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Waseem Naikzad / AFP - Getty Images
Afghan security force sit on top of a military vehicle in Laghman province Wednesday. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Tuesday he was very concerned about the rise in insider attacks on US and NATO troops, and the impact they are having on cooperation with Afghan allies.
News analysis
KABUL, Afghanistan – A group of U.S. Marines in Helmand province was invited to dinner by a local police commander and his men late last week. A little after midnight, under the dark Afghan sky, the Marines left the police compound and were shot in the back as they walked away. Three were killed.
Last week, seven Americans lost their lives after Afghans they were working with turned their weapons on them.
The military is now designating these incidents in which Afghan troops turn on coalition counterparts as "insider attacks," (they were once called "green-on-blue" incidents) to account for the non-security personnel also involved in the assaults.
Insider attacks are now at the highest level they have been since the start of the war.
Three US special ops troops killed, Afghan officials say
In 2007 and 2008 there were four such attacks and four deaths.
So far this year, there have already been 29 incidents in which Afghans turned their weapons on their coalition partners, killing 37. That’s compared with a total of 21 incidents, in which 35 were killed, in all of 2011.
The spike has startled many and brought calls to find the catalyst for the deadly problem.
Jose Cabezas / AFP - Getty Images
Members of the Afghan National Army are helped by a US soldier as they participate in a map reading training session at Narizah base in Narizah, Khost Province, on August 12, 2012.
Who or what is to blame?
One group that would seem like the obvious culprit is the Taliban. They have claimed to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Forces, consisting of both the military and police, to help kill NATO troops from the inside.
Last year, the group called on more Afghans in uniform to join their cause and turn their weapons on the “foreign invaders” because of their access and proximity.
NATO does not deny some of the attacks have been from Taliban insurgency infiltration – but they attribute the trend to more than that.
Seven American troops killed in Afghan chopper crash
“There was infiltration; that is correct, we can acknowledge that,” said Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force based in Kabul. However, he said most of the attacks could be blamed on more basic warfare issues.
“The main reasons for those green on blue incidents are personal grievances, stress situations and what we call battle fatigue,” Katz said.
Hoshang Hashimi / AP
More than ten years after the beginning of the war, Afghanistan faces external pressure to reform as well as ongoing internal conflicts.
He attributes about 10 percent of the insider attacks to Taliban infiltration, and blames the remaining 90 percent on individual motives.
However, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged the Taliban are somewhat to blame for the attack earlier this week.
“The reality is, the Taliban has not been able to regain any territory lost, so they’re resorting to these kinds of attacks to create havoc,” Panetta told reporters in a Pentagon briefing Tuesday, according to Stars and Stripes.
Panetta later said there is “no one source” responsible for the attacks, and that there are several reasons why Afghan forces would turn on coalition troops.
Cultural divide
A former commander of the Afghan Border Police, Gen. Aminullah Amarkhil, blames the attacks on a disrespect of the Afghan culture by foreign forces.
“The main reason for these attacks is that the foreign troops have on many occasions humiliated the Afghan culture and religion,” Amarkhil said. “They’ve entered Afghan homes without permission, killed innocent civilians, they’ve bombarded wedding parties, they’ve entered our mosques with dogs, burned the Holy Quran. All of these are the factors that have contributed to the Afghan army or police being infiltrated by people who have been humiliated by the foreign troops.”
The Afghan general admitted it is not just the fault of NATO, adding that the insider attacks are also because of the weakness in the Afghan National Security Forces’ recruitment system.
“We don’t have a proper procedure for recruitment in our army or police. There are people in the Afghan army who have come from Pakistan and have made Afghan identity cards, " said Amarkhil, explaining that loyalties can be divided.
Training on Afghan culture
Amarkhil believes more should be done to show respect for the Afghan culture and religion by the foreign forces. And ISAF says they are doing just that.
“We continue to improve this process further and further in order to teach our guys [about] ‘what is Afghan culture.’ What can be done, what must not be done,” Katz said. “We are very serious about that.”
In the meantime, ISAF has implemented force protection measures to help prevent more insider attacks. Katz would not elaborate on what those measures are.
“We permanently assess the environment our soldiers are working in and assess if the current force protection measures are still in accordance to our assessment. And if not, we change them.”
But Katz says that these incidents, although tragic, are isolated.
“We had a very bad week last week,” he says. But he believes for the most part there is trust between the Afghan and international forces.
“The more we fight together, the more we trust each other.”
NBC’s Fazl Ahad contributed to this report.
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Leave a Comment:
Afghanistan is a lost cause. We went in there to avenge 9/11 and rout Al Queda. We have succeeded in doing so, but we will NEVER get all of the Taliban who hosted them. Those people take a long range view of things, and are not afraid to take casualties, or to inflict them. If it takes 20 or 30 years to get us to depart they will wait. Nobody can seem to even articulate what our goals are any more. We need to declare victory and come home. The sooner the better.
I must say that makes a lot of sense ... No wonder your name is Einstein*
Yes, we HAD to go in to avenge 9/11, otherwise we'd look like chumps. but the time has come to cut our losses and go home. The people there are either Taliban sympathizers or they are just too weak/afraid to fight these radicals. Either way it is Their fight, not ours.
Ya, why did those pesky colonists keep takin' potshots at those Redcoats?
Your comparison is Afghans as Colonists and American soldiers as Redcoats?
Obama is clearly a Turncoat.
We are not at war in Afghanistan. War is HELL, merciless, with no punches being pulled. If we are to go to war, Hell needs to come with us in every form we can bring it in. Had we done so, this silly game would have been over years ago. Our political Generals make excuses for our soldiers being shot in the back by a people we say we are there to "help." We should have killed those back-shooting SOBs wholesale long ago. It is too late now.
They might be sick and tired of our unnecessary occupation of their country.
Obama doesn't care how many die there, he will not bring them home even when they clearly have no mission.
Read "Descent into Chaos" by Ahmed Rashid (2008). Great book explains how we, Pakistan, Afghanistan, NATO screwed up, and the poor citizen just gets tired. The Taliban gets energized with "kill the infidels" and we get this.
Earlier on Reuters.com. Execution of Pakistan's by 3-4 Taliban men.
July 18 - The Pakistan Taliban releases a video, posted on Liveleak.com, showing masked militants savagely shooting more than a dozen Pakistani security personnel in firing-squad style in the northwest part of the country last month. WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES. Rough Cut (no reporter narration). ( Transcript )
http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/08/06/blast-hits-syrian-tv-and-radio-building?videoChannel=2602&videoId=217212878
Why are we there? Bin Laden is DEAD....so get us THE HELL OUT.
thank soviet russia and the american billionaires who funded the muja hideen 30 years ago for it. Really though I guess you can thank 'god' , or 'human nature' or some @!$%#e..
think about the number of mentally unstable people in developed countries, then imagine a place like afghanistan where you can buy a kalashnikov off the side of the road for a few bucks and kill your wife, or your neighbors for that matter, for not obeying some religious bull @!$%#..
mo money, mo problems, its just the same old @!$%#
F em...let them deal with it...we got what we came for...Elvis needs to leave the building!
Easy solution:
1. Pull out and let the idiots get their Islamic dictatorship fired up again.
2. At the first sign of a threat from them evaporate Kabul.
Jerry might be on to something there ....
Dude, I have to agree
Our U.S. military MUST, absolutely MUST pour everything they have to into researching and developing the means to vet foreign military forces with the help of advanced brain scans. THIS MEANS NOW !!! - Rick Carter
(The world can vet me this way anytime they want to! I am an 'all volunteer', and always have been!) - RC
Are you really surprised? I'm not.
Some people are so dense. It's because they hate us for our freedom, because they are Islamic or any other seriously unintelligent excuse? Gullible sheep, they hate us because we have occupied their land. Prior to that, we've meddled in their affairs. Any honorable American would stand up and fight any occupiers who tried to occupy us "for our own good". Why is that so hard to comprehend? Oh yeah, because we've been lied to by our ever loving government. Wake up!
Obama doesn't care if American troops die and have no mission.
American forces were once long ago taught that the American military had to respect the general population and extend respect for the cultural and social differences between American and occupied areas. It seems that today we have lost that ability due to lack of training under the direction of superiors who have remained sensitive to the facts.
When American troops maintain the attitude to "Kill them all and let God sort them out," we have paved the way for failure of the greatest magnitude.
Colonel (06)
Obama term racking up 70%+ deaths now in Afghanistan. Yet he won't bring them home. That Nobel Peace prize necklace was supposed to be a gold golfclub and ball encrusted with diamonds.
first of all its their country , and of course theyres animositys when troops go shootin up woman n children in middle of night , an corraling people like cattle ,. hooray fer the great american cowboy puppet masters
Obama is The Puppet Master. How many more acts are in this play? The audience has all but left the room. Are we waiting for the really big death scene?
We've been there way too long. We didn't get the job done. We failed. Admit it and leave.
Being there for too long and "not a day longer than necessary"?
How about the reason that they are doing it is because they are just about the stupidest people on the planet. Most can not read, they are members of a country wide cult that prays to a dead pedophile and can not be trusted. Plainly we need to make sure that there is an American with a gun trained on them at all times so if they even look like they are going to point a weapon at us, they are shot first. Or, don't even give them weapons to begin with. All they every do is drop them when they are shot at. You would think that they were
french.
"So not happy". You must be a devout Christian, am I right?
Are we leaving or not?
Simple - they are hedging their bets with the winning side. Obama has already given the we are leaving speech so they know that it is only a matter of time before the Taliban take over.
Even if they are killed while ambushing Americans the fact that they did it will buy the lives of their families when the Taliban do take control. Anyone working with the Americans now will be killed along with their families once they take control.
It that simple.
Very interesting thought cannon and it does make a lot of sense. I saw an article the other day where families were forced to give up their daughters as payment for loans taken out after poppy seed crops were destroyed by Afghan gov/ US troops (well the troops just provided protection.)
All Afghan soldiers have their families moved to guarded compounds. When a soldier turns on us all his family is executed.
These people want to grow opium and arrange marriages for their daughters. Theirs is a tribal society and we're trying to turn it into a modern democracy with a powerful central government. It ain't on the agenda.
Procrustes- I agree with you. I had hoped our country would have learned a whole lot more than we did after our experience in VietNam (I was there). We cannot mold these countries in our image or expect them to adopt our way of life, when they are dealing with issues, religions and beliefs that have been in existence for thousands of years.
Standing ovation reeltor
An Afghan General spouting off how American troops do not respect Afghan Culture....this is so wrong...we are there to help them overcome the Taliban! The General of the Afghan troops is hurting our presense! How can our American Military leadership allow our troops to be placed in very likely harm's way and brush it off as just a misunderstanding and non present danger! Please pray for our troops survival!! Also say a prayer for the mothers and fathers whose sons have been thrown into harms way with no backup or solution, but only with a nod to stay the course!!
We definitely should not trust any muslim/islamist - this has been proven far too much... they say one thing and think another...
Return all of our boys home from these lands, do not make any more tax payer contributions to their corrupt inhumane governments... Stop training their military, they will use it against us over and over...
This is who they are, they will never change...
All the culture and sensitivity training in the world isn't going to make these sleeze-bag rag heads tolerant of western troops occupying their country. American military can't wait until 2014 to pull out. OUT NOW!