The killing of Baitullah Mahsud in a U.S. drone strike will weaken the militant group and throw it into disarray,expertssay ByRodriguez /U.S. & so so

A Majeed / AFP/Getty Images
An undated photo from 2004 shows Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mahsud, right, escorted by his guard as he arrives for a meeting in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

The killing of Baitullah Mahsud in a U.S. drone strike will weaken the militant group and throw it into disarray, experts say.
By Alex Rodriguez
August 8, 2009
Reporting from Lahore, Pakistan -- The American missile strike that killed Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mahsud, Pakistan's most wanted militant and a staunch Al Qaeda ally, dealt a devastating broadside to extremists and handed the United States a major victory in its bid to help stabilize the volatile nuclear state.

Mahsud's death, confirmed Friday by top Pakistani officials as well as the Taliban, creates a vacuum within the command structure of the militant organization and gives the Pakistani military a rare opportunity to weaken the group, former top Pakistani security and intelligence officials said.
"The loss for the Taliban is tremendous. He was their center of gravity," said former Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao. "His loss means there will be confusion and total demoralization within their ranks. This is a window of opportunity that Pakistan has to take advantage of."

Mahsud, believed to be 35, was killed in a missile strike by an unmanned U.S. aircraft early Wednesday, Pakistani officials said. One of Mahsud's two wives was also killed in the attack, which struck the home of Mahsud's father-in-law in South Waziristan, a volatile tribal area of Pakistan along the Afghan border that the Taliban has used as a base for years.

Mahsud's wife was killed first, by a missile that struck the house, Pakistan's Express News channel reported. When Mahsud tried to escape in his car, a second missile struck and killed him, the Pakistani channel reported.
A source close to Mahsud's father-in-law said seven of the family's bodyguards and at least 26 other people also were killed. The source's claim could not be confirmed.

Immediately after the strike, Taliban leaders denied that Mahsud, the suspected mastermind of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, was among the dead.

On Friday, however, a top Mahsud aide confirmed his death.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also confirmed the death. "According to my sources, the news is correct," Qureshi said. "He has been taken out."



No. 1 target

Pakistani military and government leaders had regarded Mahsud as Public Enemy No. 1, a clever, ruthless opponent responsible for engineering suicide bomb attacks and ambushes that killed more than 1,200 people in recent years. He had as many as 20,000 fighters under his command and provided haven to Al Qaeda militants who fled after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

For weeks, the Pakistani military had been preparing for an offensive in South Waziristan aimed at eliminating Mahsud and his Taliban fighters. Rather than sending in ground troops, as they did against Taliban militants in the Swat Valley, military commanders have been blockading Mahsud's supply routes in and out of South Waziristan while using fighter jet bombing raids to strike the group's hide-outs.

In the end, though, Mahsud's death was the result of an attack from a U.S. drone, a weapon that has been a major source of friction between Washington and Islamabad. Pakistani leaders have condemned U.S. drone attacks in the country's tribal areas, saying they violate Pakistan's sovereignty and result in large numbers of civilian casualties.

The U.S. has increased its reliance on such attacks in North and South Waziristan in recent weeks. That escalation coincides with heightened cooperation between Islamabad and Washington, particularly over Pakistan's military operations against the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan. The U.S. also is sharing with Pakistan intelligence collected by drone flights over militant targets in Pakistani territory.

Mahsud's death gives a significant boost to the Pakistani military's efforts to rein in the Taliban, which it has failed to do despite several offensives in the country's volatile northwest over several years. Its most recent attempt to crush the Taliban in the Swat Valley has been lauded by Pakistani leaders as a resounding success, but most of the Taliban leadership in Swat remains at large.

With Mahsud gone, the Taliban in Waziristan probably will be in disarray as jockeying for leadership begins, experts said. Mahsud's death gives Pakistan a chance to exploit that vulnerability, analysts said, by keeping up military pressure on the Taliban while also beginning talks with militants willing to lay down their arms.

"It's an opportunity for the state of Pakistan to wrest the initiative from the Taliban," said Masood Sharif Khattak, a former top Pakistani intelligence official. "There must be a lot of people wanting to get out of all this. This is an opportunity to work on that, to give those people who want to give up that chance to do so."



Successor unclear

Several names have surfaced as potential successors to Mahsud, including Mahsud aide Wali ur-Rehman and Hakimullah Mahsud, a Taliban leader based in the tribal area's Orakzai region. He is not believed to be related to Baitullah Mahsud.

"There are Mahsud subordinates, people like Hakimullah Mahsud, who could succeed him," said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. "As a rule, these commanders are harsh characters who have supervised suicide operations, kidnappings and other crimes.


"The real challenge for any of them would be to hold together the network of tribal groups that Baitullah Mahsud assembled," the official said. "It's not monolithic. There are serious personal and economic rivalries."

None of the candidates are likely to attain the stature that Mahsud had any time soon, experts said. And the process of selecting a new leader could exacerbate those rivalries, they said.
"As they begin choosing another leader, there will be factions forming that would definitely impact the Taliban's ability to continue fighting," said Sherpao, the former interior minister. "This is the time to win over tribal groups and people who were with Mahsud."

Washington has criticized the Pakistani government for entering into peace deals with Taliban groups.

A truce with Swat Taliban leader Maulana Qazi Fazlullah fell apart this year when Taliban militants reneged on their promise to lay down arms and instead expanded their reach to within 60 miles of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.
Cease-fires negotiated with Mahsud in 2005 and early 2008 fell apart, and afterward Mahsud's fighters resumed their attacks. The truce in 2005 gave Mahsud time to consolidate and build up rank-and-file fighters.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Friday that Pakistan would press on with its military offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan.

"It is a targeted law enforcement action against Baitullah Mahsud's group," Malik said, "and it will continue until his group is eliminated forever."

Experts described Mahsud as a clever, careful tactician who deftly chose the time to strike and the time to lie low. Born in the Bannu district of North-West Frontier Province, Mahsud was schooled in a Pakistani madrasa and later fought alongside Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan during the 1990s.



Suicide attacks

In December 2007, he was chosen as the leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban, a coalition of pro-Taliban groups that menaced Pakistani society with suicide bombings and other attacks.

At a rare news conference last year in South Waziristan, Mahsud talked of the rationale for relying on suicide attacks to inflict terror.

"America is bombing us and we are facing cruelty, so we will support these suicide attacks," the Taliban leader said. Suicide bombings "are our atomic weapons. Although the infidels have atomic weapons, our atomic weapons are the finest in the world."

On the streets of Peshawar, a city of nearly 3 million bordering Pakistan's tribal areas, news of Mahsud's death was greeted with relief by many. Peshawar was hit with a string of suicide bombings this year as Pakistani troops waged their offensives in Swat and South Waziristan.

"He was very lethal," said shopkeeper Sarwar Khan. "He earned a bad name for our country and for Muslims. Such people should be eliminated."

alex.rodriguez

Times staff writer Greg Miller in Washington and special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar contributed to this report.

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U.S. military works to foil Afghan bombers
A special task force to counter IEDs -- improvised explosives -- is turning its focus on Afghanistan, where militants have been increasingly making bombs.
ByAlexandraZavis
August 8, 2009

Roadside bombs in Afghanistan are more likely to injure and kill U.S.-led forces than the ones planted in Iraq, even though the weapons manufactured by Afghan insurgents are morerudimentary,militaryfiguresshow.

This is in part because they are so easy to make and difficult to detect, senior U.S. officers say. Afghan insurgents also use the devices to stage complicated ambushes involving teams of bombers and gunmen.

Related Content
• 5 U.S. troops killed as Afghan violence swells
• New NATO chief makes surprise trip to Afghanistan
• Afghanistan ride-a-long with Gen. Stanley McChrystal
A military task force dedicated to countering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, calculates that a casualty results from more than one in four bombs that troops encounter in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where the ratio was once 1 to 1, about six bombs are detonated or cleared per casualty.

Homemade bombs have not traditionally been a favored weapon in Afghanistan, say members of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization. Schooled in the Cold War-era guerrilla war against the country's former Soviet occupiers, Afghan militants typically ambushed their adversaries with grenade launchers and AK-47 assault rifles, or fired rockets and mortar rounds from a distance.

But faced with a growing U.S. and NATO force, the militants appear to be taking a leaf from the Iraqi insurgent handbook, using bombs at least as often as any other type of weapon, members say.

The bomb force recorded 3,594 devices used in Afghanistan in 2008, more than twice the number in 2007. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, who commands the force, predicts a 50% to 60% increase this year as thousands of additional troops ordered into Afghanistan by President Obama push into areas that have long been under Taliban control.

"I believe we can do what we did in Iraq, and we can start beating the problem," Metz said. "But I don't think it's going to occur before March '10."

Metz spoke to The Times on the sidelines of a recent conference in Huntington Beach that was aimed at enlisting the help of private firms, research labs and academics in developing new technology and tactics to protect against the bombs.

At least 154 U.S. and allied service members have been killed in bombings this year in Afghanistan -- four of them in a single explosion Thursday -- compared with 34 in Iraq, according to the independent website icasualties.org. Roadside, suicide and other kinds of bombings are also the leading cause of civilian war deaths in Afghanistan, killing at least 725 people last year, according to a United Nations report.

The United States already has poured billionsof dollars into the effort in Iraq, where the number of bomb attacks against American-led forces peaked at more than 2,500 a month in the summer of 2007.

Last year, there were 9,036 incidents, according to the military's anti-bomb task force. Most of the attacks have been directed against Iraqi security forces and civilians since U.S. forces pulled out of cities at the end of June, military officials said.

"Iraq is an industrial society with an educated and predominantly urban population," Metz said in e-mailed comments after the conference. "Consequently, the IEDs encountered in Iraq are relatively sophisticated, with a wide variety of switches and technologies employed."

Among the most lethal are so-called explosively formed penetrators, which can pierce the armor of a tank. U.S. commanders accuse Iran, Iraq's neighbor, of supplying Iraqi militants with the devices, charges that Tehran denies. But Metz said he has not seen evidence of the devices being exported to Afghanistan, on Iran's eastern border, on a large scale.

Because most Iraqi roadways are paved, Metz said, insurgents would hide bombs in culverts and trash piles on the side of the road, then use cellphones, hand-held radios or even garage-door openers to set off the devices when crowds gathered or a convoy rumbled by. To prevent the bombs from detonating, U.S. researchers developed tools to jam the signals emitted by radio devices.

"We did really develop very good jammers," Metz said at the conference. "We were able to push the enemy significantly away from radio devices. The problem was that, instead of more sophisticated, he went less sophisticated."

Afghanistan is a vast, largely rural country with a population less educated than Iraq's. Instead of radio initiators, Afghan bombers usually use command wires or crude pressure plates, which can be fashioned from two saw blades, some duct tape and scrap wire, Metz said.

The bombs are made from materials that are easy to find in a war zone, such as artillery shells and fertilizer. Because most roads are unpaved, militants can bury the devices in the ground and leave the wind and dust to camouflage the danger.

U.S. forces are experimenting with ground-penetrating radar to detect bombs before vehicles pass over them. But, Metz said, "there is all sorts of other clutter 18 inches under the road, and trying to develop the accuracy of the radar in order to not give you the false positives is pretty tough."

The rugged terrain also plays to the advantage of the Afghan militants, he said. Although the population is larger than Iraq's, it is scattered across a bigger country, with isolated valleys, surrounded by jagged peaks, giving bombers ample time and space to plant their devices.

Although the weapons are generally simple, "you don't need to be technologically sophisticated to be effective," said Army Col. Jeffrey Jarkowsky, who directs the anti-bomb effort in Afghanistan, known as Task Force Paladin. "The enemy is very clever about how he uses them."

A bomb that explodes under a vehicle is more likely to cause casualties than one that goes off on the side of the road, he said, especially when it is packed with large quantities of homemade explosives.

Afghan militants also use suicide bombers and other explosive devices to stage complex attacks, often as part of a more conventional ambush.

In late July, waves of gunmen and suicide bombers, some of them disguised as women, attacked a U.S. military base in Jalalabad and several Afghan compounds in Gardez. At least six Afghan security officers and eight of the insurgents were killed during hours of fighting.

Metz's organization, which was formed in 2006 with a three-year budget of $11 billion, is sending hundreds of analysts, trainers and ordinance disposal experts to Afghanistan this year. They are replicating many of the strategies developed in Iraq, such as equipping troops with jammers, ground-penetrating radar and wheeled robots to investigate suspected bombs from a safe distance.

The military also uses route clearance teams, surveillance aircraft, satellites and blimps to provide what it calls a "steady eye" over major transport routes.

But some modifications will be required in Afghanistan, officers say. The Pentagon is buying more than 2,200 lighter, more agile versions of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected truck, or MRAP, that are better suited to the rough Afghan terrain than the model developed for Iraq.

Metz said U.S. forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq detect 50% of the bombs they encounter before they explode and are using forensic methods to figure out how they were made and by whom.

Although U.S. commanders say these kinds of measures have helped reduce the threat in Iraq, they also credit a rapid buildup of U.S. and Iraqi forces, the rebellion of Sunni Muslim tribesmen against extremists in their midst and the decision of an influential Shiite cleric to stand down his militia.

Commanders say the U.S. buildup in Afghanistan, which is expected to boost the number of troops in the country to 68,000 by year's end, will give them the forces to drive the Taliban from its havens and begin reconstruction, to undercut the militants' support.

"The one sure way to defeat IEDs 100% is to defeat the insurgency," Jarkowsky said.

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The mother of Sohrab Arabi, shown in the poster at right, who was killed during Iran's postelection turmoil last month, speaks with protesters at an opposition rally at the Behesht Zahra cemetery in Tehran. This photo was obtained by the Associated Press outside Iran.
Thousands flood a Tehran cemetery on the 40th day since the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan.(Related photo)

Their defiance sets the stage for protests next week, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in.
By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim
July 31, 2009
Reporting from Tehran and Beirut -- Protesters swarmed Tehran's main cemetery and fanned out across a large swath of the capital Thursday, defying truncheons and tear gas to publicly mourn those killed during weeks of unrest, including a young woman whose death shocked people around the world.

The protests marked the 40th day since the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan was captured on video and posted on the Internet. For Shiite Muslims, the 40th day has religious importance, often an occasion for an outpouring of emotion and grief.

Thirty years ago, such commemorations helped build momentum for the Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the shah. The resilience of the thousands of protesters this time set the stage for more clashes next week, when hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be inaugurated for a second term despite allegations that he won only because of widespread fraud in the June 12 election.

The scale and reach of Thursday's protests, which also erupted in at least four other cities, appeared to catch security forces off guard. After initially bloodying some of the mourners arriving at Behesht Zahra cemetery, many of them young women dressed in black and carrying roses, officers stepped back. They mingled amicably with protesters, and in one case even accepted flowers from them.

The mourners chanted political slogans as they rode the Tehran subway from the city center to the cemetery and back. When they returned to the center, they took to the streets, first in the area of the Grand Mosala Mosque, where they had been banned from gathering.

Later, on side streets and main thoroughfares, they were occasionally attacked by baton-wielding security personnel, some on motorcycles.

But they were also cheered on by thousands of well-wishers honking car horns ferociously or hanging out the windows of apartments and buses. They clogged roadways and tunnels, holding up signs in support of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Shopkeepers handed out bottles of water to sustain the demonstrators in the heat.

"Honorable Iranians," the protesters chanted. "Today is a day of mourning."

And in a challenge to a harsh crackdown on the news media, they recorded everything and quickly flooded the Internet with amateur videos of the day's events in the capital as well as the provincial cities of Esfahan, Shiraz, Ahvaz and Rasht.

"Death to the dictator," chanted those in one long procession heading toward Agha-Soltan's grave, kicking up a storm of dust as they walked. "Neda is not dead. This government is dead."

As night fell, witnesses reported intense confrontations between demonstrators and security forces in north-central Tehran. Trash bonfires that had been created to counter the effects of tear gas belched black smoke into the sky. Residents nearby hurriedly took injured protesters into their homes to protect them from roaming bands of Basiji militiamen.

Iranian officials say 30 people have died in unrest since the election. But human rights monitors and independent observers say the number killed in the protests and subsequent crackdown is at least twice that in the capital alone.

On Wednesday, the Paris-based monitoring group Reporters Without Borders urged authorities to explain the death of journalist Alireza Eftekhari on June 15. His body was handed over to relatives on July 13. A news release said Eftekhari died from a severe beating.

Authorities have tried to quell the unrest using the coercive instruments of the state, angering even some of Ahmadinejad's conservative allies.

On Wednesday, the Tehran prosecutor's office announced the latest in a series of arrests of prominent political figures: Saeed Shariati, a member of the central committee of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the nation's primary reformist grouping.

Authorities also said they would place the first group of protesters on trial. According to a statement by the prosecutor's office, they will be charged with offenses that include having ties to terrorist organizations, invading and setting fires at military bases, destroying public property, looting, and preparing and dispatching news reports for "enemies" of the Islamic Republic.

Still, under massive domestic and international pressure, officials also have acknowledged wrongdoing by authorities. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this week ordered the Kahrizak detention center south of Tehran closed because its facilities were "substandard."

Iran's police chief, Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, said some officers "went to extremes" during the protests.

Two prominent jailed reformist politicians, Behzad Nabavi and Mostafa Tajzadeh, were allowed to phone their families from prison for the first time since they were arrested June 13.

And authorities moved Saeed Hajjarian, who was critically wounded in a 2000 assassination attempt, from prison to a detention house with medical facilities, the Mehr news agency reported.

But such steps may not be enough to appease an emboldened opposition, which is supported by a grass-roots political movement unlike any the Islamic Republic has experienced.

Former President Mohammad Khatami, speaking to a group of reformist lawmakers, called for an investigation into allegations of torture and murder.

"Crimes have been committed. Lives have been lost and immoral treatments have been meted out to our dear youths, women and men," he said. "With the supreme leader's order of closure [of Kahrizak], a fresh opportunity has come up to launch an inquiry into the tragedy and punish the perpetrators."

Among the demonstrators, spirits seemed to be rising.

"We cannot foresee any reconciliation between the two camps," said Reza, a 25-year-old at the cemetery who did not want his last name used. "So we go for collapse of the entire system in the long term."

Hamid, a 24-year-old engineering school graduate from what he described as a wealthy family, said he'd given up his previously luxurious lifestyle to devote himself to undermining the government.

"A general strike won't work now," he said. "These demonstrations are better than strikes because with a smaller number of people we . . . make them fear for tomorrow."

Parisa, a 22-year-old college student, said she had already been in so much trouble with the authorities and her college that there was no turning back.

"Whether I come to the demonstrations or not, the authorities will be keeping an eye on me forever," she said.

Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, tried to attend the mourning ceremony but were prevented by security forces, who in some cases appeared divided over whether to beat the demonstrators or guide them toward Agha-Soltan's grave. An amateur video showed mourners surrounding police officers lounging on an official vehicle, chatting amicably.

One witness estimated that 10,000 people flooded into the cemetery. Another, 30-year-old Koroush, said from a bridge that he could see thousands more were outside the grounds, unable to get in.

One person who wasn't there was Agha-Soltan's mother, Hajer Rostam Motlagh.

Many of the parents of those who have died have been warned not to publicly mourn, but she had vowed that she would attend the gathering.

Motlagh instead went to a park near her home. A photograph showed her sitting cross-legged on grass before a single candle. In an interview with BBC Persian this week, she said she didn't want people to forget her daughter, a former student of Islamic philosophy who had cultivated a passion for music and travel. And she said she had a message for the world.

"I want you, on my behalf, to thank everyone around the world, Iranians and non-Iranians, people from every country and culture, people who in their own way, their own tradition, have mourned my child," she told the interviewer. "Everyone who lit a candle for her, every musician who wrote songs for her, who wrote poems about her, I want to thank all of them."

daragahi


Mostaghim is a special correspondent.

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U.S. military works to foil Afghan bombers
A special task force to counter IEDs -- improvised explosives -- is turning its focus on Afghanistan, where militants have been increasingly making bombs.
By Alexandra Zavis
August 8, 2009
Roadside bombs in Afghanistan are more likely to injure and kill U.S.-led forces than the ones planted in Iraq, even though the weapons manufactured by Afghan insurgents are more rudimentary, military figures show.

This is in part because they are so easy to make and difficult to detect, senior U.S. officers say. Afghan insurgents also use the devices to stage complicated ambushes involving teams of bombers and gunmen.

Related Content
• 5 U.S. troops killed as Afghan violence swells
• New NATO chief makes surprise trip to Afghanistan
• Afghanistan ride-a-long with Gen. Stanley McChrystal
A military task force dedicated to countering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, calculates that a casualty results from more than one in four bombs that troops encounter in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where the ratio was once 1 to 1, about six bombs are detonated or cleared per casualty.

Homemade bombs have not traditionally been a favored weapon in Afghanistan, say members of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization. Schooled in the Cold War-era guerrilla war against the country's former Soviet occupiers, Afghan militants typically ambushed their adversaries with grenade launchers and AK-47 assault rifles, or fired rockets and mortar rounds from a distance.

But faced with a growing U.S. and NATO force, the militants appear to be taking a leaf from the Iraqi insurgent handbook, using bombs at least as often as any other type of weapon, members say.

The bomb force recorded 3,594 devices used in Afghanistan in 2008, more than twice the number in 2007. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, who commands the force, predicts a 50% to 60% increase this year as thousands of additional troops ordered into Afghanistan by President Obama push into areas that have long been under Taliban control.

"I believe we can do what we did in Iraq, and we can start beating the problem," Metz said. "But I don't think it's going to occur before March '10."

Metz spoke to The Times on the sidelines of a recent conference in Huntington Beach that was aimed at enlisting the help of private firms, research labs and academics in developing new technology and tactics to protect against the bombs.

At least 154 U.S. and allied service members have been killed in bombings this year in Afghanistan -- four of them in a single explosion Thursday -- compared with 34 in Iraq, according to the independent website icasualties.org. Roadside, suicide and other kinds of bombings are also the leading cause of civilian war deaths in Afghanistan, killing at least 725 people last year, according to a United Nations report.

The United States already has poured billionsof dollars into the effort in Iraq, where the number of bomb attacks against American-led forces peaked at more than 2,500 a month in the summer of 2007.

Last year, there were 9,036 incidents, according to the military's anti-bomb task force. Most of the attacks have been directed against Iraqi security forces and civilians since U.S. forces pulled out of cities at the end of June, military officials said.

"Iraq is an industrial society with an educated and predominantly urban population," Metz said in e-mailed comments after the conference. "Consequently, the IEDs encountered in Iraq are relatively sophisticated, with a wide variety of switches and technologies employed."

Among the most lethal are so-called explosively formed penetrators, which can pierce the armor of a tank. U.S. commanders accuse Iran, Iraq's neighbor, of supplying Iraqi militants with the devices, charges that Tehran denies. But Metz said he has not seen evidence of the devices being exported to Afghanistan, on Iran's eastern border, on a large scale.

Because most Iraqi roadways are paved, Metz said, insurgents would hide bombs in culverts and trash piles on the side of the road, then use cellphones, hand-held radios or even garage-door openers to set off the devices when crowds gathered or a convoy rumbled by. To prevent the bombs from detonating, U.S. researchers developed tools to jam the signals emitted by radio devices.

"We did really develop very good jammers," Metz said at the conference. "We were able to push the enemy significantly away from radio devices. The problem was that, instead of more sophisticated, he went less sophisticated."

Afghanistan is a vast, largely rural country with a population less educated than Iraq's. Instead of radio initiators, Afghan bombers usually use command wires or crude pressure plates, which can be fashioned from two saw blades, some duct tape and scrap wire, Metz said.

The bombs are made from materials that are easy to find in a war zone, such as artillery shells and fertilizer. Because most roads are unpaved, militants can bury the devices in the ground and leave the wind and dust to camouflage the danger.

U.S. forces are experimenting with ground-penetrating radar to detect bombs before vehicles pass over them. But, Metz said, "there is all sorts of other clutter 18 inches under the road, and trying to develop the accuracy of the radar in order to not give you the false positives is pretty tough."

The rugged terrain also plays to the advantage of the Afghan militants, he said. Although the population is larger than Iraq's, it is scattered across a bigger country, with isolated valleys, surrounded by jagged peaks, giving bombers ample time and space to plant their devices.

Although the weapons are generally simple, "you don't need to be technologically sophisticated to be effective," said Army Col. Jeffrey Jarkowsky, who directs the anti-bomb effort in Afghanistan, known as Task Force Paladin. "The enemy is very clever about how he uses them."

A bomb that explodes under a vehicle is more likely to cause casualties than one that goes off on the side of the road, he said, especially when it is packed with large quantities of homemade explosives.

Afghan militants also use suicide bombers and other explosive devices to stage complex attacks, often as part of a more conventional ambush.

In late July, waves of gunmen and suicide bombers, some of them disguised as women, attacked a U.S. military base in Jalalabad and several Afghan compounds in Gardez. At least six Afghan security officers and eight of the insurgents were killed during hours of fighting.

Metz's organization, which was formed in 2006 with a three-year budget of $11 billion, is sending hundreds of analysts, trainers and ordinance disposal experts to Afghanistan this year. They are replicating many of the strategies developed in Iraq, such as equipping troops with jammers, ground-penetrating radar and wheeled robots to investigate suspected bombs from a safe distance.

The military also uses route clearance teams, surveillance aircraft, satellites and blimps to provide what it calls a "steady eye" over major transport routes.

But some modifications will be required in Afghanistan, officers say. The Pentagon is buying more than 2,200 lighter, more agile versions of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected truck, or MRAP, that are better suited to the rough Afghan terrain than the model developed for Iraq.

Metz said U.S. forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq detect 50% of the bombs they encounter before they explode and are using forensic methods to figure out how they were made and by whom.

Although U.S. commanders say these kinds of measures have helped reduce the threat in Iraq, they also credit a rapid buildup of U.S. and Iraqi forces, the rebellion of Sunni Muslim tribesmen against extremists in their midst and the decision of an influential Shiite cleric to stand down his militia.

Commanders say the U.S. buildup in Afghanistan, which is expected to boost the number of troops in the country to 68,000 by year's end, will give them the forces to drive the Taliban from its havens and begin reconstruction, to undercut the militants' support.

"The one sure way to defeat IEDs 100% is to defeat the insurgency," Jarkowsky said.

alexandra.zavis

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Venezuela arrests activist accused of leading attack on Globovisión

The leader of the Venezuelan Popular Unity (VPN) party, Lina Ron, accused of leading an attack on the opposition TV station Globovisión, was arrested, the Latin American Herald Tribune reports.
The attack on the station was reportedly carried out by 35 people, including Ron, wearing the VPN's colors. Before the Attorney General’s office announced the order for her arrest, the head of Globovisíon blamed President Hugo Chávez for the incident, as Ron and her party are considered allies of the leader.
According to El Universo, Chávez condemned the attack, saying that it gives “oxygen to the counter-revolution.”

Other Related Headlines:
» Tear gas attack on opposition TV network draws protests (Knight Center)
•
Posted by Miriam Forero/JV at 08/05/2009 - 20:10

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Venezuela arrests activist accused of leading attack on Globovisión

The leader of the Venezuelan Popular Unity (VPN) party, Lina Ron, accused of leading an attack on the opposition TV station Globovisión, was arrested, the Latin American Herald Tribune reports.

The attack on the station was reportedly carried out by 35 people, including Ron, wearing the VPN's colors. Before the Attorney General’s office announced the order for her arrest, the head of Globovisíon blamed President Hugo Chávez for the incident, as Ron and her party are considered allies of the leader.

According to El Universo, Chávez condemned the attack, saying that it gives “oxygen to the counter-revolution.”

Other Related Headlines:
» Tear gas attack on opposition TV network draws protests (Knight Center)

* Posted by Miriam Forero/JV at 08/05/2009 - 20:10


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