After Bin Laden, U.S. Reassesses Afghan Strategy

Two influential senators — John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana — suggested Tuesday that it was time to rethink the Afghanistan war effort, forecasting the beginning of what promises to be a fierce debate about how quickly the United States should begin pulling troops out of the country.

“We should be working toward the smallest footprint necessary, a presence that puts Afghans in charge and presses them to step up to that task,” Mr. Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a hearing. “Make no mistake, it is fundamentally unsustainable to continue spending $10 billion a month on a massive military operation with no end in sight.”

Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lugar, the committee’s senior Republican, said they remained opposed to a precipitous withdrawal.

Still, “the broad scope of our activities suggests that we are trying to remake the economic, political and security culture of Afghanistan — but that ambitious goal is beyond our power,” Mr. Lugar said. “A reassessment of our Afghanistan policy on the basis of whether our overall geostrategic interests are being served by spending roughly $10 billion a month in that country was needed before our troops took out Bin Laden.”

Inside the Pentagon, however, officials make the case that rather than using Bin Laden’s death as a justification for withdrawal, the United States should continue the current strategy in Afghanistan to secure additional gains and to further pressure the Taliban to come to the bargaining table for negotiations on political reconciliation.

And in Congress, a debate is getting under way over the underlying authority used by two successive administrations to wage the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorist organizations and their supporters.

The House Armed Services Committee is expected to take up a defense authorization bill on Wednesday that includes a new authorization for the government to use military force in the war on terrorism. The provision has set off an argument over whether it is a mere update — or a sweeping, open-ended expansion — of the power Congress granted to the executive branch in 2001.

The new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda was unveiled by the committee chairman, Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California. The committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday on amendments to the bill.

The provision states that Congress “affirms” that “the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces,” and that the president is authorized to use military force — including detention without trial — of members and substantial supporters of those forces.

That language, which would codify into federal law a definition of the enemy that the Obama administration has adopted in defending against lawsuits filed by Guantánamo Bay detainees, would supplant the existing military force authorization that Congress passed overwhelmingly on Sept. 14, 2001. It instead named the enemy as the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Critics of Mr. McKeon’s provision have reacted with alarm to what they see as an effort to entrench in a federal statute unambiguous authority for the executive branch to wage war against terrorists who are deemed associates of Al Qaeda but who lack a clear tie to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a joint letter to Congress, about two dozen groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — contended that the proposal amounted to an open-ended grant of authority to the executive branch, legitimizing an unending war from Yemen to Somalia and beyond.

“This monumental legislation — with a large-scale and practically irrevocable delegation of war power from Congress to the president — could commit the United States to a worldwide war without clear enemies, without any geographical boundaries” and “without any boundary relating to time or specific objective to be achieved,” the letter warned.

 

Murky Identities and Ties Hinder NATO’s Hunt for Afghan Insurgents, Report Says

A report by the Afghan Analysts Network challenges the accuracy of American intelligence used in what are known as targeted killings, and makes a case study of the killing of an alleged Qaeda-affiliated operative in Takhar Province who was attacked by NATO jets as he traveled in a convoy through a rural area. The report offers evidence that NATO forces got the wrong man and that the insurgent commander they were seeking is alive in Pakistan — an interview with him is included in the report.

However, NATO officials stand by their account and the intelligence it was based on, and insist that they got the man they were seeking, Mohammed Amin.

“In this instance, multiple forms of intelligence confirm that coalition forces targeted the correct person after tracking his activities for nearly six months,” said Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a NATO spokesman. Colonel Dorrian said the evidence included confirmation from a family member and “additional intelligence” showing that Mr. Amin had operated as a so-called shadow governor in Takhar on behalf of Taliban insurgents.

The other report, by Human Rights First, examines the growing number of detainees and the legal rights accorded them at the detention facility in Parwan, which replaced the detention area at Bagram air base. As of April 23, the Parwan facility housed 1,750 detainees, according to Cmdr. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for the American military’s detention operations here.

The report notes a number of improvements in detention operations, but emphasizes that many detainees insist they were taken into custody based on false intelligence and that they take that view back to their villages when released. Detainees remain unable to see much of the evidence used to apprehend them or hold them for unlimited periods of time.

“In the view of their families and communities, the United States is arbitrarily detaining people based on false intelligence,” the reports says.

Underpinning both reports is the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about whether people are who they say. It is a problem faced by foreigners working here, whether as diplomats, aid workers, journalists or human rights workers. The United States government and other countries’ governments have repeatedly entered into contracts with corrupt people and paid off rights abusers thinking they were legitimate actors.

“We need to be careful,” said Nadir Nadiry, the deputy director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “Sometimes I’ve gone face to face with NATO because we talked to the families and it seems clear that people had been wrongly killed or detained, and then it was countered by information that shows I was na?ve,” he said.

There have been substantial improvements, but NATO still makes mistakes, he said. “Our findings show that in the last year, it has been much more precise in terms of what the community and people are telling us,” Mr. Nadiry said. “Most of the time, they hit the right target, but yes, sometimes it goes wrong.”

The incident recounted in the Afghan Analysts report occurred on Sept. 2. NATO jets bombed a convoy carrying the man who was alleged to be working with the Taliban in Takhar Province.

The bombs killed him and killed or wounded 8 to 12 others, believed to be insurgents, according to a NATO statement at the time.

Within hours it became clear that at least one person in the convoy was a candidate for Parliament, who was wounded. He insisted that the other people in the convoy were campaign workers accompanying him to three village rallies. NATO’s target was his uncle, who was helping to support his campaign, he said. The government of President Hamid Karzai and the local provincial government said much the same.

The report by Afghan Analysts traces the uncle’s life, in which he fought at various times on different sides and was captured and tortured by different groups. But in the period shortly before his death, he was living peacefully in Kabul. According to the report, a Taliban leader active in Takhar, whom the man knew, used his name as an alias, adding a further layer of confusion and leaving the overall sense that a number of players have such shifting allegiances and identities that it may be nearly impossible to make accurate