Taliban attacks might signal new strategy

Campaign targets NATO forces, diplomats, contractors and Afghan officials



An Afghan policeman stops a three-wheeler near the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, Wednesday. Insurgents launched a brazen pre-dawn assault Wednesday against the giant U.S.-run Bagram Air Field, killing an American contractor and wounding nine service members in the second Taliban strike at NATO forces in and around the capital in as many days.

By ANNE GEARAN

updated 8:15 p.m. CT, Wed., May 19, 2010

WASHINGTON - Brazen Taliban attacks in and around Afghanistan's capital Kabul this week demonstrate the power of the insurgency to strike directly at foreign forces on Afghan soil.

A sobered U.S. military is studying whether these Taliban efforts to reach outside their rural home base are part of a new campaign to target NATO forces, foreign diplomats, contractors and Afghan government officials.

The attacks come as the number of U.S. military deaths approach the 1,000 mark, and at a time when Americans are looking for progress in a long and costly war.

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Karzai Like a Fox

Michael Hirsh

Hamid Karzai, who is on his umpteenth visit to Washington, is a royal pain who has made no secret of his growing anti-Americanism, to the point of threatening to join the Taliban. President Karzai may also be, for that reason, the most critical asset Barack Obama now has in Afghanistan—and the main ticket home for thousands of American troops there.

Despite attempts to smear him as crazy or unstable or drug-addled—by controversial ex-diplomat Peter Galbraith, among others—most senior U.S. and British officials who have worked closely with Karzai say he is acting as normally as anyone could expect from someone who is regularly accused of being an American stooge by the Islamist insurgents in his country. Not to mention someone who has heard his sanity and reliability regularly questioned in leaked U.S. memos and press accounts over the last year. Among his defenders: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who told me in a late April interview that both she and Sen. John Kerry have "spent a lot of time talking to President Karzai about why elections oftentimes aren't fair," drawing "on our own personal experience.") Another champion of Karzai is NATO civilian envoy Mark Sedwill, who told me and other reporters recently that the Afghan leader is doing the best he can with the meager cards he's been dealt and who suggests, piquantly, that a better question might be whether Karzai sees the Western allies as reliable.

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Obama orders unified U.S. message on Karzai’s legitimacy

By Scott Wilson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran

updated 9:07 p.m. CT, Sat., May 8, 2010

 

WASHINGTON - President Obama has bluntly instructed his national security team to treat Afghan President Hamid Karzai with more public respect, after a recent round of heavy-handed statements by U.S. officials and other setbacks infuriated the Afghan leader and called into question his relationship with Washington. 

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