bales was not cooperating with the investigation.

It will be days or weeks before Bales begins his journey through the military's complicated legal system, but glimmers of his life and background are available in unusual places, like an article in the internal newsletter of his unit, Blackhorse Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, from Washington State.

An article from last August details a training exercise at a mock Afghan village in the Mojave Desert. Bales is shown in several pictures and quoted holding a conversation with an actor playing an Afghani civilian. In the photos, Bales is wearing full body armor and a helmet, which obscures his face.

Military officials have said they were simply following standard procedures in refusing to formally identify the suspect, arguing that a suspect’s name and background are typically kept out of public view until there’s been a so-called “preferral” of initial criminal charges. That hasn’t taken place yet in the Kandahar shooting, and the preferral could be days or, potentially, weeks away.

But the argument came under attack being by many military-law experts, who say that suspects are usually identified immediately after being apprehended or placed into pretrial confinement. The lawyers also note that the military has already confirmed that there are no other suspects in the case and that Army surveillance equipment recorded him leaving and returning to the base shortly after the shootings.

“I’m really surprised his name hasn’t been released by now,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charlie Dunlap, who had served as its deputy judge advocate general. “Some delay may be appropriate to protect the family, but I can’t think of a legal reason for why they’re not being as transparent as possible.”

The military’s refusal to formally name Bales stands in sharp contrast to its handling of a trio of recent cases. In March 2003, then-Army spokesman George Heath named Sgt. Hasan Akbar as the sole suspect in the killings of two fellow soldiers at a base n Kuwait just hours after the attack. In May 2009, a military spokesman waited just one day before naming Sgt. John Russell as the sole suspect in the shooting deaths of five American troops at a base in Baghdad. That November, then-Lt. Gen. Robert Cone named Maj. Nidal Hasan as the sole suspect in the Fort Hood shootings eight hours after the assault.

Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was wrong to compare the Kandahar case to the other episodes. He noted that Hasan’s name had leaked out almost immediately after the Fort Hood shootings, so Cone was merely confirming information which had already been widely reported. Russell had already faced preliminary charges in the Baghdad shootings at the time he was named. Other military public-affairs officials hinted that Heath had erred by naming Akbar so quickly.

Still, some of the Pentagon’s current defense of its refusal to name the suspect in the Afghan shootings simply raises more questions. If Russell could be charged within one day, why has it taken nearly a week to charge the Kandahar suspect when he’s thought to be the sole perpetrator?

The military has also said that it moved the shooter’s family into protective custody to prevent reprisal attacks. But the Afghan Taliban has shown no ability to mount attacks in the U.S., and no similar protective measures were taken for Hasan’s family, even though the bereaved spouses and children of the Fort Hood victims could much more easily have traveled to Virginia to attack members of his family.

Morris Davis, a retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, said the military’s refusal to formally identify Bales after he was put in pretrial confinement was “unfathomable.” He also questioned why no initial charges have been filed in the case, given that the military has video footage of a soldier leaving the base right before the assault and returning right afterward and that there are no other suspects.

“I was a military lawyer for 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Davis said. “It should be out by now.”

In the meantime, anonymous military officials have been steadily dribbling out new details about the suspect, telling The New York Times that the soldier reportedly had been drinking the night of the massacre, hadn’t wanted to deploy, and was feeling the strain of marital difficulties caused by the impact of his repeated war-zone tours.

The military's reluctance to formally identify Bales could also stem from an institutional desire to control the narrative of the how the attack comes to be seen publicly and politically. Painting the suspect as a mentally unstable and potentially alcoholic rogue soldier would help sweep away questions about whether others in his chain of command should bear any responsibility for his alleged actions or if the military strategy of sending troops to isolated outposts makes such attacks harder to predict or prevent.

The suspect’s newly hired lawyer, John Henry Browne, added more information last night, telling reporters that his client had lost part of a foot in Iraq and had recently seen a fellow soldier from his unit lose a leg in an insurgent attack. He said the soldier had a “very healthy” marriage and that the soldier’s wife and in-laws were helping to pay for his defense.

Dunlap, the retired general, said the only substantive reason he could think of for why the military was continuing to shield the alleged shooter’s identity was to allow Army investigators to speak to his friends, relatives, and fellow troops before they come under significant media scrutiny and incessant demands for interviews.

Still, he said, one aspect of the military’s handling of the case was particularly troubling. Knowingly disclosing any aspect of someone’s medical history is a serious violation of federal health-privacy laws, but anonymous military officials have repeatedly done just that, whispering to reporters that the suspect had suffered a brain injury and potentially had post-traumatic stress disorder. That type of information came out days ago.

The suspect’s name, Dunlap said, should have been formally released at least as fast.

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U.S. officials dole out selective details on shooter

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:04:11 -0400

An array of details have leaked out about the sole suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting in Kandahar, from the brain injury he reportedly suffered in Iraq to the wife and two children he left behind in Washington State. But the Pentagon is steadfastly refusing to release his name, a stance seemingly at odds with its handling of other similarly high-profile cases.

The Army staff sergeant allegedly responsible for the killings of 16 civilians in the southern Afghanistan province is expected to arrive at Fort Leavenworth, the military’s main detention facility, later Friday. He’ll be held in pretrial confinement as officials from the Army Criminal Investigation Command interview survivors, analyze shell casings and try to get a clearer sense of what may have motivated the attack.

Military officials say they're simply following standard procedures in refusing to identify the suspect, arguing that a suspect’s name and background were typically kept out of public view until there’s been a so-called “preferral” of initial criminal charges. That hasn’t taken place yet in the Kandahar shooting, and the preferral could be days, or potentially weeks, away.

But the military’s argument is being attacked by many military-law experts, who say that suspects are usually identified immediately after being apprehended or placed into pretrial confinement. Both steps have already taken place in the Kandahar case. The lawyers also note that the military has already confirmed that there are no other suspects in the case and that Army surveillance equipment recorded him leaving and returning to the base shortly after the shootings.

“I’m really surprised his name hasn’t been released by now,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charlie Dunlap, who had served as its deputy judge advocate general. “Some delay may be appropriate to protect the family, but I can’t think of a legal reason for why they’re not being as transparent as possible.”

The military’s refusal to identify the alleged shooter stands in sharp contrast to its handling of a trio of other recent cases. In March 2003, then-Army spokesman George Heath named Sgt. Hasan Akbar as the sole suspect in the killings of two fellow soldiers just hours after the attack. In May 2009, a military spokesman waited just one day before naming Sgt. John Russell as the sole suspect in the shooting deaths of five American troops at a base in Baghdad. That November, then-Lt. Gen. Robert Cone named Maj. Nidal Hasan as the sole suspect in the Fort Hood shootings eight hours after the assault.

Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was wrong to compare the Kandahar case to the other episodes. He noted that Hasan’s name had leaked out almost immediately after the Fort Hood shootings, so Cone was merely confirming information which had already been widely reported. Russell had already faced preliminary charges in the Baghdad shootings at the time he was named. Other military public affairs officials hinted that Heath had erred by naming Akbar so quickly.

Still, some of the Pentagon’s current defense of its refusal to name the Afghan suspect simply raises more questions. If Russell could be charged within one day, why has it taken nearly a week to charge the Kandahar suspect when he’s thought to be the sole perpetrator?

The military has also said that it moved the shooter’s family into protective custody to prevent reprisal attacks. But the Afghan Taliban has shown no ability to mount attacks in the U.S., and no similar protective measures were taken for Hasan’s family even though the bereaved spouses and children of the victims of his alleged assault could much more easily have traveled to Virginia to attack members of Hasan’s family.

Morris Davis, a retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, said the military’s refusal to identify the suspect now that he’s been put in pretrial confinement was “unfathomable.” He also questioned why no initial charges have been filed in the case given that the military has video footage of the soldier leaving the base right before the assault and returning right afterwards, and that there are no other suspects.

“I was a military lawyer for 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Davis said. “It should be out by now.”

The military's reluctance to name the suspect could also stem from an institutional desire to control the narrative of the how the attack comes to be seen publicly and politically. Painting the suspect as a mentally-unstable and potentially alcoholic rogue soldier would help sweep away questions about whether others in his chain of command bear any responsibility for his alleged attack or if the military strategy of sending troops to isolates outposts makes these kinds of attacks harder to predict or prevent.

The suspect’s newly-hired lawyer, John Henry Browne, added more information last night, telling reporters that the alleged shooter had lost part of a foot in Iraq and recently seen a fellow soldier from his unit lose a leg in an insurgent attack. He said the soldier had a “very healthy” marriage and that the soldier’s wife and in-laws were helping to pay for his defense.

Browne, following the military’s lead, declined to identify the suspect.

Dunlap, the retired general, said the only substantive reason he could think of for why the military was continuing to shield the alleged shooter’s identity was to allow Army investigators to speak to his friends, relatives and fellow troops before they came under significant media scrutiny and incessant demands for press interviews.

Still, he said one aspect of the military’s handling of the case was particularly troubling. Knowingly disclosing any aspect of someone’s medical history is a serious violation of federal health-privacy laws, but anonymous military officials have repeatedly done just that, whispering to reporters that the suspect had suffered a brain injury and potentially had post-traumatic stress disorder. That type of information came out days ago. The suspect’s name, Dunlap said, should have been formally released at least as fast.

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Navy chief: U.S. to bring 'sawed-off shotgun' to Persian Gulf

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:40:38 -0400

The Navy is sharply increasing its military capabilities in the Persian Gulf, shifting more vessels, aircraft and powerful weapons amid ongoing tensions with Iran over its nuclear program.

Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, told reporters on Friday that he plans to double the number of mine-sweeping vessels in the Gulf from four to eight, add four additional mine-hunting helicopters, and deploy next-generation underwater mine-neutralizing drones.

Greenert said all U.S. ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil-shipping routes, would also be given new infrared surveillance equipment and short-range guns and missiles for potential use against smaller Iranian vessels.

The admiral, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that existing U.S. armaments -- which were designed for long-distance fights against other powerful vessels -- wouldn’t necessarily work in the narrow waterway. Pentagon strategists have long worried that Iran would try to swarm U.S. vessels with small, fast-moving attack boats as a way of countering the stronger and larger American warships.

“It’s like having this high-powered great rifle, but you’re in a small area,” Greenert said. “Maybe what you need is a sawed-off shotgun.”

The comments come at an uncertain moment in the rocky U.S. relationship with Iran. Israel, Washington’s closest ally, is openly warning of military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran doesn’t abandon its apparent quest for a nuclear bomb. President Obama recently warned that the U.S. would also consider such strikes if Iran continued its nuclear push.

At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have reopened negotiations with Iran amid what seems like a concerted push by both Washington and Tehran to reduce tensions and to step back from the brink of a military confrontation.

Greenert said that the planned expansion came after he had traveled through the Strait of Hormuz on the USS Stennis and discussed the potential Iranian military threat there with Gen. Jim Mattis, the head of the military’s Central Command.

Still, Greenert said that the Navy hadn’t detected any increased Iranian military activity in the Strait. Iran has previously said it would try to close the Strait if Israel or the U.S. struck its nuclear facilities, but American officials have consistently said they have no evidence Iran is capable of doing so or is actively preparing for such a hostile act.

“The Iranian navy has been unto itself professional and courteous,” Greenert said.

The U.S. push to bolster its capabilities in the Gulf could provide a mini-boost to large American defense contractors. Greenert told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing on Thursday that he expected to spend roughly $250 million in fiscal 2013 to retrofit American vessels with new weapons and surveillance systems and shift additional drones, helicopters, and mine-hunting ships to the Gulf. He said he expected many of the systems to be in place by the end of the year.

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Panetta: Pentagon planning for potential Iran strikes

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:20:23 -0500

The Pentagon is preparing an array of military options for striking Iran if hard-hitting diplomatic and economic sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to drop its nuclear ambitions, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told National Journal in an interview Thursday.

The Pentagon chief said that such planning had been underway “for a long time,” a reflection of the Obama administration’s mounting concern over Iran’s continued progress towards a nuclear weapon.

In the interview, Panetta said that he didn’t believe Israeli leaders had made up their minds about whether to order a high-risk raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Panetta, President Obama and an array of other senior U.S. military and civilian officials have counseled Israel to give the sanctions more time to work before resorting to military force. They’ve also warned that an attack would set Iran’s nuclear program back only by a few years, a high price to pay for the inevitably violent Iranian retaliation likely to follow.

“As the president himself has said, I don’t believe they’ve made a final decision here,” Panetta told National Journal. “I feel confident that they really are seriously weighing all of the ramifications of how best to deal with Iran.”

Panetta said in the interview that an unilateral Israeli strike against Iran would be less effective than one conducted by the U.S., which has a significantly larger air force and an array of advanced weapons which are more powerful than any possessed by the Jewish state. An American strike doesn’t appear imminent; Panetta and Obama have said that all options are on the table when it comes to ending Iran’s nuclear push, but the administration has made clear that it prefers to use diplomatic and economic pressure against Iran instead of resorting to military force.

“If they decided to do it there’s no question that it would have an impact, but I think it’s also clear that if the United States did it we would have a hell of a bigger impact,” Panetta said in the interview.

The comments came one day after Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. was reviewing “possible military options” for an armed intervention into Syria, underscoring the real possibility that Washington could soon find itself embroiled in a pair of new -- and risky -- Mideast conflicts.

Asked in Thursday’s interview if the Pentagon was conducting similar planning for strikes on Iran, Panetta didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he said.

The Defense chief stressed that the administration didn’t simply believe that Iran’s nuclear push posed a threat to Israel. Washington, he said, also saw Iran’s efforts as a direct threat to the U.S.

“I think they’re serious about the threat that they view from Iran and its impact on Israel,” Panetta said in the interview. “I think they also understand that we view Iran as a threat to our security as well.”

Panetta’s remarks echoed his tough talk on Iran earlier this week. Speaking to a powerful pro-Israel lobby Tuesday, Panetta said “if all else fails, we will act” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

“Let me be clear -- we do not have a policy of containment,” he told the crowd. “We have a policy of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

In his remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Panetta said Obama’s new budget requests $3.1 billion in security assistance to Israel, a sharp increase over the $2.5 billion provided in 2009. He also noted that the administration had committed more than $650 million in U.S. funding for Israeli missile defense, double the Bush administration’s pledge of $320 million over the same period. Panetta didn’t mention Iran in those remarks, but his concern about Iran came through loud and clear. In today’s interview, they came through even clearer.

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Pentagon weighs military strikes into Syria; clear risks remain

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:00:31 -0500

The military campaign would begin with U.S. warplanes jamming Syria’s air-defense systems and then destroying them. With those systems out of the way, American aircraft would help create a no-fly zone to protect the country’s pro-democracy protesters and a humanitarian corridor to allow them to receive food, water, and medicine. The U.S. and its allies would also decide whether to directly arm the rebels as the opposition forces made a final push to oust Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.

That, at least, would be the most likely scenario if President Obama ordered the American military to directly intervene in Syria, according to the Pentagon’s top leaders.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said that the U.S. was pushing for a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis and had deep concerns about using force there.

Still, the two men said that the United States was considering an array of ideas for protecting the Syrian people including, Panetta said, “potential military options.” Dempsey, in his testimony, said that those options would likely include the destruction of Syria’s air defenses and the creation of a no-fly zone.

At the same time, the two made clear that strikes weren’t imminent. The Pentagon had begun war-gaming various scenarios, Dempsey said, but had yet to present them to the president. Panetta said that the U.S. was still working to assemble an international coalition against Assad so that Washington wouldn’t have to act alone.

Dempsey also pointed out that Syria’s air defenses are five times more sophisticated than those in Libya, making airstrikes riskier and more complicated. Panetta, for his part, said that the systems had been set up in heavily populated areas, which meant that American strikes could cause “severe collateral damage.”

The testimony came as the Syrian crisis – and the international debate about how to handle it – continued to escalate. Outside groups estimate that Assad’s forces have killed at least 7,500 people and effectively leveled rebel-held cities such as Homs. The U.S. and its allies have slapped hard-hitting economic and political sanctions on Damascus, but Russia and China have prevented the United Nations Security Council for authorizing stronger measures.

Here at home, an array of prominent senators is calling for the U.S. to do more to stop the bloodshed. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have pressed for U.S. military involvement in Syria, with McCain this week explicitly calling for American airstrikes against Syrian forces.

At Wednesday’s hearing, McCain criticized the administration for not acting more quickly and aggressively to force Assad out of power.

“In past situations, America has led. We’re not leading, Mr. Secretary,” McCain told Panetta early in the hearing. Later, McCain asked, “How many more have to die? 10,000 more? 20,000 more?”

Panetta and Dempsey made it clear that they shared McCain’s outrage at Assad’s continued slaughter and that they believe that he long ago lost any legitimate claim to power. Panetta likened the brutality and scope of Assad’s crackdown to the violence unleashed by Chinese forces when they crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the 1990s.

But the secretary and the chairman stressed again and again that using the American military to push Assad from power would be far more challenging than similar humanitarian interventions into Libya and Bosnia. In addition to the size and sophistication of Syria’s air defenses, they pointed out that Syria has a large military; the active assistance of Iran, which is shipping antitank missiles and other armaments into the country; and a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons a hundred times larger than that in Libya.

They also warned that the U.S. was unsure of the exact makeup of the Syrian rebel groups, including whether they had ties to al-Qaida or other extremist groups. Panetta and Dempsey said that the rebels didn’t appear to have the kind of clear hierarchy and well-organized leadership structure that existed in Libya.

Still, the Syria conundrum won’t end anytime soon. Assad’s forces have crushed the opposition inside Homs and have clear momentum on the ground. The Obama administration faces a difficult and unwanted choice: Intervene militarily despite the clear risks of doing so, or rely on sanctions and diplomatic pressure despite the clear risks of failing to stop an unfolding humanitarian disaster.

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Panetta takes a slap at the GOP

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:31:50 -0500

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum used an early-morning speech to a powerful pro-Israel lobby Tuesday to accuse the Obama administration of taking too soft an approach towards Iran. Hours later, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took to the same podium to issue an unusually pointed response.

“In this town, it’s easy to talk tough,” Panetta said, in a subtle reference to Republican critics like Santorum. "Acting tough is a hell of a lot more important.”

Panetta didn’t mention Santorum by name, but he didn’t need to. The comments weren’t in Panetta’s prepared remarks, and his departure from the text -- and the language he chose to use -- was clearly intended to respond to the GOP candidates.

In his earlier remarks, Santorum told the crowd that the U.S. should destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran continued its weapons push and promised that if Iranian leaders “do not tear down those facilities, we will tear them down ourselves.” The former Pennsylvania senator trained the rest of his fire on Obama, accusing the administration of being “reticent” Iran and mocking the president’s earlier promise to always stand behind Israel.

“He says he has Israel’s back,” Santorum said. “ From everything I’ve seen from the conduct of this administration, he has turned his back on the people of Israel.”

As one would expect, the comments drew an angry response from Democratic lawmakers like Michigan Senator Carl Levin, who said Santorum was trying to use a vital national security issue to boost his campaign. More interestingly, they also drew a pointed -- if veiled -- response from Panetta.

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Obama administration offers new defense for killing U.S. citizens

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:42:48 -0500

President Obama took office promising to abandon many of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. Three years later, the Obama White House is claiming the right to do something even the Bush White House never proposed: kill American citizens overseas who are suspected of links to al-Qaida and other terror groups.

The administration has signed off on operations that led to the deaths of at least three U.S. citizens, but key aspects of its thinking about the legal justification for such strikes have long been clouded in the same secrecy that surrounds the broader CIA-led effort to hunt down terrorist leaders across the globe.

In a high-profile speech on Monday in Chicago, Attorney General Eric Holder offered the administration’s most expansive explanation to date of the reasons it believes Americans like Anwar al-Awlaki can be marked for death. Holder also offered a forceful defense of such killings, arguing that citizenship doesn’t protect Americans actively involved in planning or carrying out attacks against their own country.

“Any decision to use lethal force against a United States citizen -- even one intent on murdering Americans and who has become an operational leader of al-Qaida in a foreign land -- is among the gravest that government leaders can face,” Holder said in his speech at Northwestern University’s law school. “The American people can be -- and deserve to be -- assured that actions taken in their defense are consistent with their values and their laws.”

The speech raised as many questions as it answered. Holder didn’t offer any detail about the other Americans it was pursuing, explain who in the administration needs to sign off on the killings of U.S. citizens affiliated with terror groups, or precisely define the legal terms under which Americans could be targeted. He didn’t address the operational aspects of such strikes, including whether they are carried out by the CIA or by the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command.

The remarks instead seemed designed to carry out a pair of related missions: reassure outside critics that lethal force would only be used against a small number of Americans -- and only under a set of three specific conditions -- and combat the growing perception that Obama’s counterterror policies have become more extreme than those of the Bush administration.

It’s far from clear that Holder’s speech will pull that off. Morris Davis is a retired Air Force colonel who served as the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay before resigning and becoming a harsh critic of the detention camp and the military commission process itself. In an interview, he called the new policy deeply worrisome.

“There are those signs with Bush’s picture saying, 'Do you miss me yet?’” he said. “I’m almost going to the point that I do. Even Bush didn’t say he had the unilateral right to kill.”

The White House has already retained -- and expanded -- a host of controversial Bush-era counterterrorism programs. Obama has signed off on four times as many lethal drone strikes inside Pakistan as Bush had. The president has expanded the nation’s drone war to new battlefields in Yemen and Somalia. Guantanamo Bay remains open, and the military commissions which Obama criticized so harshly during his 2008 presidential campaign resumed last year. With the recent killings of three U.S. citizens, the Obama administration has added a new tactic that goes beyond anything put in place by the Bush White House.

Holder offered a multi-part defense for the administration’s approval of strikes like the drone attack in Yemen last year which killed Awlaki and a second American citizen, al-Qaida propagandist Samir Khan. Awlaki’s American-born son, Abdulrahman, 16, was killed in another U.S. air strike in Yemen just weeks later.

The attorney general said such strikes would only be carried out if three conditions were met. First, Holder said that the executive branch has to have determined that the U.S. citizen “poses an imminent threat of violent attack” against the U.S. Second, it has to involve a situation where it’s not “feasible” to capture the militant alive. Finally, the strike has to cause only minimal collateral damage and “use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering.”

“The unfortunate reality is that our nation will likely continue to face terrorist threats that, at times, originate with our own citizens,” Holder said. “When such individuals take up arms against this country and join al-Qaida in plotting attacks designed to kill their fellow Americans, there may be only one realistic and appropriate response.”

Still, Holder gave no ground on one of the most contentious aspects of the policy: the administration’s insistence that it can decide which citizens to kill on its own and without needing any judicial review. The Constitution, he said, “guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

Many of the legal definitions for a strike against a U.S. citizen, meanwhile, are vague enough that they could be used to justify attacks against a wide range of Americans overseas, including some with arguably minimal ties to al-Qaida.

Awlaki, for instance, was an English-speaking cleric who was thought to have inspired militants like Nidal Hasan, the sole suspect in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Khan edited an al-Qaida propaganda magazine called “Inspire.” Neither one was an operational leader of al-Qaida or appears to have been involved in carrying out, or even directly planning, an imminent attack against U.S. targets.

“There’s no evidence that either of these guys directly participated in any hostilities,” Davis said. “It’s hate speech, but there are a lot of people who engage in hate speech who don’t get targeted for assassination.”

Other legal experts said they sympathized with the administration’s efforts to wrestle with complex issues of life and death which go far beyond the issues raised in previous conflicts. Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas who has written extensively about counterterrorism, said, “The reality is that the Founders didn’t think about this, the courts haven’t really addressed it, and there’s not very much relevant prior precedent.”

“The speech will not change the mind of anyone who held the view that there should be judicial review of such targeting decisions, but it is notable nonetheless that the scope of authority claimed here … is relatively narrow and defensible,” he said.

The administration is widely believed to have put a similar kill-or-capture designation on Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a California-born al-Qaida leader who uses his fluent English to issue blood-curdling calls for new attacks against other Americans, a role once filled by Awlaki himself.

In a recent YouTube video, Gadahn told would-be militants that it is easy to buy assault rifles in the U.S. that could be used in shopping malls and other public areas. “What are you waiting for?” he asked.

Gadahn and other American-born militants are doing all they can to trigger new attacks on their fellow citizens. The Obama administration, without apology, is now making clear that it will do all it can to kill those militants before they succeed.

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Parts of 9/11 victims' remains ended up in landfill -- report

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:33:00 -0500

The Pentagon has disclosed for the first time that the remains of some Sept. 11 victims wound up in a landfill, adding a grim new chapter to an ongoing scandal over care for the military nation’s war dead.

A lengthy investigative report by a Pentagon panel into the handling of human remains at Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base found that both military and civilian remains had been mishandled at the facility, blaming the shortcomings on contractor malfeasance and a lack of proper oversight and training at the base.

According to the report, remains of 9/11 victims that could not be identified, either because they were too small or too burned, were cremated at a civilian facility, sent back to Dover, and then sent in a sealed container to a civilian waste disposal company. The firm was supposed to completely incinerate the containers, but the report said “there was some residual material following incineration” and “the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill.”

The report notes that “the landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement,” but doesn’t identify the company or specify whether the government has pursued any legal action against the firm. No senior Dover officials have been fired over the landfill controversy.

The 86-page report was sparked by media reports that military remains had been cremated at civilian facilities and ultimately sent to a landfill. The articles sparked outrage on Capitol Hill and fury among the tight-knit community of bereaved military families, who said the military had in essence been treating the remains of their loved ones as garbage.

The new report confirms that military remains were mishandled and then goes further. It concludes that military remains weren’t the only ones that ended up in a landfill; the remains of 9/11 victims, some of the most venerated in recent American history, were disposed of there as well.

The study identified smaller incidents that were nevertheless extremely painful to bereaved families. In late September 2011, the remains of a fallen service member were cremated. The family had requested the ashes be placed in a hardwood casket. Instead, the report found, the remains were placed in a cheap cardboard insert.

The report blames the failings on a lack of proper training and oversight at the facility, as well as systemic understaffing, and recommends a variety of bureaucratic fixes.

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Panetta calls for tax increases, not Defense cuts

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:55:54 -0500

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Tuesday stepped back into the bitter debate over the nation’s debt, arguing that lawmakers should close the budget deficit through tax increases and changes to popular programs like Social Security rather than through additional cuts in Pentagon spending.

“No budget can be balanced on the back of discretionary spending alone,” he told the Senate Budget Committee. “I strongly believe that all areas of the federal budget must be put on the table – not just discretionary, but mandatory spending and revenues.”

“Revenue” in that context is code for tax increases, while “mandatory spending” is code for programs like Medicare.

Panetta has made that argument before. Last August, during his first press conference, the Defense chief said trimming the debt would mean also taking a “look at revenues as part of that answer.” Last fall, he explicitly told a House panel to consider “increases in revenue” and entitlement cuts before taking another whack at the Pentagon budget.

But the new comments come in the midst of the heated Republican presidential campaign, where front-runners like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have emphatically ruled out any tax increases – even on the very wealthy – while also promising to somehow shield the defense budget from further reductions.

The candidates have promised to save billions of dollars through far-reaching Medicare and Social Security cuts, but many independent budget analysts have said the candidates’ plans for additional tax cuts would wipe away any such savings and instead add to the national debt.

Panetta’s comments about the need for tax increases came as he reiterated his long-standing warnings that so-called sequestration – the roughly $600 billion in automatic defense cuts which would take effect if no debt-cutting deal is reached by the end of the year – would hollow out the nation’s armed forces and directly threaten U.S. national defense.

In his typically colorful language, Panetta derided the sequester mechanism as a “meat axe” which would impose dangerous across-the-board cuts rather than the targeted plans the administration has also unveiled for shaving $487 billion out of the Pentagon’s budget over the next 10 years.

Shielding the Pentagon from those mandatory cuts, he argued, would require lawmakers and the White House to gore cows sacred to both parties. Panetta said Congress and the Obama administration would need to look at tax increases and cuts to popular entitlement programs like Social Security.

The panel expressed near-uniform opposition to sequestration, but Panetta’s calls for tax increases were largely ignored by lawmakers from both parties. Instead, the lawmakers expressed shock at several specific components of the Pentagon’s gargantuan budget. When Pentagon comptroller Robert Hale said it costs $850,000 to keep an individual service member in Afghanistan for a year, committee chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota said the figure “takes my breath away.”

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Koran burning in Afghanistan fuels bloody new attacks on U.S. forces

Yochi J. Dreazen — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:07:24 -0500

The deaths of a pair of American soldiers in Afghanistan Thursday highlights the bloody intersection of two dangerous aspects of the long war there: the growing Afghan fury over the burning of Korans and the continued killings of Western troops by their Afghan counterparts.

An Afghan soldier shot and killed the U.S. soldiers at an outpost in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province and then, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter, fled into the large crowd of demonstrators outside the base. They were protesting reports that American troops had burned copies of the Koran, the holiest text in Islam. Elsewhere, a large crowd of protesters also threw stones at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan’s Laghman Province, while Afghan police fired on protesters in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province, killing at least one person.

The increasingly large and violent protests began Tuesday, when the U.S.-led military alliance confirmed that “religious materials” were accidentally burned at a sprawling American base in eastern Afghanistan.

President Obama sent a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai apologizing for the incident, echoing similar expressions of regret from top administration and military officials. But the apologies have done nothing to assuage public fury in Afghanistan. At least 13 Afghans have died this week, and the riots -- and their resulting death tolls -- seem certain to escalate in the days ahead.

Fury in Afghanistan and other parts of the Muslim world over reports of U.S. troops descerating the Koran is not new. A Newsweek article in 2005 reported that an American interrogator at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The article was later retracted, but not before sparking violent protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia. At least 16 people were killed.

There was more violence last March in response to a Florida pastor publicly burning copies of the Koran. Those riots left roughly 24 people dead, including seven United Nations employees killed in what remains the world body’s largest one-day death toll in Afghanistan.

The Koran-related anger may now fuel more Afghan troops to turn their weapons on their American counterparts, a growing trend concerning American policymakers here and in Afghanistan. Taliban officials are already exploiting the widespread fury towards the U.S. In a statement cited by the Associated Press, a Taliban spokesman said destroying the Korans was an “unforgivable crime” and explicitly encouraged Afghan soldiers and police officers to “become real sons of the nation” by killing U.S. and NATO troops.

It’s not clear that extremists within the ranks of the Afghan military need much encouragement to target their American counterparts. Indeed, the two U.S. soldiers killed during the protests in Nangarhar Thursday were the latest additions to a grim tally of so-called “green on green” violence (the phrase is a reference to the color of the uniforms historically worn by military personnel) throughout Afghanistan.

This year alone, an Afghan soldier opened fire at U.S. soldiers playing volleyball at a base, killing one and wounding several others. Another Afghan soldier killed four French soldiers less than a week later, prompting Paris to suspend its training mission in Afghanistan and threaten to accelerate its withdrawal from the country.

U.S. officials had consistently argued that such attacks were motivated by financial problems, personal stress and other prosaic concerns, not ideological affinity with the Taliban. But that case is increasingly difficult to make as more and more Western troops die at the hands of their Afghan counterparts.

A leaked report prepared last year for the American military command in Kabul found that Afghan soldiers and police officers attacked Western troops at least 26 times between May 2007 and May 2011, killing approximately 58 U.S. and NATO troops. The pace of such attacks has been steadily increasing since 2009, the report found. The worst single incident occurred in April 2009, when an Afghan officer killed eight American troops and one U.S. contractor.

“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” the report said, according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy. U.S and NATO declarations that the attackers were motivated by factors other than ideology “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest,” the report said.

All of those attacks took place before the fury unleashed by the Koran burnings, suggesting that there is already a pool of Afghan troops pre-disposed to committing acts of violence against Western troops. The Taliban are calling for more such attacks. Barring something unforeseen, extremist Afghan troops seem likely to listen.

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Protests latest in series against U.S. military gaffes in Afghanistan

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:51:00 -0500

The violent protests that erupted in Afghanistan on Tuesday amid reports that American forces burned copies of the Koran are the latest in a series of self-induced wounds for the NATO alliance. The current phase of the long and unpopular war appears to be following a grimly predictable pattern. When there seems to be a smidgeon of good news, NATO troops commit a public relations blunder to overshadow it.

Late last year, for example, National Journal reported that American war deaths in Afghanistan -- steadily increasing for more than five years -- were trending lower in 2011 than the year before. That positive trend was forgotten weeks later when a video showing American Marines urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters hit the Internet.

The Taliban’s recent opening of a political office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar sparked optimism that the U.S. and the armed group might soon begin substantive talks as Western involvement in Afghanistan winds down. Administration officials, speaking privately, said it was the clearest indication to date of the Taliban’s potential willingness to come to the negotiating table.

Now that news is swept aside by NATO’s announcement of a formal investigation into reports that American troops burned copies of the Koran, Islam's holy book. Thousands of Afghans protested outside the gates of the American base where the books were allegedly set on fire, with some of the rioters throwing petrol bombs at the facility. The military ultimately fired flares to dissipate the crowd.

The incident gives the Taliban a public relations boost within Afghanistan while eroding Afghan support for the NATO alliance.

Beyond the politics, allegations about mistreatment of the Koran can have deadly repercussions. In 2005, Newsweek reported that an American interrogator at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The magazine ultimately retracted the story, but not before it had sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia which killed at least 16 people. Another 18 were killed in Afghanistan last year when a Florida pastor publicly burned copies of the Koran.

Gen. John Allen, the top American commander in Afghanistan, heard about the new allegations on Tuesday morning and immediately ordered a formal probe. Allen also issued an unusual public letter apologizing “for any offense this may have caused” stressing “this was NOT intentional in any way.”

U.S. military officials investigating the current incident say it’s too soon to know if -- or how many -- copies of the Koran were burned.

Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the NATO alliance, said materials had been gathered at a U.S.-run prison located on the sprawling Bagram airbase and given to troops there for burning. Cummings said some of the papers were religious in nature, but said “the exact type and content of the religious material involved is being investigated.” Cummings said the troops involved were being questioned, but that it was not yet clear that Korans had actually been burned.

But that may not matter. Mere allegations of mistreatment of the Koran can spark spasms of deadly violence throughout the Muslim world, and anything positive out of Afghanistan will be lost in the uproar.

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Panetta: U.S. to wind down combat mission in Afghanistan next year

Yochi J. Dreazen, National Journal — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:36:00 -0500

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that the U.S.-led NATO coalition would end its combat role in Afghanistan next year, the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is accelerating its plans to wind down the long and unpopular Afghan war.

“Hopefully by mid- to the latter part of 2013, we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise, and assist role,” The Washington Post said Panetta told reporters accompanying him to Brussels.

The Obama administration has previously promised that the United States would keep troops in Afghanistan until 2014, but Panetta’s comments suggested that the U.S. would shrink its military footprint there significantly in 2012 and 2013 as part of a broader shift away from a direct combat role in the country.

Military commanders in Afghanistan have spoken for months about reducing the number of American troops involved in frontline fighting against the Taliban and instead ramping up the effort to train a large and relatively capable Afghan military. The strategic shift, modeled on a similar approach used in Iraq, comes amid growing tensions within NATO about whether the war is worth the human and financial cost. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his country would be withdrawing its troops sooner than planned after an Afghan soldier recently killed four French troops.

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