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THE STANS
'Green-on-blue' attacks spike in Afghanistan
by Staff Writers
Kabul (AFP) Aug 11, 2012


Seven international soldiers have been killed by their local colleagues in a bloody week of violence in Afghanistan, further eroding trust between foreign troops and the Afghans they work with.

Six died on Friday alone -- three American soldiers were shot by an Afghan policeman who invited them to a meal and three other troops were killed by an Afghan civilian employed on a NATO base, military and Afghan officials said.

NATO has about 130,000 soldiers helping the Afghan government fight an insurgency by Taliban Islamists, but they are due to pull out in 2014 and are increasingly working with Afghans they are training to take over.

So-called green-on-blue attacks, in which Afghans turn their weapons against their foreign allies, have killed a total of 34 international soldiers this year, according to a NATO count.

The seven deaths this week -- one soldier was killed on Tuesday -- make up around 40 percent of the total of some 17 foreign troops killed.

"Clearly as far as the future partnering and training and mentoring of Afghan forces by NATO and the US is concerned, it is going to have a very negative effect and the lack of trust between the two sides is going to grow," said author and analyst Ahmed Rashid.

"NATO will have to impose new security measures for its own troops when they are dealing with Afghans or training Afghans, which will put even more distance between the two sides," Rashid told AFP.

Some of the attacks are claimed by the Taliban, who say they have infiltrated the ranks of Afghan security forces, but many are attributed to cultural differences and antagonism between local and US-led allied forces.

"What we identified was that most of them were caused by personal grievances and stress situations," the chief spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, Brig-Gen Gunter Katz, told AFP.

"Those isolated incidents don't reflect the overall security situation in Afghanistan. As we speak 500,000 soldiers and policemen are working together to contribute to a more secure and stable Afghanistan," he said.

"We are confident that the morale (among international troops) is still good and those incidents will not affect our transition process."

Katz agreed, however, that there had been an increase in green-on-blue attacks this year, up from a total of 21 incidents and 35 deaths in all of 2011.

"Insurgents understand that this type of action is the most effective one, so they tend to use it as much as they can," a Western security source said.

"But apart from that, there is a general feeling of Afghans being fed up with the foreign troops, cultural issues."

On Tuesday, an American soldier died in the east when two men in Afghan army uniform opened fire, and on Thursday an Afghan soldier was killed after turning his weapon on NATO troops, also in the east.

Then on Friday an Afghan police officer opened fire on four American soldiers he had invited for a meal, killing three of them, Afghan officials said.

The Taliban claimed that attack and said the shooter had fled and joined their ranks. Katz said that the shooter had been detained, without giving further details.

Also on Friday, an Afghan civilian employed on a NATO base shot dead three international coalition soldiers, ISAF said.

"The shooter was not in uniform and our current reporting indicates he was a civilian employee authorised to be on the base, but there is no indication he was an Afghan service member," an ISAF spokesman said.

The spokesman said he had no information on how the civilian got hold of a weapon on the shared Afghan-NATO base in southern Afghanistan, and provided no further details.

President Hamid Karzai "strongly condemned the killing of six NATO soldiers in two separate incidents," attributing them to "terrorists wearing military uniforms", his office said in a statement.

There have also been instances when members of the Afghan security forces have targeted local colleagues.

On Saturday 11 Afghan policemen were killed when one of their colleagues, believed to be a Taliban infiltrator, opened fire on them, officials said.

The incident happened in Delaram district of western Nimroz province.

"Initial investigation shows the shooter was a Taliban infiltrator. He was also killed when police returned fire," Nimroz governor Abdul Karim Brahawi told AFP.

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US must seal border for Waziristan push: Pakistani official
Islamabad (AFP) Aug 10, 2012 - Pakistan has told Washington that US forces must seal the Afghan border in the event of any offensive against the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in North Waziristan, an official said Saturday.

The Haqqanis, blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan and whose leaders are understood to be based in the Pakistani tribal district, is one of the thorniest issues between Islamabad and Washington.

"The Americans have been repeatedly told that they will have to seal off the border on the Afghan side whenever an operation is launched in North Waziristan," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP.

Without protecting the porous, mountainous border, militants would simply escape into Afghanistan, where Pakistan has no writ, the official explained.

He claimed that Americans have "never been encouraging on this point" and accused them of failing to seal the border when operations were planned twice before in North Waziristan.

On August 3, The Wall Street Journal reported that Pakistani and US officials were considering joint counter-terrorism campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Haqqanis and Taliban fighters who attack Pakistan.

The paper said the campaigns would mark an upturn in cooperation after more than a year of rancorous relations and stamp out major threats facing each country.

Pakistani officials later denied any agreement with the United States for a joint operation in North Waziristan, and said "routine" actions on each side of the border "should not be mistaken for 'joint operations'".

Washington has long demanded that Pakistan take action against the Haqqanis, whom the United States accused of attacking the US embassy in Kabul last September and acting like the "veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence.

Pakistan has in turn demanded that Afghan and US forces to do more to stop Pakistani Taliban crossing the Afghan border to relaunch attacks on its forces.

The senior official told AFP that Pakistan had been able to "speak their heart and mind" on the issue during last week's visit to Washington by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief.

Lieutenant General Zaheer ul-Islam, in the first such visit for a year, and CIA director David Petraeus discussed some of the most intractable issues on both sides that have fractured the anti-terror alliance.

"The Americans were clearly told that Pakistan will not allow American boots on its soil for any operation and whenever an offensive is launched, it will be done by us," the official told AFP.

"We told the Americans that it is simply not possible for Pakistan to launch a fresh offensive in North Waziristan at the moment because it will have a very negative impact," he added.

Some analysts question to what extent Pakistan can win a full-on battle against the disciplined Haqqani faction, particularly when its troops are already over-stretched against local Taliban elsewhere in the northwest.

Islam gave the CIA in Washington "two loud and clear messages," said the official -- no American boots on Pakistani soil and that US drone strikes on Islamist militants, which Islamabad brands a violation of its sovereignty, must stop.

Many in Pakistan accuse the Americans of demanding a Pakistani offensive to mask their own failings in the 10-year war in Afghanistan.

"I will be surprised if Pakistan agrees to a joint operation," said political analyst Hasan Askari.



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THE STANS
US must seal border for Waziristan push: Pakistani official
Islamabad (AFP) Aug 10, 2012
Pakistan has told Washington that US forces must seal the Afghan border in the event of any offensive against the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in North Waziristan, an official said Saturday. The Haqqanis, blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan and whose leaders are understood to be based in the Pakistani tribal district, is one of the thorniest issues between Islamabad an ... read more


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