In Afghanistan, Buying Friends Doesn't Buy Loyalty

Rooting out corruption is a key part of the U.S. military's counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. But recent revelations that a member of the Afghan government is on the CIA payroll has raised questions about how secret intelligence operations in Afghanistan can complicate the overall mission.

"Money is ammunition; don't put it in the wrong hands," Gen. David Petraeus said in guidance he sent out to all NATO troops in Afghanistan earlier this month. "Remember, we are who we fund."

Petraeus made fighting corruption a fundamental part of his strategy to turn Afghanistan around. But while he warns his troops about striking financial deals with potentially unreliable allies, the CIA is prosecuting its part of this war by doing exactly that.

"We have a strategy that is inherently inconsistent," says Rick Nelson, a counterterrorism expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Internationa l Studies. He says the CIA is fighting the counterterrorism component of the war, which means getting information about those plotting to attack the U.S. or the Afghan government.

For years, the method for getting that information is to pay individuals for it, Nelson says. "Unfortunately, that's also considered corruption."

The Long-Term Vs. Short-Term Mission

Last week the New York Times, first reported that the CIA is paying a key member of President Karzai's national security team. Karzai's own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been reportedly getting paid by the agency, and former U.S. officials say Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord accused of war crimes, has been on and off the CIA payroll since the U.S. invasion. The CIA's history of buying alliances with power brokers in the region stretches back to the Cold War.

Paul Pillar spent almost 30 years in the CIA and now teaches at Georgetown University. "It is no surprise," he says, "and it is no exception from long-standing ways in which intelligence services around the world have done business — to deal with the people they have to deal with in order to get the information they're seeking. Many of those people are not the kinds of folks that you would want as long-term friends."

Pillar says it's a matter of timelines. U.S. and NATO troops are working on a longer term mission that involves building up Afghan capacity, while the CIA, he says, is pursuing shorter term objectives: find such-and-such insurgent, neutralize the threat he poses — and do so by whatever means necessary.

"I don't see how you can tell our decision-makers or our agencies of government, whether they're military or intelligence, to set aside either the short-term mission or the long-term mission to get through the next month and the next year," Pillar says. "We have to work with the ally we've got, and that's the Karzai government."

But allies — especially the kind you pay — can be fickle and fleeting.

"When you pay someone, you are renting their allegiance temporarily," Nelson says. "It is not a long-term deal — not guaranteed loyalty for life."

It's the kind of alliance that's only good until someone else comes along with a higher offer.

john mccain al gore bill clinton newt gingrich sarah palin

Foreign Policy: The Global Need For Peace In Somalia

As extremism and violence in Somalia grows, so does the resolve of the African Union to support peacekeeping missions. Yoweri Museveni of Foreign Policy argues the search for peace and stability in the Horn of Africa is not just a Somali or even an African issue; it is at the heart of the global war against extremism.

hamid karzai barak obama hillary clinton george w bush nancy pelosi

Two Bases In Afghanistan Attacked By Insurgents

U.S. and Afghan troops repelled attackers wearing American uniforms and suicide vests in a pair of simultaneous assaults before dawn Saturday on NATO bases near the Pakistani border, including one where seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack last year.

The raids appear part of an insurgent strategy to step up attacks in widely scattered parts of the country as the U.S. focuses its resources on the battle around the Taliban's southern birthplace of Kandahar.

Also Saturday, three more American service members were killed — two in a bombing in the south and the third in fighting in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. command said. That brought to 38 the number of U.S. troops killed this month — well below last month's figure of 66.

The militant assault in the border province of Khost began about 4 a.m. when dozens of insurgents stormed Forward Operating Base Salerno and ne arby Camp Chapman with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, according to NATO and Afghan police.

Two attackers managed to breach the wire protecting Salerno but were killed before they could advance far onto the base, NATO said. Twenty-one attackers were killed — 15 at Salerno and six at Chapman — and five were captured, it said.

Three more insurgents, including a commander, were killed in an airstrike as they fled the area, NATO said.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said two Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded in the fighting. Four U.S. troops were wounded, NATO officials said.

U.S. and Afghan officials blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based faction of the Taliban with close ties to al-Qaida. Camp Chapman was the scene of the Dec. 30 suicide attack that killed the seven CIA employees.

Afghan police said about 50 insurgent s took part in the twin assaults. After being driven away from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were also scattered, said Khost provincial police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai.

"Given the size of the enemy's force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it," he said.

Small-arms fire continued through the morning, while NATO helicopters patrolled overhead. The dead were wearing U.S. Army uniforms, which can be easily purchased in shops in Kabul and other cities, possibly pilfered from military warehouses.

The twin attacks appeared to be part of a growing pattern of insurgent assaults far from the southern battlefields of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, which have been the main focus of the U.S. military campaign. Last December, President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinfor cements to Afghanistan, most to the Kandahar area where the Islamist movement was organized in the mid-1990s.

Late Friday, insurgents stormed a police checkpoint in Takhar province near the northern border with Tajikistan. The Interior Ministry said nine insurgents were killed and 12 wounded with no losses on the government side. The day before, Taliban fighters killed eight Afghan policemen in a raid on a checkpoint outside the northern city of Kunduz.

And on Wednesday, an Afghan police driver with family links to the Taliban killed three Spaniards — two police trainers and their interpreter — at a training center in the northern province of Badghis.

A joint NATO-Afghan investigative team found the shooter, whose brother-in-law is a Taliban commander, had been arrested and disarmed a year ago for links to insurgents but was reinstated after two local elders vouched for him, NATO said in a statement Saturday.

Although the Afghan capital is relatively secure, incidents apparently directed at female students have raised concern about Taliban intimidation within the city.

The Health Ministry said 48 pupils and teachers at the Zabihullah Esmati High School were rushed to hospitals Saturday after falling ill with breathing problems and nausea. All but nine were treated and released after blood samples were taken to try to determine the cause.

On Wednesday, dozens of students and teachers at another Kabul girls' school became sick when an unknown gas spread through classrooms, education officials said. The cause of that incident has not been determined, but officials fear the apparent poisonings could be part of an insurgent campaign to frighten girls from attending school.

Also Saturday, the government criticized U.S. media reports that alleged numerous Afghan officials had recei ved payments from the CIA. A presidential office statement did not address or deny any specific allegations, but called the reports an insult to the government and an attempt to defame people within it.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the CIA had been paying Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for Afghanistan's National Security Council, who was arrested last month as part of an investigation into corruption. The Washington Post reported the next day the agency was making payments to a large number of officials in President Hamid Karzai's administration.

"Afghanistan believes that making such allegations will not strengthen the alliance against terrorism and will not strengthen an Afghanistan based on the law and rules, but will have negative effects in those areas," the statement by Karzai's office said, without commenting on the substance of the reports.

"We strongly condemn such irresponsible allegations which just create doubt and defame responsible people of this country," it said.

Meanwhile, NATO issued a statement saying coalition helicopter pilots were not responsible for the deaths of three Afghan policemen killed Aug. 20 in what had been considered a friendly fire incident in Jowzjan province's Darzab district.

It said the helicopters showed up hours after fighting began and it was possible the three had been killed earlier.

All Afghan forces had also been ordered to remain inside compounds at the time the two helicopters fired a missile and 80 30-millimeter rounds at an insurgent firing position, NATO said.

al gore bill clinton newt gingrich sarah palin al sharpton

On The National Mall, Divisions Kept In Check

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., became a crossroads of American politics Saturday. Two rallies represented two very different ideas of what this country is and should be. Tens of thousands of conservatives gathered to honor the military and Christian values, while a much smaller group demonstrated in honor of the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington.

Fox News personality Glenn Beck has brought together small-government Tea Party activists and traditionalist social conservatives with this message: "We simply must remember who we were, who we've been, who we can be — not what we've allowed ourselves to become."

And though Beck insisted the event he hosted at the Lincoln Memorial was not about politics, he enlisted the support of a pretty popular Republican: Sarah Palin.

"May this day be the change point!" she told the roaring crowd. "Look around you, you're no t alone! You are Americans!"

The crowd packed in around the reflecting pool and spilled out over half the National Mall, almost to the Washington Monument. Couples planted their folding chairs and families grabbed space under trees. As far as Washington demonstrations go, it was calm and genial, almost like a massive church picnic.

Betty Fitzgerald, who came down from Morton, Pa., wore a button on her lapel with a photo of Beck.

She said the day was not about politics, but about values.

"I guess maybe just to be a better person, and be good to your friends and neighbors ... and ... that kind of stuff always chokes me up a little," she said.

Fitzgerald and others said those values do inform their politics. And there were quite a few Tea Party activists in the crowd.

Joe Alek made the trek from Cinnaminson, N.J., wit h this message for elected officials: "You know, so we're not going t o buy the lies anymore. Every politician wants us to buy in to them so that they stay in power. That's going to stop."

They're going to have to stand for something, he said, and keep to the Constitution.

"And when they don't follow that, they're out," he said. "Republicans and Democrats — don't matter."

hillary clinton george w bush nancy pelosi harry reid john mccain