The biggest thorn in the sides of the U.S., the coalition and the Afghan government is what is called the Haqqani Network. This is the most vicious opponent of the coalition in Afghanistan in what has been called a revenge obsessed family.

The Haqqani Network is a large radical insurgent group currently led by a father and son team, Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani, who operate out of the Pakistan area of North Waziristan, near the eastern side of Afghanistan. Their focus in Afghan is the provinces of Khost, Pakia and Paktka.

The anti-Americanism machinations are the result of two major U.S. blunders.

First, while the Haqqani family was one of the biggest recipients of U.S. aid when the mujahedeen fought the Russian, they were snubbed by the Americans when the U.S. was trying to form a government in Kabul.

Second, Mohammed Haqqani, a son of Jalaluddin, was killed in a drone strike. Also, it was reported that one drone strike killed a number of women and children of the Haqqani family.

The Haqqanis are ethnic Pashtuns of the Zadran tribe in Pakia province.

The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency uses the Haqqanis as a tool to keep ISI influence in Afghanistan. Additionally, they are able to persuade many Pakistani Taliban to fight in Afghanistan and not Pakistan. The Pakistan ISI has even warned the Haqqanis of pending U.S. drone strikes.

MajGen. Dan Allyn, USA, the U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan, has said that special-operations forces have had some success in targeting Haqqani commanders, but the network was far from defeated:

“Haqqani is clearly the most lethal threat to the government of Afghanistan and the coalition,” MajGen Allyn said. “Because of Haqqani’s bases in Miranshah, they clearly have a stronger regenerative capability than any Afghanistan Taliban. There’s no question that they’re a difficult, capable enemy.”

The Haqqani will see that there will be no “Dayton-style peace agreement” like the one that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995.

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Admiral Michael Mullen, CJCS, in a rare moment away from the Administration’s party line, has warned against a precipitate drawdown of the 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan, ahead of a reduction in force size next month.

General David Petraeus, USA, the commander for NATO and US troops in Afghanistan, has not yet submitted his proposed plans for the drawdown and emphasized the challenges still facing the allies.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death a May Gallup poll showed 51 per cent of respondents said things were going well for the US in Afghanistan. Polls before that show an American majrity in opposition to our involvement in Afghanistan.

Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, deputy U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said that NATO forces in July will begin to transfer “security duties” to Afghan forces in seven urban areas of Afghanistan, a key measurement in a nearly decade long war. But the handoff in these first areas will be slow and is expected to take 12 to 18 months, according to all military reports.

The only positive report out of Afghanistan is that numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are seeking peace deals with the Afghan government since U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden last month.

The only clear way to pass civil and military control to the Afghans is to make sure we have the right number of trainers and advisors to remain in Afghan to help in building the Afghan security forces.

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Most journalists do not understand how the Taliban come mainly from the Pushtu.

The Pushtu populations is primarily in central and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, which includes Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan. The Pashtuns are typically characterized by their usage of the Pashto language and practice of Pashtunwali, a traditional set of Islamic ethics guiding individual and communal conduct.

According to Wikipedia, the Pashtuns are the world’s largest (patriarchal) lineage ethnic group. According to Ethnologue, the total population of the group is estimated to be around 50 million but an accurate count remains elusive due to the lack of an official census in Afghanistan since 1979. Estimates of the number of Pushtu tribes and clans range to about 350.

The Taliban have been mostly Pashtun since the fight against Soviet occupation and now fight the U.S. occupation.

The frayed alliance between Pakistan and the U.S. hurts U.S. plans to draw down troops in Afghanistan and leave behind a stable country. WDC needs better cooperation from Pakistan in shutting down Taliban havens on both sides of the border, which fuel the conflict. Without Pakistan’s cooperation, a U.S. troop withdrawal could lead Afghanistan into a renewed civil war.

Unfortunately, the Pakistani military and ISI see the situation very differently. Mostly they attribute their militant problem to U.S. errors in Afghanistan. They are unwilling to shut down havens for the Afghan or Pakistan Taliban (whom they trained in the 1990s to fight the Soviets) because they want a friendly, and anti-Indian, regime to take over in Kabul after the U.S. exit. They believe the Taliban may provide their best option.

Until the Pashtuns are ready to accept a divided allegiance to Afghans and Pakistan– there will be no peace in Afghanistan.

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“It Takes a Network:The new frontline of modern warfare,” bY STANLEY A. MCCHRYSTAL |MARCH/APRIL 2011, <blockedhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/issues/185/contents/.

Accprding to McChrystal: “Over time, it became increasingly clear — often from intercepted communications or the accounts of insurgents we had captured — that our enemy was a constellation of fighters organized not by rank but on the basis of relationships and acquaintances, reputation and fame. Who became radicalized in the prisons of Egypt? Who trained together in the pre-9/11 camps in Afghanistan? Who is married to whose sister? Who is making a name for himself, and in doing so burnishing the al Qaeda brand?

“insurgent leaders. Connected to, and often directly dispatched by, the Taliban’s leadership in Pakistan, they moved through the same areas of Afghanistan. They made shows of public support for Taliban shadow governors, motivated tattered ranks, recruited new troops, distributed funds, reviewed tactics, and updated strategy. And when the sky above became too thick with our drones, their leaders used cell phones and the Internet to issue orders and rally their fighters. They aimed to keep dispersed insurgent cells motivated, strategically wired, and continually informed, all without a rigid — or targetable — chain of command.

“became clear to me and to many others that to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves. We had to figure out a way to retain our traditional capabilities of professionalism, technology, and, when needed, overwhelming force, while achieving levels of knowledge, speed, precision, and unity of effort that only a network could provide. We needed to orchestrate a nuanced, population-centric campaign that comprised the ability to almost instantaneously swing a devastating hammer blow against an infiltrating insurgent force or wield a deft scalpel to capture or kill an enemy leader.”

Ten years later and we are still debating tactics, techniques and procedures in Afghanistan.

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SecDef Robert Gates spoke at the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels, 11 March, asking for more NATO support at what he called “a critical juncture for our mission in Afghanistan.”

Gates emphasized three items: International Security Assistance Force accomplishments over the past year, his concern progress could be threaten by uncoordinated national troop draw down, and how to plan for a deliberate transition to Afghanistan lead.

It was agreed that the Taliban control far lees territory and have lost much of their ability to operate.

Additionally, there is some semblance of normalcy emergent

Gates also said: “There is too much talk about leaving and not enough talk about getting the job done right.”

Geez, wonder who started that?

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More than six “suicide attacks” in recent weeks in Afghanistan – Kabul, Khost, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Kunduz and Faryab – have taken the lives of around 200 ordinary Afghans working for a living on a daily basis.

But should they be called suicides or homicides?

“There is a pattern. As the counter-insurgency takes momentum, and the Taliban get weaker, we get more suicide attacks, particularly on civilian targets …and it’s happening as the General in a hurry (hinting towards Gen. Petraeus) is being applauded for shortening the long war — so these attacks on Afghan civilians have an international impact as well,” said one of the Kabul-based news publishers.

It seems that whenever the Afghan government seems to be making progress in terms of its security, there are more attacks even in the relatively calm regions that can destabilize that area.

The terror created by the TV video of the attacks on the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad is on the faces of all local Afghans. Some thought that such a merciless momentum of killing civilians cannot go on. But it has.

Suicide or homicide – no matter it is still terrorism which the current Administration cannot seem to understand. The definition of terrorism – that is.

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According to the Marine Corps Times, the Army “severely reprimanded” two of the three officers cited for negligence after a mishandled mission in eastern Afghanistan resulted in five U.S. deaths, according to a congressman who pushed for the information’s release.

The Army officers were cited for poor planning and oversight of a Sept. 8, 2009, operation in Ganjgal which is a remote village near the Pakistan border. Three Marines and a corpsman were killed on the battlefield after the men in contact were repeatedly denied air and artillery support while pinned down by more than 100 insurgents. A soldier later died of medical complications related to wounds he suffered in the ambush.

A joint Army-Marine Corps investigation deemed three Army officers primarily responsible for the mission’s failures and given reprimands. The Ganjgal investigation, conducted by Army Col. Richard Hooker and Marine Col. James Werth, determined that the “negligent” leadership of three Army officers at nearby Forward Operating Base Joyce contributed “directly to the loss of life which ensued.” The officers refused direct calls for help from U.S. forces on the ground and failed to notify higher commands that they had troops under fire, reported the investigation.

Severely reprimanded?

Many feel that this was a case of dereliction of duty causing the loss of life and should have been sent to courts-martial

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An interesting article appeared in National Geographic, February 2011, by Robert Draper: “Opium Wars: A key step to securing peace will be to wean Afghan farmers off growing poppies.”

Draper reported that the grim axiom defining today’s Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside world’s largesse to continue, the national economy’s addiction to opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world’s leading opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan’s poppy mind-set promises to be a complicated endeavor.

In Badakhshan, chief of police Kintuz appears to be making some headway against poppies. Five years ago the province was Afghanistan’s second-biggest opium producer, after the Taliban-controlled province of Helmand. For a brief period after a Taliban ban on poppies in 2000, Badakhshan even took the lead in poppy cultivation, because the province was controlled by the Northern Alliance militias, rather than the Taliban. When Kintuz started his job in 2007, 9,000 acres were planted with poppies. Two years later fewer than 1,500 were.

Eradication efforts have forced poppy farmers into the margins of the countryside. Their fields are, by design, all but invisible. To find one, you must drive for hours on a crumbled and isolated mountainside road, accompanied by someone who knows the district and will if necessary explain your presence there. You must look far from the roadside, gazing over the rolling terra incognita of northern Afghanistan—studying its monochromatic creases for that rogue burst of color, simultaneously innocent and obscene, that finally screams out what it can only be: a field of poppies.

As I have said many times, the U.S. should buy the crop, burn it in front of all, and then pay them to grow something else.

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In reading much of the White House “annual review,’ there seemed to be little on the center of gravity in Afghanistan. The center of gravity is the people and to win the people you have to win the elders. The Taliban are mostly centered in the Pashtun people.

The central theme of the Review is: “Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.”

But, how will we do it?

A battle of attrition cannot be won. There are exponentially more Taliban in Afghan and Pakistan than NATO forces. Ever seen a map of the Pashtun population in Afghanistan and Pakistan? The vast majority of Pashtuns are found in an area stretching from central and southeastern Afghanistan to western Pakistan

Wikipedia reports that the Pashtuns are the “world’s largest (patriarchal) segmentary lineage ethnic group.” The total population of the group is estimated to be as high 49 million according to Ethnologue, but an accurate count remains elusive due to the lack of an official census in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are an estimated 350 to over 400 Pashtun tribes and clans.

To win the war we have to win the Pashtuns – we have to win the people. The elders will determine who wins.

Easier said than done.

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