Archive for 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan officials say four gunmen, including a suicide bomber, attacked an army recruitment center in northern Afghanistan, killing at least five members of the security forces members

Gunshots could still be heard coming from the site hours later early Sunday.

The attackers stormed the recruitment center in Kunduz province at daybreak and at least one of them was able to detonate his explosives, said Hamdullah Danishi, the province’s deputy governor. The blast shattered windows in nearby homes.

The dead included three Afghan soldiers and two police officers, Danishi said.

He says three of the attackers were killed in the initial assault but one was still alive and fighting with government forces inside the center at 9 a.m. local time .

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WASHINGTON — At two in the morning on Sept. 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s protective detail returned to their compound drunk, with a prostitute in tow. Less than a week later, three of these same guards got drunk again, this time in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.

“They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious,” according to an internal company report of the incident, which noted that Afghanistan’s deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also in the lounge. “Complaints were made regarding the situation.” DynCorp fired the three guards.

Such episodes represent the headaches that U.S. contractors can cause in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are indispensable to the State Department’s mission overseas, handling security, transportation, construction, food service and more. But when hired hands behave badly — or break the law — they cast a cloud over the American presence.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad State Department security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va.; Triple Canopy of Reston, Va.; and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide — Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.

Most of the infractions, which include excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct and mishandling weapons, were violations of corporate and U.S. policies that probably went unnoticed by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis. But other offenses played out in public, undermining U.S. efforts in both countries and raising questions about how carefully job candidates are screened.

Despite complaints from foreign capitals about reckless behavior and heavy-handed tactics, U.S. contractors are more important than ever. In Iraq, the departure of U.S. combat forces has left a security and logistics support vacuum to be filled by the private sector.

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Taliban militants on Sunday launched their first major attack in Kabul for seven months, killing five Afghan army officers and casting fresh doubt on a largely upbeat assessment of the war published by the Obama administration last week.

Insurgents opened fire on a bus carrying the officers on the main road from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad, in the first fatal attack in the Afghan capital since May, when six foreign troops were killed by a large suicide car bomb.

In another sign of the challenges facing Nato-led forces, the death toll in 2010 for foreign troops reached 700 over the weekend when a soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in the south of the country. This year’s toll surpasses the 521 foreign troops killed in 2009.

The Taliban admitted it had carried out Sunday’s attack in Kabul, bringing to an end a period of relative calm as insurgent leaders had opened tentative talks with the government of President Hamid Karzai.

One attacker blew himself up and the other was shot by police before he could detonate his explosives, according to General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, Defense Ministry spokesman.

At the same time, militants stormed an army recruitment centre in the northern city of Kunduz. Two attackers detonated their suicide vests and killed five security officers, according to a statement released by the Afghan Defence Ministry.

On Thursday, Barack Obama, the US president, discussed a review of progress in the war 12 months after he had ordered 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. He said the US was “on track to achieve our goals” and to start withdrawing troops next year.

Although he added that gains made against the Taliban were “fragile and reversible” his upbeat assessment has been criticised by aid agencies and analysts who say it fails to reflect the level of insurgent strength and local hostility to the Kabul government across the country.

Haroon Mir, head of the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy, said the latest round of attacks undermined the optimism of last week’s review, and suggested it was far too early to say the surge was working.

“The attacks show that they are still capable of disrupting life in Kabul,” he said. “There will be sleeper cells here and their capacity to cause damage remains.”