Legion of Angels News Archive

KABUL, Afghanistan - An insurgent attack on an eastern compound killed a U.S. soldier on Thursday, bringing the year’s death toll to 112 and making 2008 the deadliest for American forces in Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded the country in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The NATO-led force said the soldier was killed in eastern Afghanistan “when insurgents attacked a compound.” It provided no other details, but a Western military official told The Associated Press that the soldier was American.

Afghanistan was the launching pad for al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. In response, U.S. forces invaded in October 2001 and drove the Taliban out of power in a matter of weeks.

Once derided as a ragtag insurgency after the fall of their regime, Taliban fighters have transformed into a fighting force advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks. Suicide and roadside bombs have turned bigger and deadlier than ever.

The number of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants flowing into the Afghan-Pakistan theater has increased this year, bringing with them command expertise the Taliban had lacked in previous years.

Pakistan blamed
Top U.S. generals, European presidents and analysts say the blame lies to the east, in militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. As long as those areas remain havens where fighters arm, train, recruit and plot increasingly sophisticated ambushes, the Afghan war will continue to sour.

Thursday’s death brings to 112 the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan this year, surpassing last year’s record toll of 111.

Some 33,000 U.S. troops are now stationed in the country, the highest level since 2001. Overall, more than 65,000 troops from 40 nations are deployed in Afghanistan.

U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thursday remembered those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks during ceremonies at bases around the country. In Kabul, a top U.S. general said terrorism still remains a threat to the world.

Maj. Gen. Robert Cone told those gathered for a memorial ceremony at Camp Eggers that terrorists have struck in London, Russia and Bali, Indonesia since the 2001 attacks in the United States.

“These attacks are reminders that the threat of terrorism is real and still a danger to the entire world,” Cone said.

Cone’s command in Kabul trains and equips the fledgling Afghan security forces — the centerpiece of the American strategy of turning Afghanistan into a country that can defend itself and away from the days when Osama bin Laden used it as a safe haven to launch attacks in New York and Washington.

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Insurgents who squared off with U.S. soldiers in a major battle in eastern Afghanistan overran a military observation point just outside a coalition outpost, but failed to take the base, a U.S. military official told CNN.

U.S.-led coalition, Afghan and NATO officials were attempting to piece together details about the confrontation which occurred Sunday in Kunar province, a location close to the Pakistan border.

“It was heroic fighting,” said another official, NATO spokesman Mark Laity, describing the U.S.-led troop performance.

“They wanted to overrun that base,” he added, referring to the militants. “They failed.”

The fighting left nine U.S. soldiers dead and 15 wounded. It marked the most fatalities in an attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan in three years. An Afghan official estimated that 100 militants died or were wounded in the fighting.

A U.S. official told CNN that as many as 200 insurgents were involved in the strike, which NATO said occurred at an outpost in Dara-I-Pech. However, other officials could not put a figure on the number of insurgent casualties at this time.

The official said militants didn’t get into the outpost but they did overrun a small U.S.-led observation point outside the base, where it is believed most of the American and Afghan fatalities and injuries occurred.

Laity described the insurgent strike as a “major attack” by a “large group of insurgents.”

“What there was was a combat outpost had a major attack on it by a large group of insurgents. They had infiltrated a neighboring village and they fired on the base from that village and then they attacked the base itself.”

He said severe fighting followed, resulting in the American casualties and the wounding of four Afghan service members.

“They attempted to break into that base. They did make some penetration. But overall they were repelled and they took very heavy casualties themselves,” Laity said.

He indicated that the penetration or breach that media reports about the strike referred to was the attack on the observation post.

“We brought in air power to stabilize the situation in a fight that then lasted for several hours,” he said.

There have been occasional strikes on coalition bases in recent months — Laity noted that the practice “is quite common.”

“This was a larger-scale attack than normal,” he said, but added, “This was not a new tactic. They usually get defeated. We are very, very sad that we lost some people but again, their attempt to take that base failed.”

Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, an Afghan Defense Ministry official, had different initial numbers than the U.S. official. He said the attack involved 400 to 500 militants, and at least 100 were killed or injured, he said.

In June 2005, 16 U.S. troops were killed near the same province when their MH-47 helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Since the start of coalition operations in Afghanistan, 470 U.S. troops have died, including Sunday’s casualties.

The battle illustrates the escalating war in Afghanistan, where since May U.S. and coalition troop deaths have exceeded those occurring in Iraq.

Many of the attacks against NATO-led and Afghan troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan are roadside bombs, and to confront that threat, U.S. military commanders have asked the Pentagon to send hundreds of MRAP armored vehicles, designed to withstand strong explosives, as quickly as possible to U.S. troops battling the Taliban.

Defense sources said the request could include between 600 and 1,000 MRAPs — Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, many originally destined for Iraq but not needed there as much now because of the dramatic drop in violence there.

The MRAPs, which are the newest armored vehicles, have a V-shaped hull that helps deflect the blast of a roadside bomb.

The troops in the east have been quite busy and they are using all of the equipment they have on hand to conduct their fight, officials have said.

For example, when Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in the east’s Korengal Valley recently, the helicopters that dropped him off at a base immediately left to join in a firefight on the other side of the valley.

Source — CNN

WASHINGTON - The United States military has a strategic shortfall — not of bullets or ballistic missiles, but of soldiers and Marines fluent in Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, and Turkmen — the languages spoken in Afghanistan.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaida forces.

But after seven years on the ground, military leaders are still short of soldiers and Marines who can speak and understand the local lingo.

In movies about World War II, there’s often one soldier — for instance, the French-speaking Cajun from Louisiana — who could converse with French villagers in Normandy.

But in the real world of 2008, things are a bit more complicated.

How can the United States be a successful interventionist nation without an adequate supply of people fluent enough to interrogate the locals — not just in Afghanistan — but around the world?

Where will future crises erupt?
It’s not just Pashto and Dari in Afghanistan, but Javanese and Indonesian, or Kazakh, should trouble erupt in that oil-and-uranium-rich nation.

If today’s problem is the Dari deficit, what about five or ten years from now?

How can the Pentagon train soldiers and Marines to be proficient in critical languages if no one knows for certain where the crisis will be, in say, 2012?

The Defense Department might invest money in training a cadre of people in Farsi or Kazakh, only to find that it may not need them in five years, instead finding themselves short of Javanese and Indonesian speakers.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s panel on Oversight and Investigations, convened a hearing Wednesday to draw attention to this language dilemma.

Snyder said that a monetary language proficiency bonus is paid to 17,000 military service members, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that it only amounts to one percent of the Defense Department’s 1.3 million personnel.

And a significant number of the linguistically proficient, Snyder said, are senior officers involved in intelligence work — not soldiers and Marines walking into Afghan villages.

A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, Snyder said he didn’t learn Vietnamese before his tour of duty.

Language in boot camp
But he has an idea to remedy the language scarcity: make language training a required part of boot camp for new soldiers and Marines.

“In the Marine Corps, every Marine is a rifleman and a big part of boot camp is learning to shoot,” Snyder said. “That’s just ingrained in you, and you know that’s important. Discipline is important, honor is important, shooting a rifle is important. If we think this (foreign language proficiency) is important, then why not have that be from the get-go, from day one?”

But training soldiers and Marines to more than a rudimentary level of a language is a long, expensive task — even to get them to “2 plus” on the military’s zero-to-five language proficiency scale.

At the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., “they’re spending 63 weeks in Arabic, five days a week, six hours a day, these kids are amazing. Sixty-three weeks — and only a portion of them can make it,” said Richard Brecht, head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, who testified before Snyder’s committee Wednesday. “It’s real tough.”

The demands of irregular warfare
Retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich, the head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent policy research institute, said irregular warfare and counter-insurgency will demand larger numbers of U.S. foreign language speakers.

“You don’t need 100 percent of a unit to speak Pashto or Farsi — you go into an area with a platoon of 40 soldiers if a few of them speak the language you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.

Krepinevich told Snyder’s committee that he’d recently talked to one Army general who said, “Once we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re not going to do this for another 30 years. The American people won’t stand for it” — but Krepinevich doesn’t necessarily believe that.

The trends, he said, point to “a disordered world.”

The inescapable demographic reality is that a huge percentage of the population in Africa, South America, and Asia is under age 15 — “a rising number of highly frustrated people” who live in countries with incompetent or corrupt governments, Krepinevich said.

These people often resort to violence and they may live in places with an impact on U.S. trade and prosperity.

“Irregular warfare is here to stay, it is a trend, I think it is going to increase in importance,” said Krepinevich

And this won’t be the traditional waging of war — blowing up bridges or dropping bombs on enemy troop concentrations — but policing, training, and patrolling.

It is possible to imagine a scenario in the next several years in which domestic political pressure in the United States builds for military intervention to stop mass killings in a particular place, such as Darfur.

The defense secretary might turn to the president and say, “We just don’t have sufficient number of people fluent in the local languages to be able conduct long-term stability operations.” For the non-interventionists in the United States, this might sound like good news.

With the U.S. military already over-stretched, irregular warfare will require choices. “We’re probably not going to place a high priority on being able to deploy in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Krepinevich. “There are places in the world where you say if this country fails, it is going to have a major effect on U.S. security or economic well being.”

Case in point: Nigeria, from which the United States imports more than 400,000 barrels of high-quality crude oil every year, nearly as much as it imports from Saudi Arabia. “You say, ‘That’s one area we’re going to have a hard time turning our back on,’” Krepinevich said.

Brecht told the committee that the language deficit can not be remedied only by training of those already in uniform.

In the long run, recruitment of foreign speakers depends on vastly improved language education starting in the nation’s primary schools, he pointed out.

Shortage of Chinese speakers
The military language deficit is part of a larger national shortfall. There are, for instance, few U.S. elected officials who speak Chinese.

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is one of the only prominent American politicians fluent in Chinese. Huntsman worked as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan in the late 1970s and served as a trade official and ambassador to Singapore in the 1990s. On a trade mission to China last year he gave speeches in Chinese.

Relative to the size of state population, Utah has the highest number of students studying foreign languages of any state.

“German and French are great, but they’re a bit of an anachronism,” Huntsman said on a recent visit to Washington. “So we’ve done a bit of fortifying of the languages available in our schools. We struck up a relationship with Chinese Ministry of Education through the embassy here. We now have teachers from China dropped into some of our high schools who teach Chinese.”

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday it has been a “tough month” in Afghanistan, where more U.S. and NATO troops died during the past two months than in Iraq. He said he was weighing whether to send more troops.

The president told a Rose Garden news conference that one reason for the rising deaths “is that our troops are taking the fight to a tough enemy … of course there is going to be resistance.” It has also been a “tough month for the Taliban,” he said.

Bush also urged Americans to pressure Congress to allow more oil exploration in the United States.

Story continues below ↓advertisement

“We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country, something I’ve been advocating ever since I’ve been the president. I’ve been reminding our people that we can do so in environmentally friendly ways,” he said. “And yet the Congress, the Democratically controlled Congress now has refused to budge. It makes no sense.”

Bush spoke ahead of a trip to Japan this weekend to participate in the annual Group of Eight economic summit.

The president sought to tamp down speculation that Israel will launch a military strike against Iran before he leaves office. He said all options are on the table but said military action would not be his first choice.

‘First option’
“I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be solve this problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “And the best way to solve it diplomatically is for the United States to work with other nations to send a focused message — and that is, you will be isolated, and you will have economic hardship, if you continue to enrich.”

Iran says its nuclear program is aimed only at generating electricity and cites its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue uranium enrichment, a process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or material for a warhead.

The United Nations has demanded that Iran suspend enrichment and has imposed three rounds of similar financial sanctions on Iranian companies and individuals. The United States and European allies have been pushing Tehran to halt enrichment and offering incentives, to no avail.

In June, militants killed more U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq for the second straight month. It was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the war began.

Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates earlier this year told NATO allies that they would increase troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009 in response to the growing violence. The United States now has about 31,000 troops there — the most since the war began in October 2001 — and has been pressing allies to contribute more.

Asked whether he might send more troops before 2009, Bush said, “We’re constantly reviewing troop needs, troop levels.”

As the holiday weekend began, Bush said Congress was in part to blame for rising gas prices that have stung American consumers.

‘We can alleviate shortages’
He said lawmakers continue to block his proposals, including lifting prohibitions on offshore oil drilling. The president has also called for allowing oil drilling in a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, easing the regulatory process to expand oil refining capacity, and lifting restrictions on oil shale leasing in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

“We can alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in the United States,” Bush said. “I’ve been reminding our people that we can do so in environmentally friendly ways, but the Congress — the Democratically controlled Congress — now has refused to budge.

“It makes no sense to watch these gasoline prices rise when we know we can help affect the supply of crude oil, which should affect the supply of gasoline,” he said.

Bush even appealed to Americans to lobby their congressional representatives on the matter.

“We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home in environmentally friendly ways and they ought to be writing their Congress people about it,” Bush said.

Source — MSNBC