Taliban

When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A brazen daytime assassination on Sunday offered a grim reminder of stymied progress in a key part of NATO's effort to wind down the Afghan war: peace talks with the Taliban. Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan government body set up to conduct negotiations with the militant group, was shot and killed while traveling by car through the Afghan capital, police said. Coming less than nine months after the assassination of the head of the High Peace Council, the killing cast yet more gloom over Western-backed efforts to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table.

The spasm of violence that has shaken the country since copies of the Koran were dumped in a trash incinerator at a U.S. military base is emblematic of a culture war among Afghans themselves, one that is likely to grow more intense as the Western military presence wanes. Five days of chaotic street battles have left more than 30 people dead, including two U.S. military officers killed Saturday in a heavily guarded Afghan government ministry. The unrest over the desecration of the Muslim holy book illustrated not only the depth of religious fervor felt by many here, but also a visceral distaste for Western behavior and values among a far broader swath of Afghan society.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In many ways, the two young soldiers were not so different from each other. Each was tough-minded and physically powerful. Each worked hard to win a place in an elite military unit, and spoke with pride of serving his country. They were 25 years old, these two: one newly married, the other planning a wedding this year. Their upbringings were as disparate as their homelands were distant, but religious faith was entwined with the family lives of both.

This week, the last convoy of U.S. troops in Iraq drove noisily across the border into Kuwait and shut the gate behind them. The next drawdown comes in Afghanistan, where American forces are scheduled to disengage from most combat by the end of 2014. But the Afghanistan withdrawal won't be anywhere near as final as the one we just saw. U.S. military leaders are working on a new slimmed-down strategy that would keep some American troops in combat against the Taliban for years to come, long after 2014.

Weighing 70 tons, traveling up to 45 mph and possessed of a smash-mouth name, the Assault Breacher Vehicle is the Marine Corps' latest answer to a perennial problem of offensive warfare: how to push through the barriers and booby traps of an enemy's outer defenses. Over the decades, Marines have used various strategies to breach defenses, involving heavy vehicles or, in some cases, sending Marine engineers into minefields to set, by hand, line charges loaded with explosives. "Breaching is always the hardest part of an assault," said Sgt. Carl Hewett, a breacher operator stationed here.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In many ways, the two young soldiers were not so different from each other. Each was tough-minded and physically powerful. Each worked hard to win a place in an elite military unit, and spoke with pride of serving his country. They were 25 years old, these two: one newly married, the other planning a wedding this year. Their upbringings were as disparate as their homelands were distant, but religious faith was entwined with the family lives of both.

It should have been a time of celebration. Afghanistan was experiencing a rare conjunction of festive dates: our national holiday, the Friday Sabbath, the imminent start of the monthlong Ramadan fast and national elections. The streets should have been packed with celebrants, children in bright clothes, shoppers laying in stores of sweets for the first sundown meal. But my town, Kandahar, was shuttered tight. Its normally clogged, odorous, noisy streets were nearly empty. The Taliban had put out the message: Anyone leaving his house on the eve of the election or on election day was risking death.

President Obama ordered 30,000 more troops into the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Tuesday, but warned that the United States could not afford an open-ended war and pledged to begin bringing home U.S. forces in 18 months. Speaking to cadets at West Point, some of whom have fought in Afghanistan and others who may soon be deployed there, Obama said the administration would rush all the additional combat troops into the country by next summer. But those forces would not stay any longer than necessary to ensure U.S. security, Obama said, noting that the cost of the decade's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches $1 trillion.

The Taliban's military success in Afghanistan is alarming for anyone concerned with human rights, to say nothing of peace and stability in the region (Oct. 2). Yet Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain, our good "buddies," all have non-democratically elected leaders, and most of these Muslim countries are considered among the most repressive regimes in the world. Their treatment of half their population--women--is especially reprehensible. JENNIFER FLOWERS Laguna Beach

WASHINGTON - In a pointed response to images of Marines urinating on corpses and soldiers posing with body parts, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta appealed to American troops to refrain from misconduct that has complicated the war effort in Afghanistan. Panetta, speaking Friday to an Army brigade at Ft. Benning, Ga., was blunt in his assessment of the breakdown of discipline within the ranks, saying these incidents "show a lack of judgment, a lack of professionalism and a lack of leadership.

The brazen and well-coordinated attacks by insurgents against four embassies and other key sites in the heart of Afghanistan's capital were aimed less at inflicting high numbers of casualties, analysts said, than at humiliating the government and its foreign allies as Afghan forces take increasing responsibility for protecting their own homeland. Taking positions on high-rise construction sites, attackers on Sunday rained down rocket-propelled grenades, bullets and fear on Kabul, targeting major symbols of Afghan and foreign power, including the U.S., British, German and Russian embassies and NATO headquarters.

  Lately, it has seemed that the Taliban can just sit back and wait for the next American mistake. Over the last three months, a series of highly damaging events has forced U.S. commanders and officials to adopt a posture of nonstop crisis management. Even so, the insurgents have not taken full advantage of the American setbacks, in part because the movement appears divided over its own strategy. This month, the Taliban leadership abruptly suspended preliminary peace contacts with the Americans, a move seen by some as tactical and temporary, but interpreted by others as reflecting internal argument over whether negotiations were even worthwhile at this point.

Last week in The Hague, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, found the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers in the armed conflict in that country, sealing his fate as the court's first convicted war criminal. At the same time, the viral video "Kony 2012"has seemingly achieved its goal of making Joseph Kony, another rebel commander facing an ICC arrest warrant, notorious for his alleged crimes, including the abduction of an estimated 30,000 children for hisLord's Resistance Army.

  The Army staff sergeant held in the killing of 16 Afghan civilians initially told other soldiers that he had shot several Afghan men outside a U.S. combat outpost in southern Afghanistan on March 11, but did not mention that a dozen women and children were among the dead, according to a senior U.S. official briefed on the case. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales had "indicated to his buddies that he had taken out some military-aged males," the senior official told The Times. Soldiers frequently use that term to denote insurgents.

This has been one of the worst fortnights in the increasingly unhappy 10 1/2-year Afghan war for NATO and, above all, the United States and its ally, Britain. First there was the burning of the Korans at Bagram air base, which unleashed a wave of religious fury and revenge killings of U.S. troops. Then came the deaths of six British soldiers, incinerated by a giant Taliban bomb last week, which pushed the British death toll in the war over the symbolic 400 mark. Support in Britain for an increasingly unpopular war further deteriorated.

Reporting from Kabul — U.S. Marines and Afghan security forces assaulting a Taliban stronghold in the Now Zad valley of Helmand province have uncovered large caches of explosives, rifles, machine guns and material used to make roadside bombs, the Marines announced today. Resistance has been sporadic in the once-thriving community that is now virtually abandoned except for the Taliban. There were no reports of Marine or Afghan casualties, the Marines said. A dozen enemy fighters have been killed and several captured.

It's refreshing to read about Siddiq Barmak's decision to make a film to "show the dark side" of life under the Taliban ("Victory After Exile," by Scarlet Cheng, Feb. 8). I have grown tired of the constant depiction in the media of the happy, peppy, fun-loving side. Paul Chase Torrance

REPORTING FROM KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Prayers and muffled sobs filled the air Monday during remembrances by Afghan villagers for 16 of their neighbors, nine of them children, who were killed a day earlier during a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by an American soldier. In the capital, Kabul, parliament passed a resolution condemning the "brutal and inhuman" act by the accused assailant, identified by the U.S. military as a sergeant who acted alone in his attack on civilians near his base in Kandahar province.

The desert's nighttime chill had taken hold at a small U.S.-Afghan base in the Taliban's heartland: the home village, in fact, of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's founder and supreme commander. For the American troops manning the outpost, though, the danger came not from outside the wire, but from within. Hours before dawn Thursday, Afghan assailants, including a man hired to teach Afghan soldiers to read, shot and killed two U.S. troops and wounded a third, Afghan and American officials said.