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Afghan and international forces have killed 22 Taliban militants in a fierce battle in western Afghanistan, the Afghan interior ministry said Wednesday.
In an operation Tuesday night by Afghan police and army, backed by coalition forces, which lasted almost four hours in Farah province, 25 insurgents were also wounded and another 12 arrested, the ministry said in a statement.
“Eight rocket launchers, 35 Kalashnikovs, one device for detonating remote-controlled bombs, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition and some anti-vehicle mines were also discovered,” the statement said. There were no police casualties, it added.
The central region of Farah province where the battle took place has been increasingly encroached upon by Taliban militants, who in recent months have escalated their insurgency against government and coalition troops.
The operation in the Pusht Rod district of Farah began at 8:30 pm (1600 GMT) and lasted until midnight, the ministry said. It gave no further details.
Farah borders Helmand province, where Taliban influence is strong and coalition troops have been facing intensified resistance from Taliban-linked fighters for the last few months.
US Marines are battling to clear heavily mined areas, such as the Bhuji Bhast Pass which is essentially a Taliban corridor 36 kilometres (22 miles long) and the only route between Golestan village and Deleram city.
Villages in the area are also regarded as hostile to the foreign forces, who are battling to adopt a new strategy in the war that wins the confidence of ordinary people away from supporting the Taliban.
The US and NATO have more than 100,000 troops based in Afghanistan to wipe out the Taliban threat, with the fiercest fighting in Helmand and Kandahar, which are seeing an escalation of deaths caused by remote-controlled bombs.
The interior ministry statement comes as US President Barack Obama is weighing a request from his military top brass for additional 30,000-40,000 troops for Afghanistan as part of a change in strategy from killing insurgents to protecting civilians and promoting development.
Ok Mr. President and circle of advisors, it is time for you to figure out what you are going to do. Your VP said you would be tested in the first 6 months, and even though you have been tested domestically, this is your first real test on foreign affairs and definitely the first test on military matters.
Back in April the Administration announced a strategy for Afghanistan. Nobody really knew what that meant except it was going to focus on giving $5 million dollars a year to Pakistan for 5 years, and was supposed to surge in civilian experts. Of course the surge of military that happened in the spring was already planned for by the previous administration. Also, the surge of civilian experts never happened.
A few months later we see the General that had been in charge get fired and forced to retire because he was not the right man for the job. We then see GEN McChrystal and Rodriguez get put into place as the “best guys for the jobâ€.
As soon as he was put into place, McChrystal was ordered to do a comprehensive 60 day review to define what is needed to succeed in Afghanistan. That review was sent to CENTCOM and the Pentagon on August 30th. Today is Sept 30th and now we are hearing a meeting will happen today with the President, VP, SecState, CJCS ADM Mullen, CENTCOM CDR GEN Petreaus, and of course GEN McChrystal via secure video. According to GEN McChrystal in an interview over the weekend, he had only talked with the President once since taking over Afghanistan. ONCE? The President has talked with Leno, Letterman, and countless other talk show and TV hosts once, if not more than once.
I don’t understand what the problem is. We have the NATO chief calling for a surge.
Stepping into an intensifying debate, the new head of NATO said Monday that more allied troops are needed in Afghanistan to help train the country’s security forces.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who took over Aug. 1, said he agreed with an assessment in August by Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, who emphasized the need to secure Afghan cities.
"We have to do more now, if we want to do less later," Rasmussen said during a speech in Washington.
We have GEN Petraeus, who is considered the architect of the turn-around and winning in Iraq, backing GEN McChrystal.
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, says he endorses Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy in Afghanistan.
The Afghan assessment is contained in a confidential report prepared by the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. The thrust of McChrystal’s assessment is that without more troops by next year the eight-year-old conflict could result in failure.
Speaking at a conference of military and civilian counterinsurgency experts, Petraeus said the current multi-dimensional approach is the only way to fight terrorism in Afghanistan, the Voice of America reported. He said Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen also has endorsed McChrystal’s assessment, the report said.
And of course we have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen backing GEN McChrystal.
More American troops are likely to be needed to win the war in Afghanistan, the top U.S. military officer told skeptical Democrats on Tuesday, citing a need to demonstrate U.S. resolve in an increasingly unpopular war.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a proper effort to counter the Taliban insurgency "probably means more forces."
And last but not least we have the words from GEN McChrystal himself. The man who was put into place by this administration to steer the war in Afghanistan to a success. The man was put there to replace GEN McKiernan who apparently was doing things wrong, according to this administration.
The situation in Afghanistan is serious and growing worse and without more boots on the ground the United States risks failure in a war it’s been waging since shortly after the terror attacks of September 2001, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says in a confidential report.
"Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it," McChrystal wrote in a five-page Commander’s Summary. His 66-page report, sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Aug. 30, is now under review by President Barack Obama.
"Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall effort is deteriorating," McChrystal said of the war’s progress.
While asserting that more troops are needed, McChrystal also pointed out an "urgent need" to significantly revise strategy. The U.S. needs to interact better with the Afghan people, McChrystal said, and better organize its efforts with NATO allies.
"We run the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage. The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves," he wrote.
In his blunt assessment of the tenacious Taliban insurgency, McChrystal warned that unless the U.S. and its allies gain the initiative and reverse the momentum of the militants within the next year the U.S. "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible"
But of course, what do those 4-star Generals and Admirals know? They could not possibly know what it takes to win a war. This is why we have such profound and experienced-laden individuals like the SecState telling the President what needs to be done.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed back against the US military’s blunt warning that the battle against insurgents in Afghanistan would likely be lost within a year without more US troops.
Clinton’s comments in an interview with PBS television late Monday came amid reports that the Pentagon has asked General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to delay a request for more troops.
In the interview, Clinton expressed "respect" for McChrystal’s assessment that the United States would likely lose the war in Afghanistan within a year without more US forces.
"But I can only tell you there are other assessments from very expert military analysts who have worked in counter-insurgencies that are the exact opposite," she said.
And of course we can’t forget the Vice President, who is sooooo smart in foreign policy that he wanted to break Iraq up into a three state nation based on ethnic lines. Like that is not a recipe for a civil war disaster. Anyway, the VP wants to invoke the Bill Clinton way of dealing with bad guys, just throw some bombs at them and it will all go away. What an idiot to think such a thing.
The vice president’s plan: Scale back the overall American military footprint in Afghanistan, drop the mission of rescuing the country from the Taliban, focus on strikes against Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – the real threat to U.S. national security — using special forces and Predator missile attacks.
Biden, with a son serving in the military and years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also brings one memory to the table that the 48-year-old Obama does not. At 66, Biden has a visceral feel for the American casualties in Vietnam.
But the reality is that the American people and the military leadership of this country want a decision made. They want it to be the right decision and they want it now.
Critics are lambasting President Obama for hitting the pause button on the war in Afghanistan, making U.S. commanders seeking thousands more troops there wait for a decision as he tries to get the "strategy right first."
"The commander in chief is the commander in chief, period," said retired Army Lt. Col. James Carafano, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "You can’t fight a war from Washington D.C. There’s only one way this works: You have trust and confidence in the leaders on the ground, or you don’t."
Some critics are going so far as to ask whether Obama is more concerned with finding a political strategy to ensure his re-election than he is in finding a military strategy to win the eight-year war.
That question has been raised after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top general in Afghanistan, revealed Sunday that he has spoken to the president only once since he took command in May.
"It is nutty," said Bing West, a former Marine and defense official in the Reagan administration. "Obama is stuck with his war of necessity yet he can’t bring himself to face the fact he doesn’t even know his commander in the field!"
It will take time to build up the infrastructure to handle 10,000 more troops, much less 40,000 more. It takes time to move that many troops and start the wheels in motion. But we need to stay on the offensive and not give the enemy a chance to reorganize or plan their next move. We need them on their heels. We also don’t need them to take advantage of this in-decisiveness via their own I/O and media campaign.
Strike while the iron is hot, listen to the experts and the “best man for the jobâ€. Not to the bloviating Hillary Clinton who is a shell of a Secretary of State, only having that job to keep her from running again in 2012. Or to the VP that was picked solely for insurance and to give some experience to the ticket, but has proved to be more of a liability than an asset via his mouth. Wasting time being on Leno, Letterman, the Sunday talk show circuit or even worse wasting money and time flying to Denmark to wine and dine the Olympic committee in order to get the Olympics and millions of dollars into the most corrupt city in this country is not proper time and task management.
When the forces surged in the spring I was for it as long as they were allowed to do their job. As long as their presence their was not wasted. I wanted them to go in and get the job done and not just be IED fodder.
There are only two outcomes to a war, WIN or LOSE, VICTORY or DEFEAT. So now it is time to decide. This is a tough decision for the President, that I understand. But it is also a fairly simple one. Do you want the all the lives lost and ruined after eight years of war to be in vain? Do you want to give the enemy a huge I/O victory by allowing them to say they beat us like the Russians? Do you want to give up all we have gained and provided the people of Afghanistan? Turn your back on them now and you might as well be signing the death warrant of not only thousands of Afghans, but more than likely hundreds if not thousands of Europeans or Americans at some point in the future.
I am glad to see the Marines recognized the need, made a decision and acted on it. They didn’t let politicians worrying about jobs in their district, or the Pentagon or worse yet the Administration slow them down. Because it is clear the current administration has a hard time making a decision when it comes to strategy and war.
With unprecedented speed, the first of thousands of mine-resistant, ambush-protected all-terrain vehicles —known as M-ATVs — are being deployed to Afghanistan just three months after a delivery order was awarded.
Conventional MRAP vehicles feature a V-shaped hull to deflect roadside bombs, and are proven to be lifesavers on the battlefield. The procurement of the M-ATV grew from an urgent requirement to provide troops a smaller and more maneuverable vehicle that can travel off-road and navigate Afghanistan’s difficult, mountainous terrain, Marine Corps Systems Command officials said.
“We have pulled out all the stops to collapse the schedule and get these vehicles into theater,†said Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Michael M. Brogan, commander of Marine Corps Systems Command and joint program executive officer of the MRAP program. “We are doing everything that’s required to ensure that they are safe, that the risk assessments are complete, [and] that they’re fully integrated and flown into Afghanistan.â€
The M-ATV supports small-unit combat operations in highly restricted rural, mountainous and urban environments that include mounted patrols, reconnaissance, security, convoy protection, communications, command and control, and combat service support. It is designed to replace the up-armored Humvee in Afghanistan. The M-ATV will carry up to five personnel: four plus a gunner.
The Defense Department has ordered more than 4,300 of the all-terrain mine-resistant trucks, and another 1,400 are planned. Oshkosh Corp. is producing the vehicles.
U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kristopher Marku and Lance Cpl. Andres Luna, both with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, teach English words to an Afghan boy during a security patrol in the Nawa district of the Helmand province of Afghanistan on Sept. 3, 2009. Marines conduct security patrols to decrease insurgent activity and gain the trust of the Afghan people. The 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment is deployed with Regimental Combat Team 3 to conduct counterinsurgency operations in partnership with Afghan National Security Forces in southern Afghanistan. DoD photo by Cpl. Artur Shvartsberg, U.S. Marine Corps.
So as many who read this blog regularly know, this site had its first real technical problem starting week before last. This technical issue started mid-morning on Friday, Sept. 18th, and lasted until Friday Sept. 25th.
For an entire week this blog was pretty much un-useable. Of course this happens during a week when there were more news stories and things coming out of Afghanistan than any other time this year. This is what was extremely frustrating.
Prior to the 18th when problems started, this blog was receiving around 1000 visitors and readers a day. From the 18th thru the 25th this blog was only getting about 250 readers per day.
My civilian background is in IT security, and I have done lots of what we call “IT forensics†when dealing with attacks and hacks against websites and applications. This knowledge that I had helped greatly in finding the real problem that was happening and not having to spend more money, which is what Go-Daddy technical support wanted me to do.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole issue started mid-morning on Friday Sept. 18th. I noticed that my site was not responsive and when it did respond, that many images were broken or the page did not look correctly. The style, colors, fonts, images, etc. are driven by a thing called a style-sheet. So I determined that the style-sheet had a hard time loading, as did images or like I said the entire site in some instances.
I called Go-daddy technical support in the afternoon and asked them if there were any problems on the server that they knew of or if any other sites that also are hosted on the same physical server as mine were reporting any problems. After being on hold a while, the support guy came back and told me there were no known problems, but if I wanted to stay on the line more he could check or open a ticket. I did not have much time, so I told him that I would check back after 24 hours (on Saturday) and see if things had gotten better. I know there are lots of points of failure and areas that could have issues between my computer and the site itself. Since those points are all shared, it would only take a matter of time for others to complain.
Well Saturday and Sunday came and went. I was very busy over the weekend and didn’t have time to deal with it, so I figured I would check the site on Monday. 72 hours is much better than 24 hours when dealing with a problem. Monday morning I noticed that the Bouhammer site was still not working properly. I called Go-Daddy technical support again and they told me that there was a problem found with the server since my last call and they were working it to fix it. They told me that the bouhammer.com site was not the only one affected.
I checked the site Tuesday and found it still not working right. I called Go-Daddy back and found that they had fixed the server but knew my site was still not working correctly. Since it was no longer a “global†and specific to bouhammer.com they assigned me a incident number. I explained my background to the guy and told him that I thought either a denial of service attack was happening, a script or something from another site was caught in a loop, or that the server was not 100% yet. After telling him this, I let Go-daddy tech support continue to work the issue.
The next day (Wednesday) I called back to check on the status. While on the phone, I then did some more digging and found the server hitting my site multiple times a second and using up all the connections. I traced back the offending server to Go-daddy themselves. I told the support tech this and told him that it should be easy to resolve since it was one of their servers. He asked that I contact their Abuse department as this was their area of expertise. I knew this and had already started to draft my email to them. I gave the tech support guy and the abuse department all of the server info, to include where it was located. Abuse responded with a new incident number to track this new problem.
Later in the day I called back again to tech support. All They told me was it was being worked on, but that was all the tech guy could tell me because the Abuse department is super-secret and the best thing to do is keep emailing them. I told the guy I had been emailing them and they were not getting back to me. I pushed on him to look into it. He did and then came back to me to tell me all my processes and connection to the wordpress database were being used up. He then tried to tell me the reason I was having problems was because my site was too popular and I needed to upgrade my hosting plan to one that allowed for 200 connections instead of 100. I asked him if that upgrade was going to be free, and of course it wasn’t. I then told him that as of that minute, I had only had 96 visitors to my site when I normally would have 600-700 by that time of the day and that I have had as many as 15,000 visitors in one day and never had this problem.
On Thursday I called back and again talked to another support tech. I explained everything yet again. I also informed him that I work in IT support and I knew where the problem was. He tried to tell me that Abuse would get back to me, but I told him I was not happy with their response time, especially since it was a go-daddy server and I was the one who found it. I told him I know they had what is referred to as a scorecard on their customer service and there was an escalation path and I wanted to escalate this issue. He told me he did not know one for Abuse, so I told him to ask his boss, but I wanted to talk to someone that is in charge of the Abuse dept. After a long time on hold yet again, he came back to tell me that his boss and another supervisor were working the issue. He also told me that they could see the ton of connections from the server. He said his boss recommend I upgrade to the highest level hosting plan called Grid hosting because it had unlimited number of database connections. After confirming with him that Go-daddy was not going to give this to me for free, I told him I was not getting off the phone until I had a resolution and not someone trying to upgrade me and put a band-aid on the problem instead of fixing the problem. He pushed some more with his boss and then assured me they would have a fix within the next 72 hours.
Later that night (Thursday) I got an email from Abuse telling me they found two malicious files on my server that had been there since March 30th and they removed them. They also told me how I could modify a certain config file to block this Go-daddy server from eating up all my connections. I asked about the files and how they knew they were malicious, but they could not tell me. I then implemented the config file change and the burden on my site was lifted. It started to respond and the applications I have that show me stats proved the connections quit coming in.
Abuse and I replied back and forth on emails through Friday morning as I kept testing my site. In that exchange, I found out that according to Go-daddy I was running an older version of WordPress because I had not upgraded through them. In fact my version was up to date, because I had been manually keeping it upgraded directly from wordpress.com. I also found out that the Go-daddy server that was making the excessive connections to this site was in fact the server this site is hosted on. A certain wordpress file that is needed, was caught in a loop and kept make page requests of the site on just one blog entry. The blog entry that was posted on Friday morning, the week before when the server had the original problem. So in fact it was not an attack on the bouhammer.com site, and it was a script (called a CRON job) on this site that was hurting this site. This was one of my earliest suspicions based on the behavior I saw and how I know denial of service attacks work. I am convinced that this script started this loop back onto itself as a result of the server having problems that first day and it happened right when I posted a new blog posting.
In order to stop this behavior, I applied the latest version of WordPress again (this time via Go-daddy so they could not use that as an excuse). I did it primarily in the hopes that when this happened, the file that was causing all the problems would be over-written and corrected. I knew I needed this file to run and blocking it as go-daddy had me do with the config file, would not be the proper long-term solution. The re-application of the wordpress upgrade did exactly as I had hoped and stopped the file from acting up.
So ladies and gentlemen, that is the summary (yes I know it is long but I only included the important parts) of what happened on bouhammer.com from Sept. 18th-Sept 25th 2009 and why this site was down so long.
I still like Go-daddy’s service and will still tell people to go with them if given a chance. However I will caution anyone using their service to always be wary of the “you need to upgrade pitchâ€. That is nothing more than trying to fix the symptom, and not applying the cure.
Rick Calvert, the founder and head of Blog World and New Media Expo, has issued a challenge not just to me, but all milbloggers, and their readers. It seems Rick is convinced we can get 200 people to the milblog track on 15 October, which is quite a good number of people. So, he has challenged me to make it happen, and he has challenged you, my readers, to make it happen as well. To help us make this happen, Rick is being very generous. So, here’s the deal:
1. If you are currently serving in the Armed Forces, or are a veteran of same (discharged or retired) and want to attend, drop my friend Blake a line at blake@blakepowers.net with BWE09 Free Registration in the subject line and a short note introducing yourself within, and you will get a code that gives you a free registration for the milblog track on 15 October, and access to the exhibit hall (and the Milblog Lounge) on the 16th & 17th.
2. If you are a military spouse, spouse blogger, military supporter, or reader of the milblogs, the same applies.
3. If you have a blog or other outlets of your own (Twitter, Facebook, newsgroups, e-mail groups, etc.), please spread the word.
4. If you happen to have contacts in blogging or old media in California, Nevada, or Arizona, please reach out to them as well, as we would very much like to be sure that we reach all the different bases in those regions.
I will also note that if you are interested in attending, there are some excellent deals on rooms and such through the Blog World site once you are registered.
While the registration only covers the milblog track and exhibit hall, if you want to attend parties, other sessions, etc., you can contact BWE after you register and see about the costs of upgrades.
Keep an eye on the grid at Blog World, as we are updating as needed and are still working on trying to make a surprise or two happen.
