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Story of American Diplomat's Death in Afghanistan Changes (+video)

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Photo Credit: The U.S. Army

State Department employee Anne Smedinghoff was killed in Afghanistan last weekend. At first reports suggested the young diplomat was part of an armed convoy that was bombed, but new reports say that she was actually on foot. And that the group she was with got lost on its way to deliver books.

ABC reported earlier in the week:

Afghan security officials told ABC News that the State Department convoy had just left its headquarters in Qalat and joined the convoy of the local provincial governor who was also headed to the school book giveaway.

That’s when two suicide attackers attacked the convoy. The security officials said there was an initial car bomb detonated by a remote device. Then a suicide bomber wearing a suicide vest appeared and caused more casualties.

Afghan sources say the school event had been announced a day in advance, which possibly allowed attackers enough time to plan the attack.

And here’s CBS’s report:

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Afghan Car Bomb Kills Six Americans Including Secr. of State John Kerry's Aide

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Photo Credit: Rich Anderson

A car bomb blast killed five Americans, including three U.S. soldiers and a young diplomat, on Saturday, while an American civilian died in a separate attack in the east.

The diplomat and other Americans were in a convoy of vehicles in Zabul province when the blast occurred, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

The soldiers and the diplomat died in the blast along with a civilian employee of the Defense Department and Afghan civilians, Kerry said. His statement gave no overall death toll.

The Washington Post identified the diplomat as Anne Smedinghoff, 25, citing her parents. Smedinghoff was Kerry’s embassy guide and aide when he visited Afghanistan last month, the paper said.

Local and international officials in the region said earlier that six people died in the blast: three U.S. soldiers, two U.S. civilians and an Afghan doctor. Provincial governor Mohammad Ashraf Nasery was in the convoy, but was unharmed, local and NATO officials said.

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US Still Making Payments To Relatives Of Civil War Veterans, Analysis Finds

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Photo Credit: AP

If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war’s long-lasting financial toll. “When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about the cost,” said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII-veteran father’s disability benefits helped feed their family.

Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack Obama’s deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need the money they are receiving.

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Even In Afghanistan, A Focus On Budget Battles Of Washington

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Photo Credit: Secretary of Defense

The new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, arrived at this rugged security outpost situated along a ratline of insurgent infiltration from Pakistan to talk to American troops about the war.

Instead, the soldiers wanted to hear only about the budget battle back in Washington – in particular, how steep reductions in spending for the Pentagon would affect their careers, their salaries and their health care benefits, and their eventual retirements. Perhaps that could be viewed as a positive sign of the status of combat operations in Afghanistan.

As Afghan forces take the lead in securing their own country, members of the 101st Airborne Division’s First Brigade Combat Team were not so concerned about the quality of their body armor, or the details of counterinsurgency tactics, or whether there was a slackening of support for the war back home. Those are the sorts of things that usually come up when a defense secretary convenes a town-hall-style meeting with troops in the combat zone.

In his opening remarks delivered this weekend at the forward operating base, located in Jalalabad, a strategic crossroads in eastern Nangarhar Province, Mr. Hagel discussed the war effort, of course, and thanked the troops for their service to the nation. And he pledged to always keep at the forefront the needs of America’s service personnel and their families.

Then he opened up the dialogue to questions. Not a single one was about the war effort.

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Afghan President Alleges US Conspiracy with Taliban to Keep International Forces in Afghanistan

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Photo Credit: AP

A series of security problems and fractured relations with Afghan leaders plagued Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s first trip here as Pentagon chief, including the Afghan president’s accusations that the U.S. and the Taliban are working in concert to show that violence in the country will worsen if most coalition troops leave.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford, quickly rejected the charges President Hamid Karzai made Sunday as “categorically false.” But the accusations were just the latest in a series of disputes that have frayed relations between the two nations as the U.S. works to wind down the war and turn the country’s security over to the Afghans.

Speaking to reporters shortly after Karzai made the comments, Dunford said the Afghan leader has never expressed such views to him but said it was understandable that tensions would arise as the coalition balances the need to complete its mission with the Afghans’ move to exercise more sovereignty.

“We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the past 12 years, we have done too much to help the Afghan security forces grow over the last 12 years to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage,” said Dunford.

Dunford’s comments came, however, soon after U.S. officials cancelled a news conference with Hagel and Karzai because of a security threat – just a day after a suicide bomber on a bicycle struck outside the Afghan Defense Ministry, killing nine Afghan civilians and wounding 14 others. Hagel heard the explosion from the safe location where he was meeting with Afghan officials but was never in danger.

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Afghan Leader Accuses US, Taliban of Collusion

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KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused the Taliban and the U.S. of working in concert to convince Afghans that violence will worsen if most foreign troops leave as planned by the end of next year.

Karzai said two suicide bombings that killed 19 people on Saturday — one outside the Afghan Defense Ministry and the other near a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province — show the insurgent group is conducting attacks to help show that international forces will still be needed to keep the peace after their current combat mission ends in 2014.

“The explosions in Kabul and Khost yesterday showed that they are at the service of America and at the service of this phrase: 2014. They are trying to frighten us into thinking that if the foreigners are not in Afghanistan, we would be facing these sorts of incidents,” he said during a nationally televised speech about the state of Afghan women.

There was no immediate response from the U.S.-led military coalition, which is gradually handing over responsibility for securing the country to Afghan forces.

Karzai is known for making incendiary comments in his public speeches, a move that is often attributed to him trying to appeal to those who sympathize with the Taliban or as a way to gain leverage when he feels his international allies are ignoring his country’s sovereignty. In previous speeches he has threatened to join the Taliban and called his NATO allies occupiers who want to plunder Afghanistan’s resources.

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‘Appalling’ Waste And Abuse In Iraq Reconstruction

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Photo Credit: Republican Party of Shelby CountyAn “appalling” report on the misuse of U.S. reconstruction funding for Iraq shows the need for a “top-to-bottom” review of the State Department and its aid agency, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Wednesday.

“The extent of waste and abuse in the $60 billion of Iraq reconstruction funds coupled with the instability still evident in Iraq is appalling and highlights real failures of planning and execution that must be corrected to make U.S. foreign assistance a more effective tool for advancing the national interests of our country,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said. “At the same time, this final Iraq reconstruction report also highlights some approaches that worked and could be applied to future reconstruction efforts, especially the billions of dollars in remaining reconstruction funds for Afghanistan.”

“Going forward, I am committed to working with the State Department, USAID, and the administration, to provide the kind of accountability and oversight the American people deserve. We owe this not only to the American taxpayers, but also to the men and women – civilian and uniformed – that we send into dangerous and challenging environments to secure the area and implement U.S. programs.”

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Al Qaeda Finds New Stronghold In Rugged Mountains Of Mali As It Regroups In Africa

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Photo Credit: APAl Qaeda has established a vast mountain stronghold in Mali’s lawless north, launching attacks and then melting into the rugged hills, which they vow will become an Afghanistan-style quagmire for North African governments and Western militaries, according to experts.

Like Tora Bora, the mountain labyrinth in Afghanistan where Al Qaeda evaded Western militaries for years under Usama bin Laden, Mali’s Tigharghar Mountain chain allows terrorists to strike within the region and then vanish when pursued, according to a new report by Stratfor, a Texas-based intelligence firm. Caves, tunnels and land mines have made the jagged mountains an impenetrable safe haven for the terrorists, who authorities say were behind last month’s attack on an Algerian gas plant and yesterday’s car bombing that killed six in Kidal, a key city in northern Mali.

The terrorist groups are believed to be behind a month-old insurgency in Mali, which the government is fending off with help from France, which seeks to protect the interests of mining and energy companies in the region. But experts believe the effort is part of a larger bid to destabilize northern Africa, where Al Qaeda is regrouping after fighting American-led Western allies for more than a decade in the Middle East. Extremists vow the mountain refuge will ultimately be worse for their enemies than the decade-long struggle in Afghanistan.

“They made the mountains’ terrain even more impassable by using land mines and improvised explosive devices and digging tunnels,” the report states. “The militants could already use the extensive network of caves in the mountains, the entrances to which are extremely difficult to spot; in fact, the only way to confirm a cave’s location is to observe militants entering and exiting the cave.”

Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Africa — Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM — has been a lurking presence for years in Mali, a country decimated by poverty and hunger. But political instability following a military coup last year has emboldened them to take over an enormous territory larger than France or Texas — and almost exactly the size of Afghanistan.

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President’s Afghan Withdrawal Based on Fraudulent Data?

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photo credit: the us armyAn officially reported downward trend in insurgent attacks that has underpinned President Obama’s decision to pull 34,000 troops from Afghanistan did not actually happen last year.

On Tuesday, the NATO command in the Afghan capital of Kabul acknowledged that a database error caused it to report a 7 percent decline in “enemy initiated attacks,” when the actual number remained the same compared to 2011.

The Pentagon highlighted the decline in the lead-up to Mr. Obama’s announcement in his State of the Union address this month that more than half of the 60,000-plus U.S. troops now in Afghanistan will return home by the end of this year.

The error means that, on a statistical basis, the war is not going as well as professed by the administration — and as most international combat troops prepare to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

In December, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta cited a downturn in violence in Afghanistan during a speech at the National Press Club. He referred to a NATO summit in Chicago last May during which the alliance approved an Obama campaign plan to hand over more duties to local Afghan troops, paving the way for a foreign troop exit.

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US Special Forces Ordered To Leave Critical Afghanistan Province

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Photo Credit: ReutersThe troops were given a fortnight to leave the strategically critical Wardak province, south west of the capital, in a move likely to trigger another confrontation with Nato commanders.

Aimal Faizi, the Afghan president’s spokesman, said the national security council ordered the expulsion after complaints that “armed groups known as special forces” were committing murder, torture and kidnap.

“The US special forces and illegal armed groups created by them are causing insecurity, instability, and harass local people,” he said. He appeared to pin the blame on Afghan fighters or militiamen recruited by and working with the Americans, but held the US forces responsible.

“These belong to the US special forces,” he said.

In one case nine people went missing after an operation and in another a young student was taken from his home and found dead two days later, with his throat cut.
The surprise announcement appeared to blindside Nato headquarters in Kabul and struck directly at troops who have long been a cornerstone of coalition strategy.

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