Seven CIA Operatives Killed in Afghanistan

Barack Obama was accused of double standards yesterday in his treatment of the CIA.

The President paid tribute to secret agents after seven of them were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said the CIA had been ‘tested as never before’ and that agents had ‘served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century’.

He lauded the victims as ‘part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens and for our way of life’.

Yet the previous day he had blasted ‘systemic failures’ in the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Christmas Day syringe bomb attack.

‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’

But CIA bosses claim they were unfairly blamed at a time the covert government agency has been stretched further than ever before in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They point to the murder of seven operatives at a remote mountain base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province as an example of how agents are putting their lives on the line at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.

The agents – including the chief of the base, a mother-of-three – were collecting information about militants when the suicide bomber struck on Wednesday.

The attack was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.

The base targetted by Wednesday’s suicide bomber was a control centre for a covert programme overseeing strikes by remote-controlled aircraft along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

‘Those who fell were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism. We owe them our deepest gratitude,’ CIA Director Leon Panetta said.

Some CIA officials are angry at being criticised by the White House after Abdulmutallab, 23, was allowed to slip through the security net and board a US-bound flight in Amsterdam despite evidence he was a terror threat.

The president complained that a warning from the former London engineering student’s father and information about an al Qaeda bomb plot involving a Nigerian were not handled properly by the intelligence networks.

But CIA officials say the data was sent to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks as a clearing house where raw data should be analysed.

Agents claim that is where the dots should have been connected to help identify Abdulmutallab as a threat.

Russia Blames U.S. Forces in Afghanistan for Heroin Rise

The head of Russia’s anti-narcotics federal agency says that British troops in Helmand Province are not doing enough to stem production of the world’s deadliest drug.

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“Sixty percent of all opiates in the world are produced in the area that the British forces are responsible for,” said Viktor Ivanov.

“There were 25 hectares of opium in 2004. Now there are 90,000. This shows you how effective they are.”

Vast swathes of borderland between Russia and Kazakhstan are prime territory for smuggling heroin from Afghanistan; road and rail are the primary methods of transit.

The drug is smuggled through Central Asia by train. Bundles are ejected for pick-up en route. Some are seized – many are not.

Twenty kilos of heroin were seized earlier this year from conductors who were smuggling it on board the train from Tajikistan to Moscow.

But such hauls are just the tip of the iceberg – only 4% or 5% of heroin coming into Russia is actually captured – a small fraction of the estimated 60 tonnes that arrive from Afghanistan each year.

St Petersburg is one of the worst affected cities in Russia.

Away from the architectural grandeur lies its darker side. Heroin is rife and support is scarce. A small bus is the only needle exchange in the entire city. Methadone substitution is banned. Both mean a big problem with HIV.

Alexsei and Zhanna are both HIV positive heroin addicts

We met Alexsei and Zhanna in their cramped top floor flat. Both are HIV positive heroin addicts. Because of her usage, one half of Zhanna’s body is paralysed. She has not left the flat for three years.

She said: “There is not a single vein left anywhere. Not in my legs, not in my feet, my thighs, stomach or my chest.

“I used to even shoot up in my forehead and my eyes. Wherever you see a bit of blue vein – you stick a needle in there.”

Younger generations are also falling victim to the drug’s ubiquity.

Outside a metro station, we spotted a boy who looks no older than eight. He and his friends are incredibly open about their drug use. They say they steal and wash cars to get enough money to inject daily.

Russia has an estimated 2.5m heroin addicts – most are under the age of 30. For a country in the midst of a deepening demographic crisis, the prospect of a lost generation is a terrifying one.

Beast of Kandahar UAV Unmasked

For the first time US Air Force has confirmed that its arsenal contains an advanced stealth aircraft called ‘Beast of Kandahar‘. The images of the unmanned drone appeared on the Internet sometime ago. Before Tuesday, the Air Force kept it covered in secrecy. It has been developed by eminent aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin and according to the US Air Force, the stealth aircraft is meant for giving surveillance support and reconnaissance to augment the ground forces.

The Drone got the name ‘Beast Of Kandahar’ after its photographs got leaked by a French magazine, Air & Cosmos, was apparently the first to publish the photo of the aircraft earlier this year. The photo quality isn’t particularly good, but even untrained eyes can recognize that the UAV isn’t a Predator, Reaper or Global Hawk, types often seen over Afghanistan and Iraq.. The photos showed the aircraft flying in the sky of southern Afghanistan. That was almost two years back. It is similar to the famous B-2 bomber in terms of looks. The state of the art stealth aircraft is the brain child of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs, a facility that is involved in implementing top secret US defense projects. Lockheed is the entity that credited with making aeronautic marvels like the F-22 fighter jet, F-117 Nighthawk and the U-2 spy plane.

The presence of the drone in a nation like Afghanistan has prompted the war experts to question USA’s intention all the more closely. As everyone knows, the militants and insurgents in that country do not have enough surveillance equipment. Some people are looking at it as an indirect way of spying on the neighboring countries of Afghanistan. The US Air force has plans to increase the number of unmanned stealth aircraft in the future, and the Beast of Kandahar is a prime example of that intention.

How the U.S. Pays the Enemy

How the U.S. Funds the Taliban:

The U.S. government is funding the very forces its troops are fighting — funds that add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban.

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

… Continue Reading

Lost Army Dog Found 14mos Later in Afghanistan

A sniffer dog that went missing in action after a battle in Afghanistan has been found safe and well after more than a year in the desert.

Sabi the black Labrador was with a joint Australian-Afghan army patrol when it was ambushed by Taliban militants in September 2008.

Nine soldiers were wounded in the ensuing gun battle, which earned one Australian SAS trooper the country’s highest bravery award.

But there was no sign of the bomb-sniffing dog after the battle in a remote area of Uruzgan province.

Sabi’s handlers spent months scouring the desert looking for the four-year-old animal, but to no avail.

Having a ball: Sarbi at Forward Operating Base Ripley in Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, after her amazing return

Special Forces Explosive Detection Dog Sarbi with her favourite ball

Happy to be home: Sabi was probably looked after by an Afghan

Last week – 14 months after she disappeared – a U.S. serviceman spotted a dog with an Afghan man at an isolated patrol base in another part of Uruzgan.

The Afghan handed Sabi over and the American quickly realised she must be a military-trained animal.

Within days, the Labrador was returned to her unit – no worse for wear.

Mark Donaldson, the SAS trooper awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing a wounded interpreter during the battle, said: ‘Sabi’s the last piece of the puzzle.

‘Having Sabi back gives some closure for the handler and the rest of us that served with her in 2008. It’s a fantastic morale-booster for the guys.’

The dog’s unnamed handler told of the moment he was reunited with Sabi. He said: ‘I nudged a tennis ball to her with my foot and she took it straight away.

‘It’s a game we used to play over and over during her training. It’s amazing, just incredible, to have her back.’

Hero’s welcome: Sabi is greeted by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US commander General Stanley McChrystal

The dog was returned to the Australians’ base just in time for a visit by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was photographed along with the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, petting Sabi.

‘Sabi is back home in one piece and is a genuinely nice pooch as well,’ Rudd told reporters.

The canine star appeared composed and relaxed, showing no signs of stress – she even welcomed strangers with a sniff and a lick.

Exactly where Sabi has been or what happened to her during the past 14 months will probably never be known, though her good condition when she was found indicated somebody had been looking after her, military spokesman Brig. Brian Dawson said.

The dog was being tested for diseases before a decision was made on whether she can return to Australia.

More than 1,500 Australian troops are in Afghanistan and most are involved in training Afghan security forces. Among them are units that use dogs to sniff out roadside bombs and other explosive booby traps.

Come on then, throw the ball: Sabri will be returned to Australia after having her health checked out