US Taxpayers Funded Taliban's Army, Billions In Weapons Form Militants' ...

Reflecting on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, one year later

Kerry calls threats of swapped Taliban prisoners to resume jihad “a lot of baloney”

Robert Spencer Jun 9, 2014 at 12:07pm




“No one should doubt the capacity of America to protect Americans,” said Kerry. Oh, really? What about all the many Americans murdered by their Afghan allies over the past few years? What happened to our capacity to protect them? It was sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, specifically to the refusal of our government and military to face the fact that there is no way to protect the Afghan army and police from jihadist infiltrators.

“Kerry calls threats of swapped Taliban prisoners to resume war ‘a lot of baloney,’” by David Lerman and Greg Giroux, Bloomberg, June 9, 2014 (thanks to Samantha):


WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said threats by the five freed Taliban prisoners swapped for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl to return to war and kill Americans are “a lot of baloney.”

Defending the swap that secured the release of the last American prisoner of war in Afghanistan, Kerry said the movements of the five Taliban prisoners released to Qatar will be closely monitored.

“No one should doubt the capacity of America to protect Americans,” Kerry said from France in a taped interview for CNN’s “State of the Union” program Sunday.

Bergdahl, held captive for almost five years, was released May 31 in exchange for five Taliban prisoners held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. The deal requires that the five men remain in Qatar for at least a year.

“They’re not the only ones keeping an eye on them,” Kerry said of the Qataris, while declining to elaborate.

“We have proven what we are capable of doing with al-Qaida,” he said.

The threats by the Taliban prisoners to resume fighting in Afghanistan and kill Americans amount to propaganda, Kerry said. “They’ll say whatever they want to stir the waters,” he said.

With the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan coming to an end and most troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2016, opportunities for Taliban to kidnap Americans will dwindle, Kerry said.

Whether or not Bergdahl deserted his post in eastern Afghanistan, as some of his former fellow soldiers claim, “it would have been offensive and incomprehensible to consciously leave an American behind,” Kerry said….

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Miklaszewski: Someone at the W.H. should have Googled Bergdahl

Washington Free Beacon

Published on Jun 4, 2014

If anyone at the White House had simply Google searched Bowe Bergdahl, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski said, the red flags about his suspected desertion would have leapt off the page.
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Bergdahl's Platoon Mates: Six Died Looking for 'Deserter'

Monday, 02 Jun 2014 12:24 PM

By Greg Richter and Melanie Batley


What began as a debate over negotiating with terrorists escalated Monday into anger among many armed services members at the attention being given to Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a man who reportedly fled his post five years ago only to be captured by Afghan insurgents.

Bergdahl was freed Saturday in exchange for five Guantanamo Bay detainees. His release was celebrated at first by Washington politicians, including Republicans, though many felt the United States had broken its longstanding policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

By Monday, that had all changed. Soldiers who served with Bergdahl said they were outraged at the possibility he would be accorded a hero's welcome. He is anything but, they said.

CNN, Rolling Stone, and other media reminded Americans that at least six soldiers were killed in subsequent searches for Bergdahl in rugged Paktika Province in the ensuing days and weeks after he deserted.

The six men reportedly killed while searching for Bergdahl were identified by CNN as Staff Sgt. Clayton Bowen and Pfc. Morris Walker on Aug. 18, 2009; Staff Sgt. Kurt Curtiss on Aug. 26; 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews and Pfc. Matthew Michael Martinek on Sept. 4; and Staff Sgt. Michael Murphrey on Sept. 5.

"He walked off," said former Pfc. Jose Baggett, a former comrade. "He left his guard post. Nobody knows if he defected, or he’s a traitor, or he was kidnapped. What I do know is he was there to protect us, and instead he decided to defer from America and go and do his own thing. I don’t know why he decided to do that, but we spent so much of our resources, and some of those resources were soldiers’ lives."

Bergdahl walked away from his base, reportedly without a weapon, in June 2009 and was captured by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.

Moreover, CNN reported that soldiers in his platoon said attacks seemed to increase against the United States in Paktika Province in the days and weeks following his disappearance.

Richard Grenell, a former U.S. spokesman to the United Nations and partner with Capitol Media Partners, told Newsmax that numerous soldiers who served with Bowe reached out to him to express their anger with the decision.

"I have spoken with several of Bowe Bergdahl's platoon mates, and they are united in their view that Bowe walked away from them, and that many lives were risked and some lost in looking for a guy who willingly left the team," Grenell said.

The outrage quickly made its way into social media. A Facebook page, "Bowe Bergdahl is NOT a hero," went up on Monday, the New York Post reported. It linked to an online petition demanding Bergdahl’s prosecution.

"Punish Bowe Bergdahl for walking off base with intent to not support the war on terror. Bowe Bergdahl broke several Articles under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and needs to be punished not rewarded," the petition read.

"Bowe Bergdahl directly disobeyed the following articles Article 86 AWOL and Article 85 Desertion. Both articles call for trial by court martial. He is not a hero and is directly responsible for several military members' death. Bring punishment to Bowe Bergdahl and let the public know that the military holds all members to the same standard," the petition states.

Former combat medic Javier Ortiz told The Washington Post, "Regardless of what you learned while being there, we still have a responsibility to the men to our left and right. It's terrible, what he did.

"There were military assets required ... but the problem came of his own accord."

Another unidentified soldier said, "The unit completely changed its operational posture because of something that was selfish, not because a soldier was captured in combat."

CNN's Jake Tapper, who embedded with and wrote a book about soldiers in Afghanistan, also found much anger.

"I was pissed off then, and I am even more so now with everything going on," said former Sgt. Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl's platoon. "Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war, and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him."

Bergdahl's former squad leader, Greg Leatherman, told CNN: "I'm pleased to see him returned safely. From experience, I hope that he receives adequate reintegration counseling. I believe that an investigation should take place as soon as healthcare professionals deem him fit to endure one."

According to a 2012 report in Rolling Stone, Bergdahl, now 28, had become disillusioned with his role in America's longest war, sending emails to his parents prior to his disappearance.

"The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong," Bergdahl reportedly wrote his father. "I have seen their ideas, and I am ashamed to even be american (sic). The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

He also attacked the Army, saying it cut down people "for being honest," and rewarded sycophants. "The title of US soldier is just the lie of fools," he wrote. "I am sorry for everything here.

"These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.

"We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks," he continued. "We make fun of them in front of their faces and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them."

His father, Bob, told him in an email, "In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones' conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like-minded men when possible."

Rolling Stone reported that Bergdahl even approached a superior, "If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?" He was told it would, so he left his gun and took just water, a knife, a camera, and his diary, and "slipped off the outpost."

Specialist Jason Fry told Rolling Stone that even before leaving for Afghanistan Bergdahl told him, "If this deployment is lame, I'm just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan."

Bergdahl left his camp close to the Pakistani border, on June 30, 2009.

Bergdahl — who was promoted from private first class to sergeant during his time in captivity — is said to have become increasingly disillusioned with the war after a close friend was killed in Afghanistan.

Though the Obama administration has publicly embraced Bergdahl, one former comrade called on Facebook for him to be executed as a deserter, according to the New York Post.

Bergdahl spent his first night of freedom at the military hospital at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before being flown to Germany.

He will return to the United States to the Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, reported the Christian Science Monitor.

The five Taliban prisoners released by the United States into the custody of Qatar were described by Sen. John McCain on Sunday as the "hardest of the hardcore." Human Rights Watch has pressed for one of them, Mohammed Fazl, to be prosecuted for war crimes for allegedly presiding over a mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan.

"It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to re-enter the fight, and they are big, high-level people, possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands," McCain said on "Face the Nation."

The government of Qatar negotiated the deal for the prisoner exchange and is supposed to keep the five Taliban members from leaving the country for at least a year.

"I think the big issue here is what's going to happen to these five individuals," McCain said. "If they re-enter the fight, then it is going to put American lives at risk, and none of us want that to happen."



Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Bowe-Bergdahl-platoon-petition-Taliban/2014/06/02/id/574506#ixzz33VFyy8af


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Did Bowe Bergdahl go AWOL in Afghanistan?

After five years as a POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is headed home. But the circumstances of his capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan remain unclear, indicating he may have walked away from his base.

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / June 1, 2014





Jani and Bob Bergdahl speak during a news conference at the White House Saturday about the release of their son, U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held prisoner by the Taliban since 2009. He was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban in exchange for the release of five Afghan detainees held by the United States.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

For now, the story for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is one of physical and mental recovery and reunion with his family.

Related stories

In Pictures Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

Obama's Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap: Was it illegal?

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Five years a POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl released by Afghan Taliban (+video)

The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

But very soon it will involve debriefings about the nearly five years of his captivity by Taliban fighters, who apparently held him in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, where his infantry unit had been engaged in combat.

Military and intelligence experts will want to know how he was treated, anything he can tell them about his captors, and what he learned about insurgent capabilities.

But for the young soldier – 23 when he became a prisoner of war, now 28 – those debriefings also will include difficult questions about how and why he happened to be in a position where he fell into the hands of Taliban fighters.

RECOMMENDED: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

There have been no reports that he was captured during direct combat, that the “fog of war” had put him involuntarily in a vulnerable location.

At this point in the developing narrative, Sgt. Bergdahl seems to have grown disillusioned with the mission, bitter about the Army and especially higher ranking enlisted men and officers, and simply walked off – gone “outside the wire” or protective base limits – and disappeared.

That could indicate that he had gone AWOL (Absence Without Leave), also referred to as “Unauthorized Absence” (UA), which could bring charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

This scenario – it’s important to note that it has not been confirmed – is based on detailed reporting in 2012 by Rolling Stone magazine, which included interviews with Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers as well as apparently lengthy conversations with his parents in Idaho, who shared e-mails they had exchanged with him up until his disappearance.

“The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at,” he wrote from Afghanistan. “It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same."

"I am sorry for everything here," Bergdahl wrote at another point "These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live."

In his final message, Bergdahl refers to having mailed home boxes with his uniforms and books.

“Feel free to open them, and use them,” he wrote.

Later that night, Bowe Bergdahl’s father Bob Bergdahl, a UPS truck driver, sent his son an email from their home in Hailey, Idaho, with the subject line: OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!

"Dear Bowe," he wrote. "In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones' conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like minded men when possible. dad."

“Ordinary soldiers, especially raw recruits facing combat for the first time, respond to the horror of war in all sorts of ways,” Rolling Stone observed. Bowe Bergdahl “decided to walk away.”

“In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?

“Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.

“Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.”

When his absence was discovered, Bergdahl was listed as “DUSTWUN” – Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown.

Search parties were sent out. The search included drone aircraft as well as F-18 and F-15 fighter jets.

Reports from Afghan intelligence sources indicated that Bergdahl had been captured by the Taliban, later confirmed by intercepted radio conversations and the first videos of him being held.

Speaking at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan Sunday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said the US had to move quickly to rescue Bergdahl as part of a prisoner transfer involving five mid- to high- level Taliban being sent to Qatar from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bergdahl's "safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health was deteriorating,” Secretary Hagel said.

"Our first priority is assuring his well-being and his health and getting him reunited with his family," Hagel said. "Other circumstances that may develop and questions — those will be dealt with later."

Those “other circumstances” and “questions” involve how the young and apparently disillusioned soldier came to be taken a prisoner of war.

Not surprisingly, the issue has stirred considerable discussion and debate.

“Though Americans may be celebrating the release of the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the reaction of the military community has been mixed at best,” Army Times reports.

“Within an hour of the announcement that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban Saturday evening, Army Times’ Facebook page lit up with hundreds of comments reacting to the news,” the publication reported. “Most centered on the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's capture, which remain something of a mystery. There has been some speculation that he willingly walked away from his unit, raising the question of whether he could be charged with being absent without leave (AWOL) or desertion.”

“I'm happy for the Bergdahl family and friends to have their loved one home, but I am angered deeply at Bowe…. It disgusts me greatly that a man that turned his back on his brothers, unit, and country is going to be hailed as a hero/saint,” wrote one Army Times Facebook visitor.

But another post summed up the situation this way:

“This guy may have made a tremendously bad decision, but I'm willing to bet that what he's endured since then has been far worse than anything the US or military judicial system would have imposed. Have some heart.”


RECOMMENDED: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

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Bowe Bergdahl's first hours of freedom: Now the questions begin (+video)
Five years a POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl released by Afghan Taliban (+video)


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An Afghan Village Of Drug Addicts, From Ages 10 To 60

by Renee Montagne
April 30, 2014 3:31 AM ET



Listen to the Story
Morning Edition

8 min 44 sec





David P. Gilkey/NPR






David P. Gilkey/NPR






David P. Gilkey/NPR





David P. Gilkey/NPR






David P. Gilkey/NPR


Herat is one of the most graceful cities in Afghanistan. Its traditions go back to the Persian empire, with its exquisite blue and green glass, and its thriving poetry scene.

Now Herat is struggling with a darker side: drug addiction at a higher rate than almost anywhere else in the country.

In a dusty ravine on the outskirts of the city, Ahmad, a scruffy 20-year-old, is striking a match to inhale heroin.

It's a simple act he repeats throughout his day — heating a dark slab of heroin paste smeared on a bit of foil so he can smoke it.

Ahmad is one of hundreds of addicts who have turned a dumping ground for building material into a village. A drug village.

They used chunks of cement and tarps to honeycomb the ravine with what look like stone igloos.

Ahmad's mother, Zahra, leans against some rocks in front of their place. Her flat, gold eyes peer at us from beneath a plaid veil as she tells her story

"I used to weave carpets and also worked as a maid," she says. "Then my husband got cancer and died."

Zahra's life spiraled downward, hitting bottom when her sister-in-law returned from Iran and offered her heroin.

Now, Zahra says, "I can't do anything except beg on the street."

We pull back a red cloth to find another woman, Zahra's sister, blinking up into the light. In the center of this tiny space is a cooking area — not for food, but for heroin.

There's also a small figure moaning and moving restlessly under a filthy blue burka.

"That's my daughter," says Zahra.

She's 10, and she's hooked on heroin too.

How did such a young girl become addicted?

"When we had my sister-in-law living with us, she was addicted," says Zahra. "I would go out to other homes to do housekeeping. And my little girl Laila used to cry a lot. So my sister-in-law gave the child opium to calm her down — that's when she became an addict."

Zahra says her daughter has already gone through rehab at a clinic in the city.
But back in this drug village, the 10-year-old became addicted once again.

Few Resources To Combat Drugs

In a white-tiled office, Dr. Ezmaray Hassin runs several clinics in Herat, and he says one of them serves children as young as 4. There are an estimated 70,000 drug users here now, he says.

"There's no doubt that Afghanistan is one of the largest producers of poppy, but historically they have never been drug users," Dr. Hassin says. But more than three decades of war, which has displaced millions of Afghans, has created all sorts of upheavals, he says.

"A lot of people travel to the neighboring countries, and they got to know about narcotics and they become addicted," he adds. "And the one country that's closest to Herat is Iran."



Saleh (from left), 25, Mohammed Ibrahim, 31, and Nisar Ahmed, 23, sit in a drug rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Herat. Opium grown in Afghanistan has long been smuggled through Herat on its way to Iran and to the West. Now Herat has many drug addicts of its own. David P. Gilkey/NPR

Iran has long had one of the highest rates of drug addiction in the world. Heroin is widely used in Iran, but recently there has been a dramatic rise in the use of crystal meth.

Sitting on a bed in this clinic in Herat is Saleh, 25, who tells a story we hear again and again, from migrants and refugees who've returned from Iran with addictions.

A few years ago, he crossed the border into Iran to look for work.

"I was in Iran and I was digging wells," he begins. "Then my legs would really, really hurt, really bad. Basically it started with opium first to treat my legs — to kill the pain. And then over time I went to heroin. Then the problem became that every time I did not use heroin my legs even would hurt more. So I had to use."

Relatively speaking, Saleh is among the lucky ones. There are just 250 beds devoted to drug treatment in all of Herat.

The city's top counternarcotics officer is Faquil Gul Amini, whose office in the center of Herat is protected by trucks with mounted machine guns.

Amini's resources are limited, and the challenge is growing with the arrival of a drug he'd never seen before a couple of years ago: crystal meth, which is known in Persian as shisheh, or glass.

Amini says he has just raided meth labs in Herat and arrested a Breaking Bad kind of guy from Iran. But he has no illusions about the magnitude of the battle he faces.

"I'm afraid to say when it comes to the list of priorities for the government to deal with, the issue of drug addicts, I'm afraid to say, it's below zero," he said.

Which is why this village outside the city is full of addicts. On a hot day you can see a constant flow of men walking up and down on a path crunchy with broken glass.

They are going nowhere.



A self-proclaimed poet and scholar, Haji Ismatullah blows smoke out after taking a hit of crystal meth. He says he turned to drugs after his wife and kids were killed in a car accident. David P. Gilkey/NPR

Those who are on crystal meth are easy to spot. One we encounter has the air of a 60-something hipster. A trim gray beard. A black leather jacket. A tattoo on his hand spelling love.

His name is Haji Ismatullah, and the young men clustered around him call out, "He's a writer."

As evidence, he opens a notebook filled with elegant Persian script in red and black.

"I say poetry for the people here," he says. "For the pain of the people."

Ismatullah says he began using crystal meth after his wife and three children were killed in a car accident.

"My heart was hurting a lot after the accident when I lost my family," he says. "Some people told me if you take meth it makes you forget things. And there's a lot in Herat, so I took it."

For the first few months, it did help, he says. But, he adds with a cackle, "After that, it does not help me because it's not a good friend."

Still, Ismatullah would like some meth right now.

As we walk with him to his place, a young woman who carries herself like a dancer comes toward us. The men see her and laugh. She has lost her mind, she's crazy, they say.

She does in fact call herself by the name of a famous Iranian singer and seems to think she's on stage. Decked out in a magenta cape, turquoise beads and a turban, she tosses her head dramatically and with a kind of wild beauty.

Then she spins away, just as we reach the dwelling of Ismatullah, which resembles a stone igloo.



A man walks past a fresh grave in the Kamar Kulagh slum outside of Herat. David P. Gilkey/NPR


He goes inside the tiny place and smokes crystal meth in a glass pipe.

Afterward, he's ready to wander again, so we walk to the top of a hill to a makeshift cemetery. He takes us to a fresh grave marked by a small mound of rocks. There lies his friend Baluchi, who died two days before.

It's a moment that brings to mind a question we put earlier to a man named Mohammed, who has been residing in this drug village for six months. I asked him how he sees his future. "Look at my life, this life," he said. "The end for us is death. That's what we're waiting for."


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Gates: Obama Made Solid Decisions, But Was Swayed By Factious Staff

by Eyder Peralta and Mark Memmott
January 13, 201412:01 AM




Robert Gates in June 2011, his last month as secretary of defense. Alex Brandon/AP


This is Part I of Morning Edition's interview with Robert Gates. Part II and a link to the complete transcript are below.



Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
9 min 0 sec



Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says his criticism of President Obama is more nuanced than , Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, would have you believe.

In a long and surprisingly frank interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, Gates talked about his relationship with the commander in chief and his rivalry with Vice President Joe Biden, and described a deep rift between the approaches of senior military leadership and Obama's young Cabinet.


Part II of the 'Morning Edition' conversation with Robert Gates





Gates, the only secretary of defense in U.S. history to keep his job with a newly elected president, said Obama was always kind to him personally and that Obama always made "decisions based on what he thought was in the best interest of U.S. national security."

However, he said, he always felt Obama thought the military was trying to force his hand on certain decisions. Gates explained that early in Obama's first term, generals and other high-ranking officials were making public statements essentially saying their strategy was the only one that would work, leaving the impression that Obama had no other choices. The suspicion that resulted, Gates said, was only fueled by the president's Cabinet.




An example of that, Gates said, was the surge in Afghanistan. , that's the part of Gates' book that has stirred the most controversy, because he implied that Obama lacked passion and approved the 2009 troop surge "believing the strategy would fail."

Gates said Obama didn't go into the surge believing it would fail; instead he was led to that belief by his Cabinet and especially by Biden.

That's when Steve asked Gates about perhaps the most explosive statement in his book: that Biden has been wrong about every foreign policy issue for 40 years.

Gates explained:


"First of all, I think it's fair to say that particularly on Afghanistan, the vice president was my — he and I were on opposite sides of the fence on this issue.

"And he was in there advising the president every day. He was, I think, stoking the president's suspicion of the military. But the other side of it is, frankly, I believe it. The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and the — that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the, when the Shah fell in Iran in 2009 — 1979, rather — that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense buildup. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just — I, frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been on the wrong — he'd been — I think he had been wrong."

Perhaps one of the more insightful parts of the interview was when Gates talked about the young members of Obama's National Security Council.

He described a clash of cultures in which those young members eschewed the chain of command. Gates, and whose service dates back to 1966 when he joined the CIA, said he had a "different world outlook and a different experience."

Here's part of the exchange:


INSKEEP: You seem considerably less respectful of the president's staff than you were of the president himself.

GATES: Well, I had a lot of battles with those folks. And, frankly, my attitudes were shaped by the fact that I worked in the White House on the National Security Council staff and as deputy national security adviser for nearly nine years under four presidents. And I had certain ideas about how the national security staff and how the White House staff ought to comport themselves in discussions on national security and military issues. And let's just say that the way it worked under — in the Obama White House — was not anything like I had seen before.

I had worked for probably three of the most significant and toughest national security advisers in our history: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. And there were things that went on in the Obama White House that, under those three guys, I am confident would have been a firing offense, such as direct calls from NSC staff members to four-star generals and so on. That just wouldn't have been allowed.

INSKEEP: Oh, they should have gone through the chain of command, you think, or through the hierarchy?

GATES: Absolutely — absolutely.

INSKEEP: And they were effectively giving orders or going around their own nominal bosses on the staff? That's what you're saying?

GATES: Well, I think the key is what you said. They were going outside the chain of command. It's not appropriate for somebody on the National Security Council staff to be in direct contact with combatant commanders.

Gates did not lay all the blame on Obama and his Cabinet. He also talked about his failures.

"At the end of the book, I also point out that I think we all did a disservice to President Obama, because the debate on Afghanistan became so divisive that the opportunities to reach across those differences I think were missed," Gates said.


"I fault myself for not reaching out more to the vice president to see where we could find common ground, because at the end of the day, in a number of important respects, I don't think our positions were that far apart. But because of the environment, because of the suspicion, because of the — just the flavor of the debate and the difficulty between the Department of Defense and the National Security Council staff, I think that those edges were sharper than they needed to be, and that's partly my responsibility."

Much more of Steve's interview with Gates is on Monday's Morning Edition. to find a local NPR member station that carries the program. We'll also post the as-aired version of the interview on this post. .

Update at 9:55 a.m. ET, Jan. 13: Now that the audio of Morning Edition's as-broadcast conversation with Gates is available, we've added it — in two parts, as they did on the radio. To simplify our layout, we've removed the small clips from the conversation that we posted earlier. Those moments are included in the Morning Edition clips.

Meanwhile, we've added a related post: Gates Says He Wept Each Evening Over Troops' Deaths.

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Book review: ‘Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War’ by Robert M. Gates

View Photo Gallery — Robert Gates: A look at his career in government: He served as defense secretary under presidents Obama and George W. Bush, bridging the two administrations and earning a reputation as careful, conservative and consensus-oriented.




By Greg Jaffe, Published: January 7




Greg Jaffe covered the Pentagon for The Washington Post and is a co-author of “The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.”

Maybe it was the time of year, just before the Christmas holidays. Maybe it was the setting — a bare-bones combat outpost in the violent mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Maybe it was the strain of more than four years of signing deployment orders that he knew would lead to the deaths of more young Americans. But in December 2010, speaking to troops clustered around him,Robert M. Gates was overcome by an uncharacteristic flood of emotion.

The soldiers in their dirt-splattered uniforms had been ordered to stop whatever they were doing and listen to the defense secretary, who, with his neatly parted white hair, khakis and starched button-down shirt, looked as if he had helicoptered in from another planet. “I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you,” Gates said. “I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you’ll ever imagine. I just want to thank you and tell you how much I love you.”




(Knopf) - “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” by Robert M. Gates.

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Gates bashes Biden in memoir

Aaron Blake JAN 7

“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates wrote of Biden, according to the New York Times.

It is impossible to imagine former wartime defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or Robert McNamara ever telling his troops that he loved them.

As a military reporter who covered Gates throughout his nearly five-year tenure and witnessed many of his increasingly emotional thank yous to troops in Afghanistan, I often wondered what was going on inside his head: He rarely showed anger or frustration. “I have a pretty good poker face,” he explains in his new memoir, “Duty.”

While his rivals at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon loudly staked out their positions, Gates held back his opinion. The uncertainty about where he stood was a source of his power, allowing him to swoop in at the last moment and broker a bargain, usually on terms that were most acceptable to him. Unlike his predecessors, he had a reputation for quietly and ruthlessly holding subordinates accountable. He fired senior people, including Gen. David McKiernan, his top wartime commander in Afghanistan, whom Gates thought wasn’t up to the job — the first such dismissal since the Korean War.

In his new book, which has nearly 600 pages of text, Gates takes the reader inside the war-room deliberations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and delivers unsentimental assessments of each man’s temperament, intellect and management style. “It is difficult to imagine two more different men,” Gates writes.

Gates left Washington in 2011 with a reputation as a steady, sober-minded member of the foreign policy establishment, who had served eight presidents and was admired equally by Republicans and Democrats. The next time Gates visits the capital, his reception may not be quite so warm. “Duty” is his second memoir, and this time he cuts loose.

He slams Congress for its grandstanding and gridlock. “I would listen with growing outrage,” he writes, “as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets.” He describes members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as “rude, nasty and stupid.”

Joe Biden haters will enjoy Gates’s description of the vice president as loud, garrulous and obsessed with politics over substance. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates writes. He accuses the vice president of poisoning Obama’s relationship with his generals: “I thought Biden was subjecting Obama to Chinese water torture, every day saying, ‘the military can’t be trusted.’ ”

Gates admires Obama’s decisiveness and smarts, but accuses him of sending troops to fight and die in support of a strategy in Afghanistan that, according to Gates, the president himself believed would fail. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

He recounts his thoughts during a tense 2011 meeting with Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in the White House Situation Room: “As I sat there I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

The critique will infuriate the parents and spouses of troops who were killed trying to execute Obama’s Afghan war strategy. But Gates doesn’t prove his damning accusation and can be maddeningly self-contradictory in his criticism of Obama. He describes the president’s decision to send 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as courageous and politically unpopular. “Obama overruled the policy and domestic political concerns of his vice president and virtually all the senior White House staff,” Gates writes. Why would the president pursue a politically unpopular strategy that he believed would fail? Gates never attempts to explain the contradiction.

Though he decries Obama’s White House staff as the “most centralized and controlling” since the Nixon administration, he offers little substantive criticism of the president’s big decisions on Afghanistan. Hawkish Republicans and some in the military slammed Obama for putting firm limits on the number of troops he was willing to send to Afghanistan and for setting a withdrawal date, saying the timelines and troop caps betrayed a lack of resolve and emboldened the enemy. Gates, however, dismisses this argument, writing, “I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions.”

Gates’s problem with the president is less about strategy or substance than about heart. “I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him,” Gates writes. He compares Obama unfavorably with Bush, who “had no second thoughts about Iraq, including our decision to invade.”

No civilian in Washington was closer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than Gates. As Washington and the rest of the country were growing bored with the grinding conflicts, he seemed to feel their burden more acutely. He describes how his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq wore on him: “On each visit I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss.” His anger at Obama, Congress and even some in the Pentagon seems to spring from his belief that they didn’t match his sense of mission in Afghanistan. They didn’t feel the sting of the troops’ deaths with the intensity that he felt.

More than 3,800 soldiers and Marines died on Gates’s watch in Iraq and Afghanistan. The losses are small compared with the numbers in the Civil War, World War II or Vietnam. But for Gates and his generals, they were extraordinarily difficult to bear. Gates spent most of his evenings as defense secretary alone, writing condolence letters to the families of the deceased. He asked his staff for a picture of the soldier and some hometown news clippings so that he would be able to personalize his message. It was a major change from the early days of the war, when Rumsfeld relied on an autopen machine to sign the letters — a practice he abandoned after lawmakers publicly flayed him for it.

Like Gates’s profession of love for the troops in Konar, his descriptions of the guilt and pain he felt from these losses are touching, heartfelt and occasionally a little over the top, especially when he recounts his predawn jogs around the Mall in Washington: “I would ritually look up at that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him, How did you do it?”

McNamara published his autobiography, “In Retrospect,” two decades after the Vietnam War as a kind of pre-death-bed confession. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he wrote of his and his colleagues’ mistakes. Rumsfeld’s autobiography, “Known and Unknown,” was fueled by his desire to settle scores with his Bush administration foes and shoot back at critics of his tenure as defense secretary.

Gates, widely considered the best defense secretary of the post-World War II era, seems to have been driven by a desire to sort through all of the anger, frustration, sadness and guilt that he held inside during his tenure. The book comes off a bit like an extended therapy session.

In public Gates was always polite and in control. His private and deep sense of obligation to the men and women he was sending to war made him an effective defense secretary. He fought to buy special mine-resistant vehicles for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over the objections of many of his generals, who didn’t want to spend the money. He forced the Air Force to scale back its plans to buy high-tech fighter jets and instead to boost spending on surveillance drones that were desperately needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He insisted that the military add field hospitals and helicopters in Afghanistan to ensure that every wounded soldier or Marine would receive treatment within an hour of his injuries. Military doctors insisted that two hours was fast enough. Gates imagined a wounded soldier waiting for a helicopter in the dirt and dust, and told the military doctors and generals to make it an hour.

There are moments when Gates seems to realize that he let his pain, guilt and frustration overwhelm his judgment in the latter days of his tenure. “My fuse was really getting short,” he writes. “It seemed like I was blowing up — in my own, quiet way — nearly every day, and no longer just in the privacy of my own office with my staff.”

Like most soldiers, journalists and civilians who passed through Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates still seems to be struggling to make sense of his war years and the toll they took on him. He says he is “indescribably proud” of the U.S. military’s efforts to stem the chaos in Iraq and believes that the American war effort in Afghanistan is on a path to reasonable success. He also carries the heavy burden of knowing that troops were killed and maimed following his orders.

This confusing, frustrating and sometimes fascinating book is best summed up by a pair of conflicting statements Gates uttered during his tenure.In a meeting with Obama’s national security team a few days before the president’s inauguration, Gates described being defense secretary as “the most gratifying experience of my life.” Only days earlier, in an e-mail to a friend, he confided: “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”


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Two US generals forced to retire over attack on US base in Afghanistan

The US Marine Corps has forced two two-star generals to retire for what the top general called their failure to secure a base in Afghanistan attacked by the Taliban last year, killing two Marines and destroying several aircraft.






US Marine, Major General Charles Mark Gurganus Photo: AFP/Getty Images




our foreign staff

12:09AM BST 01 Oct 2013


The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos, said he took the action after reviewing the findings of a four-month investigation by the US Central Command.

Fifteen Taliban fighters penetrated Camp Bastion in southwestern Afghanistan and destroyed almost an entire squadron of Marine AV-8B Harrier jets in a September 2012 attack that was one of the most brazen of the war.

Gen Amos said he asked Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus and Maj. Gen. Gregg A. Sturdevant to retire. They agreed to do so.

He also recommended that Maj Gen Gurganus' nomination to the rank of lieutenant general be rescinded and that Maj Gen Sturdevant receive a letter of censure from the secretary of the Navy.

Maj Gen Gurganus was commander of all coalition forces in southwestern Afghanistan. Maj Gen Sturdevant was commander of Marine aviation in the area.


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It is the first time since the Vietnam War that any general has been forced to retire for negligence after a successful enemy attack.

Gen Amos said the two generals did not deploy enough troops to guard the base and "failed to exercise the level of judgment expected of commanders of their rank."

"It was unrealistic to think that a determined enemy would not be able to penetrate the perimeter fence," Gen Amos said.

"In their duty to protect their forces these two generals did not meet [the] standard."

The attack occurred at Camp Bastion, the British-run Nato air base in Helmand province that adjoins Camp Leatherneck, a US facility that also serves as the Nato headquarters for southwestern Afghanistan.

Marines use Camp Bastion's runway and dozens of US helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft are parked there.

On the night of the attack, Tongan troops, who had been assigned as lookouts by the British commanders of Camp Bastion, left one watchtower unmanned.

The investigation found that aspects of the US-British security plan were "sub-optimal," with no single officer in charge of security for both camps.

Troop reductions also affected security measures, it found.

Two US marines were killed in the attack and eight were wounded. The cost of damage to aircraft was estimated at $200m.

When told of the decision to relieve him of his duties, Maj Gen Gurganus told Gen Amos "As the most senior commander on the ground, I am accountable."

Gen Amos said it was the "hardest decision I have had to make as commandant of the Marine Corps" and that he had served with both men in combat, calling them "extraordinary Marine officers."

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Afghanistan Rejects Talks With Taliban and the U.S.

BREAKING NEWS 

Wednesday, June 19, 2013 9:18 AM EDT



Less than 24 hours after the Taliban opened an office for peace talks in the Gulf emirate of Qatar, the Afghan government backed away on Wednesdayfrom even starting discussions with its adversaries and broke off talks on future military cooperation with the United States.

In one statement, signaling his anger at how the Americans had negotiated the opening of the Taliban office, President Hamid Karzai suspended talks on a bilateral security agreement with the United States which would allow American troops to stay after 2014.

It was at best a rocky prelude to peace talks with the Taliban, which have collapsed repeatedly in the past. American officials have long pushed for such negotiations, believing that they are crucial to stabilizing Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Western forces next year.


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Ambassador Richard N. Haass

Found some info on Richard Haass' Ambassador status:

AMBASSADOR  RICHARD N. HAASS 

Ambassador Haass is Director of Policy Planning for the Department of State.  He was also confirmed by the U.S. Senate to hold the rank of ambassador.  In this latter capacity, he is the lead U.S. Government official in support of the Northern Ireland peace process.  Previously, Ambassador Haass was Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.  He was also a consultant for NBC News and a frequent contributor to foreign affairs journals and the op-ed pages of major newspapers.  His is the author or editor of nine books on American foreign policy, including The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, and Intervention:  The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World.  He is also the author of one book on management.  The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur:  How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization.  Ambassador Haass has extensive prior government experience.   From 1989 to1993, he was Special Assistant to President George Bush and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council.  Previously, he served in various posts in the Departments of State and Defense and was a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate. Ambassador Haass has also been Director of National Security Programs and a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.  In addition, he has been the Sol M. Linowitz Visiting Professor of International Studies at Hamilton College, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a B.A. degree from Oberlin College and both the Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Oxford University. 

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/symposia/topical2001/haass.html

From January 2001 to June 2003, Dr. Richard Haass was director of policy planning for the Department of State, where he was a principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate to hold the rank of ambassador, Dr. Haass also served as U.S. coordinator for policy toward the future of Afghanistan and U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. For his efforts, he received the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award.

.http://www.cfr.org/experts/afghanistan-iraq-us-strategy-and-politics/richard-n-haass/b3350/bio

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Families of slain SEAL Team 6 to blame government for deaths of servicemen

GOVERNMENT TOPICS
MAY 9, 2013

BY: JOE NEWBY

A Pakistani shepherd in Abbottabad walks past the hideout of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S.-led ground operation.
Credits: Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images


Republican newsletter

Three families of Navy SEAL Team Six servicemen, along with the family of an Army National Guardsman, plan to appear at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, May 9, to "disclose never before revealed information about how and why their sons along with 26 others died in a fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan" on August 6, 2011, a few months after the raid on the compound that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, The Blaze reported.

RELATED TOPICS
Government Topics
SEAL Team 6
Barack Obama
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Osama bin Laden


Thirty-eight people, including seven Afghans and an interpreter, died when the helicopter carrying 25 members of SEAL Team Six and five other Americans, crashed.

According to a press release put out by the families, retired military experts will also appear to explain "how and why the government is as much responsible for the deaths of their sons as is the Taliban."

Out of touch -- Rebuke of Clinton and Obama from the heart of a mother



The press release says that areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

How President Obama and Vice President Biden, having disclosed on May 4, 2011, that Navy SEAL Team VI carried out the successful raid on Bin Laden’s compound resulting in the master terrorist’s death, put a retaliatory target on the backs of the fallen heroes.

How and why high-level military officials sent these Navy SEAL Team VI heroes into battle without special operations aviation and proper air support.

How and why middle-level military brass carries out too many ill-prepared missions to boost their standing with top-level military brass and the Commander-in-Chief in order that they can be promoted.

How the military restricts special operations servicemen and others from engaging in timely return fire when fired upon by the Taliban and other terrorist groups and interests, thus jeopardizing the servicemen’s lives.
How and why the denial of requested pre-assault fire may have contributed to the shoot down of the Navy SEAL Team VI helicopter and the death of these special operations servicemen.

How Afghani forces accompanying the Navy SEAL Team VI servicemen on the helicopter were not properly vetted and how they possibly disclosed classified information to the Taliban about the mission, resulting in the shoot down of the helicopter.

How military brass, while prohibiting any mention of a Judeo-Christian God, invited a Muslim cleric to the funeral for the fallen Navy SEAL Team VI heroes who disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen by damning them as infidels to Allah. A video of the Muslim cleric’s “prayer” will be shown with a certified translation.

According to Jason Howerton, the press conference "has not been highly publicized."

“This press conference takes on special significance given that our government has over the last twelve years since September 11th committed brave American servicemen to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that, in large part as a result of politics, were poorly conceived of and implemented, resulting in the deaths of thousands and the maiming of tens of thousands of our brave heroes. To make matters even worse, America has effectively lost these wars,” said Larry Klayman, legal counsel for the families.

The press conference also comes on the heels of a House hearing on the Benghazi terror attack that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.

Video of one mother's reaction to Obama's campaign ad "One Chance" can be seen here.

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General: Ramadan Factor in Afghan Insider Attack

Published on Aug 23, 2012 by AssociatedPress

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan says one possible explanation for a spike in killings of American troops by their Afghan partners is the strain of fasting during the just-concluded Muslim holy month of Ramadan. (Aug. 23)

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Afghanistan: our modern opium war

Washington justified this occupation by the 'war on terror'. But it makes more sense as another theatre of the failed 'war on drugs'

Pratap Chatterjee

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 April 2012 11.19 EDT

An Afghan farmer tends his poppy crop. Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

Parween, the opium farmer in Badakhsan province, who supported her ageing husband. Haji Barat, the opium merchant in the provincial capital of Fayzabad, who built a health clinic with 50 beds with his profits. Images one does not expect from war-torn Afghanistan, a country that makes headlines now only when Qur'ans are burned or another massacre takes place.

The stories of Opium Nation, a new book about Afghanistan by Fariba Nawa, an Afghan American who was born in Herat but grew up in northern California after her family fled the Soviets, offer a rare and contradictory glimpse into the drug trade that is the economic life blood of Afghanistan. This is the actual narrative that the media and politicians should be grappling with.

The author takes the reader on a seven-year journey through many provinces, in her search for the story behind Darya, a 12-year-old opium bride, who was sold by her father to pay off a debt. As Nawa nears her goal of following the young girl-turned-woman whom she meets in the opening pages, she starts to understand the complexities of the drug trade.

She discovers, for example, that not all those involved in this transnational business are simply victims or villains. Some of the farmers and traders are small-town heroes whose tales are seldom heard because they don't fit the picture we want to hear.

Nawa also discovers that the same is true of the country of her birth. She writes:

"The western media propagates an image of a romantic Afghanistan, one that cannot be conquered or tamed. Its people are unruly natives unwelcoming to modern society. Others believe that it's the white man's burden to save it from ignorance and tribalism."

When she started this odyssey in 2000, during the time of the Taliban, Nawa says that she, too, believed these myths and believed that it was her mission to save Darya. At the end, having traveled to opium bazaars and rehabilitation clinics, visited the beautiful homes of warlords and attended the Blackwater-run police training sessions to destroy the trade, she discovers that the good solutions are much harder to come by than one might hope. She concludes:

"Darya is no longer a mystery or a victim I must liberate. The Afghan women who live there are not the weak, voiceless victims they are so often made out to be in the western media."

Instead of trying to just save the victims and punish the villains of the drug trade in Afghanistan, she argues that the west needs to understand that it has taken Afghanistan 30 years to build a strong opium trade and it is unlikely to take less time to dismantle what has become the cornerstone of the national economy. "There are no short cuts, quick fixes, or shock-and-awe solutions," says Nawa. It is a lesson that would be well noted by those in power in Washington, if they are contemplating embarking on the even more ambitious project of introducing "democracy" to the struggling masses in Central Asia.

Bringing peace and prosperity to war-torn Afghanistan was a first and major mission of Barack Obama's foreign policy. Today, with the fresh new images of burnt Qur'ans and the innocent victims of the alleged rampage by a US soldier, the question of the endgame of this conflict has been pushed back to the front pages of the daily newspapers yet again. "When Qur'an Burnings Incite Riots and a Mass Murder Doesn't" was the headline of a New York Times article, puzzling over the eternal mystery of the unruly native.

Every day on TV network news, we hear the grave voices of experts on the "war on terror" speaking to us from Washington. Sometimes, it is Peter Bergen at the New America Foundation, who met Osama bin Laden; on other occasions, it is Lisa Curtis at the Heritage Foundation, who worked at the CIA.

Time and again, the media tell us that Washington is consulting books galore on how to "solve" Afghanistan. "The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books – both suddenly popular among White House," declared the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Which would it be? Lessons in Disaster or A Better War, both of which are chronicles of Vietnam. Yet, with more than half the income of Afghanistan derived from the opium trade, it would a mistake to imagine that the war in Afghanistan has anything in common with fighting the Viet Cong or even Communism.

Opium Nation reminds us that Afghanistan is not just a war, but a country of many ordinary yet unique people, kind and cruel, rich and poor. Not least of all, Nawa points out the obvious, inescapable fact: the solution to the opium trade – and the war – lies not in bullets or military strategy, but in addressing the root cause, which is the demand for the drug in the west.

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Vehicle explodes on Afghan runway; Panetta safe

Updated 09:44 a.m., Wednesday, March 14, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon says an Afghan drove an apparently stolen vehicle onto the ramp area of a British airfield in southern Afghanistan and into a ditch, where it exploded in flames, about the same time U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's aircraft was landing.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby, said no one in Panetta's party was injured.

Kirby said the vehicle, a pickup truck, drove at high speed onto the ramp where Panetta's plane was intended to stop. He said there was no immediate indication that the Afghan was attempting to attack Panetta's party, but the circumstances were still being pieced together.

Initial reports said no explosive devices were found in the vehicle or in a search of the driver.

Kirby said the driver was being treated for burn injuries.

Source: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Vehicle-explodes-on-Afghan-runway-Panetta-safe-3406056.php#ixzz1p6xqIPj6

Obama apologizes for Quran burning in Afghanistan

US President Barack Obama with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.—File Photo

KABUL:President Barack Obama apologized Thursday for the burning of copies of the Muslim holy book at a US military base this week, as violent protests raging nationwide led a man dressed in an Afghan army uniform to kill two US troops.

The Afghans’ furious response to the Quran burning, three days of riots in several cities nationwide, reflected the anger at what they perceive as foreign forces disrespect for Afghan laws and culture.

In a letter sent to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Obama expressed his administration’s ”regret and apologies over the incident in which religious materials were unintentionally mishandled,” White House national security council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

He added that the letter was delivered by Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Thursday afternoon.

Karzai’s office said Obama called the Quran burnings ”inadvertent,” adding that the US ”will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible.”

US apologies for the desecration, and an appeal from Karzai for calm, have failed to temper the anger of Afghans, who staged rallies in seven provinces Thursday, sparking clashes with Afghan police and security forces that left at least five demonstrators dead. Seven protesters were killed in clashes on Wednesday.

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