Abu Yahya al-Libi, the No. 2 man in al Qaeda and a longtime public face of the terror network, has been killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan launched Monday, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
One of the officials said multiples sources confirmed al-Libi's killing to the United States, but the official declined to provide details.
Al-Libi's death marks one of the most significant blows to al Qaeda since the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden in a daring nighttime raid in Pakistan a year ago. Al-Libi was second-in-command behind al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took the helm after bin Laden's death.
"There is no one who even comes close in terms of replacing the expertise (al Qaeda) has just lost," said the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Al-Libi "played a critical role in the group's planning against the West, providing oversight of the external operations efforts," the official said.
"Zawahiri will be hard-pressed to find any one person who can readily step into Abu Yahya's shoes," the official said. "In addition to his gravitas as a longstanding member of AQ's leadership, Abu Yahya's religious credentials gave him the authority to issue fatwas, operational approvals and guidance to the core group in Pakistan and regional affiliates."
The Monday strike was the third such deadly attack in as many days and the 21st suspected U.S. drone strike in Pakistan this year. At least six missiles were fired at a militant compound near the town of Mir Ali in the North Waziristan region near the Afghanistan border.
Reports emerged a couple of years ago that al-Libi was slain, but they proved to be incorrect. Al Qaeda's leadership has been so thinned by the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan that these men were the only two real leaders of the organization left, U.S.
counterterrorism officials said, according to CNN Security Analyst Peter Bergen. Al Qaeda offshoots in other parts of the world, such as the group's affiliate in Yemen, have meanwhile become more potent and worrisome to the United States.
An Islamic scholar and high-ranking member of the group, al-Libi frequently appeared in Internet videos. He gave many videotaped speeches praising al Qaeda leaders, urging resistance and trying to recruit new members.
"Al-Libi is a key motivator in the global jihadi movement and his messages convey a clear threat to U.S. persons or property worldwide," said a "Wanted" statement posted on the website of the U.S. State Department's "Rewards for Justice" program, which offers rewards for information about suspected terrorists.
"Al-Libi is believed to be in hiding in Afghanistan or Pakistan," said the website, which offered a reward of up to $1 million for the 49-year-old Libyan. Al-Libi purportedly was among al Qaeda leaders working in Libya since last year to establish a presence there.
In a video message to fellow Libyans distributed on jihadist forums in December, al-Libi said, "At this crossroads you have found yourselves: You either choose a secular regime that pleases the greedy crocodiles of the West and for them to use it as a means to fulfill their goals, or you take a strong position and establish the religion of Allah."
Al-Libi was captured in 2002 and imprisoned at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. government, but he escaped in 2005.
In 2008, a statement posted on radical Islamic websites known to carry messages from al Qaeda described how four "military leaders" including al-Libi escaped from the prison, but the statement said then that one of the escapees, Abu Abdallah al-Shami, had been killed in a U.S. airstrike.
The statement said that among those escaping with al-Shami was key al Qaeda figure Omar al-Faruq, who died in a British airstrike after the escape.
Another escapee, Abu Nasir al-Qahtani, was captured in Afghanistan in 2006. Al-Shami's death left al-Libi as the only remaining member of that escape who had not been killed or captured.
President Barack Obama's administration recently justified its use of unmanned drones to target suspected terrorists overseas in a rare public statement, with John Brennan, the president's top counterterrorism adviser, saying the strikes are conducted "in full accordance with the law."
The program uses unmanned aerial vehicles, often equipped with Hellfire missiles, to target suspected terrorists in remote locations overseas, with many such strikes occurring in Yemen and Pakistan, despite some internal opposition within the latter country.
Brennan said the United States "respects national sovereignty and international law" and is guided by the laws of war in ordering those attacks. The Pakistani border area is widely believed to be the operating base for the Haqqani network and other militant groups that have attacked international troops in neighboring Afghanistan.
Theirs was an arranged marriage: two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a mutual friend. He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at parties.
At their wedding in Peshawar six years ago, men and women danced separately but also together, “a rarity at that time,” recalled one guest. “It was such a huge gathering that even their family friends from Qatar came.”
When they returned to the United States, his colleagues at the cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden celebrated with a small office party.
The husband, Faisal Shahzad, put photographs of his wife, Huma Mian, on his desk at the Arden office in Stamford, Conn. They bought a brand-new house for $273,000, 35 miles away on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton. By the time they moved in, she was pregnant, the neighbors recalled.
As another day passed with Mr. Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb he had admitted driving into Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on Wednesday about the couple and their life together, along with speculation about his radicalization. People who knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan, said he had changed in the past year or so, becoming more reserved and more religious as he faced what someone who knows the family well called “their financial troubles.”
Last year, one Pakistani friend said, he even asked his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired high-ranking air force pilot in Pakistan, for permission to fight in Afghanistan.
Mr. Haq, now in his 70s, adamantly refused, according to a person familiar with the conversation, saying that he disapproved of the mission and reminding his son that Islam does not permit a man to abandon his wife or children.
As a newlywed, the wedding guest said of Mr. Shahzad by e-mail from Pakistan, “there was no sign of him being extremist or, for that matter, he wasn’t a bit religious.” But in the past couple of years, after changing jobs and fathering two children, Mr. Shahzad “started talking more of Islam.” The guest spoke on the condition he not be identified because of concerns about his safety in the wake of the attempted car bombing.
“The recession had taken a toll on them, I guess,” he wrote in an e-mail message from Pakistan. He said that their money worries became apparent in 2008 or 2009 and that Mr. Shahzad “lost his way during the financial problems.” JPMorgan Chase has since moved to foreclose on the Shelton house, which the couple had abandoned in a hurry, leaving behind clothes and toys.
In February, Mr. Shahzad leased a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport, Conn. His landlord said he never saw Mr. Shahzad’s wife. Faiz Ahmad, a friend from the Shahzad family’s ancestral village, Mohib Banda, said that when he last saw Mr. Shahzad, at a wedding a year and a half ago, he was sure that something was wrong. Mr. Shahzad seemed changed, he said, sitting by himself and not talking very much.
He was “completely quiet on the sofa, like someone who has some worries, and undergoing some internal change,” Mr. Ahmad said. “So he was sitting silent, silent. And silence in itself is a question.”
A Pakistani man said that an acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that within the past year, Mr. Shahzad had peered critically at a glass of whiskey the friend was holding, indicating a judgmental stance typical for rigid jihadis.
Mr. Shahzad, now 30, appeared to be tracing a familiar arc of frustration, increasing religiosity and, finally, violence. He was born and raised in Pakistan, with a privileged upbringing in a moderate family that lived in at least three places — Karachi, Rawalpindi and Mohib Banda. Mr. Haq, according to Mr. Ahmad, “was a man of modern thinking and of the modern age.”
Family friends interviewed on Wednesday said they believed that Mr. Haq was in hiding in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in western Pakistan, where the family has wheat fields. Mr. Shahzad’s wife was also believed to be in Pakistan, though her whereabouts was unknown. Dawn, a Pakistani daily, reported that her father had been arrested in Karachi, but Pakistani authorities would not confirm that.
Mr. Shahzad, the youngest of four, was born into a new generation in the years after a military autocrat, Zia ul-Haq, began to inject a rigid version of Islam into Pakistan’s education system. At the same time, hard-line mosques were given money and land, elevating a narrow, often sectarian world view that cast a pall over young Pakistanis.
Ms. Mian, the oldest of four, was born in Colorado, though she spent summer vacations in Pakistan and lived with her family in Qatar for a while as a child, according to the wedding guest. Her father, Mohammad Asif Mian, earned two master’s degrees at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., in the 1980s, and has written four books.
In the best-selling “Project Economics and Decision Analysis,” published in 2002, Mr. Mian thanked family members for their patience and support, adding, “Special thanks to my daughters at the University of Colorado for being on the dean’s list; this has contributed a lot to my enthusiasm.”
Ms. Mian and her sisters, Saba and Hina, all studied at Denver-area colleges and shared a house just off the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2003 and 2004.
Huma Mian married Mr. Shahzad soon after earning an accounting degree in 2004, and moved to Connecticut, where he was pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Bridgeport and, on an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers, was working as an operation analyst at Elizabeth Arden, managing and analyzing accounts receivable, according to a résumé obtained by MSNBC.
“I was always surprised, with her having to buy milk for the baby and everything else, how they afforded this on one income,” recalled Brenda J. Thurman, a neighbor in Shelton.
The couple did not socialize much with people on their block. “It was three years before I knew she spoke English,” Ms. Thurman said.
Ms. Thurman said that Ms. Mian left for a couple of months in late 2008 or early 2009, and that Mr. Shahzad told her she was going to Pakistan to have their second child. Within a few months of her return, they packed up and left again last summer. Mr. Shahzad, who had left Elizabeth Arden in 2006 to become a client reporting analyst at Affinion, a financial marketing services company in Norwalk, Conn., quit his job there.
Piles of garbage remained outside the home in Shelton this week, filled with clues about their lives. There were packets of Nair, moisturizer with Arabic writing on the back, a makeup brush, a Japanese cherry blossom scent body spritzer, wrapping paper and gift bags that appeared to be for baby gifts.
There was an envelope addressed to “Faisal, Huma and Alishaba,” which contained a card proclaiming, “Congratulations on your new little girl!”
How, why or where Mr. Shahzad became radicalized remains unclear. Dr. Saud Anwar, the founder of a Pakistani-American association in Connecticut, said that as soon as Mr. Shahzad’s name surfaced in connection with the car bomb, he canvassed Connecticut Muslim and Pakistani groups and found he was not involved with any of them.
But Dr. Anwar said he had been in touch with a university classmate of Mr. Shahzad’s, a man of Pakistani descent who told Dr. Anwar he did not want to be interviewed by reporters. The classmate said he had remained friends with the couple and had noticed something different about Mr. Shahzad about a year ago.
“His personality had changed — he had become more introverted,” Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. “He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things.” Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be “on his own that he was learning all these things.”
Mr. Ahmad, the friend from Mohib Banda, speculated that the transformation was rooted in Karachi. An associate of Mr. Shahzad’s was arrested in a mosque believed to have ties with a militant group in Karachi early Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
“The question is who has put Faisal in this path?” Mr. Ahmad asked. “The Faisal with the beard that you see, he was not the old Faisal. He was like you, like me, handsome, liberal and an active person.”
According to Pakistan’s information minister, Mr. Shahzad traveled to Pakistan 13 times in the past seven years. One Pakistani official who knew the family said it was unlikely that Mr. Shahzad would have been radicalized in Pakistan if he was only on short trips, which tend to be dominated by family commitments like weddings; the criminal complaint against him filed on Tuesday says that he returned in February from a five-month stint. It also said Mr. Shahzad had been trained in bomb-making in Waziristan.
Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad “emotional” and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States’ military actions, fueled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.
“A person sees the brutality of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mr. Ali noted. “These scenes affect people.”
The résumé posted Wednesday on msnbc.com said Mr. Shahzad held three different positions at Elizabeth Arden over five years starting in mid-2001, and then spent three years at Affinion. At Arden, he said he had “decreased bad debt write-offs by 47 percent” and “recovered over $2.5 mil in ‘lost’ revenue.” At Affinion, he said he prepared “monthly commission forecasting for high-profile Affinion clients such as Citibank, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, Peoples Bank, US Bank, Wells Fargo and a couple of smaller clients.”
But James Hart, an Affinion spokesman, said “there’s a lot of résumé puffery in there” and that Mr. Shahzad had been “one rung up from entry level” when he left.
A former manager at Elizabeth Arden said that he was the only Pakistani working for the company at the time, but never asked for special accommodation for prayer. And she remembered that on Sept. 11, Mr. Shahzad, like everyone else, huddled around the one radio in the office, listening to bulletins about the attacks on the World Trade Center.
“I think he was just normal,” she recalled. “Isn’t it always the case, though? It’s always the normal ones that you don’t really think they’re going to do something like this.”
The U.S. and Britain closed their embassies in Yemen on Sunday in the face of al-Qaida threats, after both countries announced an increase in aid to the government to fight the terror group linked to the failed attempt to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas.
The confrontation with al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen has gained new urgency since the 23-year-old Nigerian accused in the attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told American investigators he received training and instructions from the group's operatives in Yemen. President Barack Obama said Saturday that the al-Qaida offshoot was behind the attempt.
The White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said the American Embassy, which was attacked twice in 2008, was shut Sunday because of an "active" al-Qaida threat. A statement on the embassy's Web site announcing the closure cited "ongoing threats" from the terror group and did not say how long it would remain closed.
In London, Britain's Foreign Office said its embassy was closed for security reasons. It said officials would decide later whether to reopen it on Monday.
The closure comes as Washington is dramatically stepping up aid to Yemen to fight al-Qaida, which has built up strongholds in remote parts of the impoverished, mountainous nation where government control outside the capital is weak.
Over the weekend, Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced that Washington this year will more than double the $67 million in counterterrorism aid that it provided Yemen in 2009. On Saturday, Petraeus met with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to discuss coordination in the fight against al-Qaida.
Britain announced Sunday that Washington and London will back the creation of a new counterterrorism police unit in Yemen. Britain will also host a high-level international conference Jan. 28 to hammer out an international strategy to counter radicalization in Yemen.
The U.S. also provided intelligence and other help to back two Yemeni air and ground assaults on al-Qaida hideouts last month, reported to have killed more than 60 people. Yemeni authorities said more than 30 suspected militants were among the dead.
The U.S. has increasingly provided intelligence, surveillance and training to Yemeni forces during the past year, and has provided some firepower, a senior U.S. defense official has said. Some of that assistance may be through the expanded use of unmanned drones, and the U.S. is providing funding to Yemen for helicopters and other equipment. Officials, however, say there are no U.S. ground forces or fighter aircraft in Yemen.
On Thursday, the embassy sent a notice to Americans in Yemen urging them to be vigilant about security. and announced the increased counterterrorism aid.
Yemeni security officials said over the weekend that the country had deployed several hundred extra troops to Marib and Jouf, two mountainous eastern provinces that are al-Qaida's main strongholds in the country and where Abdulmutallab may have visited. U.S. and Yemeni investigators have been trying to track Abdulmutallab's steps in Yemen, which he visited from August until Dec. 7. He was there ostensibly to study Arabic in San'a, but he disappeared for much of that time.
Al-Qaida has killed a number of top security officials in outlying provinces in recent months, underscoring Yemeni government's lack of control over the country. Tribes hold sway in the region, and many of them are discontented with the central government and have given refuge to al-Qaida fighters, both Yemenis and other Arabs coming from Saudi Arabia or war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden and the site of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, has a weak central government whose authority does not extend far beyond the capital San'a. In addition to battling al-Qaida fighters, it also faces two separate internal rebellions in the north and south.
Located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen straddles a strategic maritime crossroads at the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the access point to the Suez Canal. Across the Gulf is Somalia, an even more tumultuous nation where the U.S. has said al-Qaida militants have been increasing their activity. Yemen also borders Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer.
There have been a spate of assaults on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and it has closed several times over past threats. In an attack in September 2008, gunmen and two vehicles packed with explosives attacked the U.S. Embassy, killing 19 people including an 18-year-old American woman and six militants. None of those killed or wounded were U.S. diplomats or embassy employees. Al-Qaida in Yemen claimed responsibility.
In March 2003, two people were shot dead and dozens more are wounded as police clash with demonstrators trying to storm the embassy. In March 2008, three mortars missed the U.S. Embassy and crashed into a high school for girls nearby, killing a security guard
Last January, gunmen in a car exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint near the embassy, hours after the embassy received threats of a possible attack by al-Qaida. Nobody was injured.
As recently as July, security was upgraded in San'a after intelligence reports warned of attacks planned against the U.S. Embassy.
In Washington, the State Department had no immediate comment on the embassy closure.
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.
The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington's growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Obama administration has come to rely heavily on the unmanned drones because they allow the U.S. to safely monitor and stalk insurgent targets in areas where sending American troops would be either politically untenable or too risky.
The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.
U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.
In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."
A senior defense official said that James Clapper, the Pentagon's intelligence chief, assessed the Iraq intercepts at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded they represented a shortcoming to the security of the drone network.
"There did appear to be a vulnerability," the defense official said. "There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so."
Senior military and intelligence officials said the U.S. was working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but said it wasn't yet clear if the problem had been completely resolved.
Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said.
The Pentagon is deploying record numbers of drones to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration's troop surge there. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who oversees the Air Force's unmanned aviation program, said some of the drones would employ a sophisticated new camera system called "Gorgon Stare," which allows a single aerial vehicle to transmit back at least 10 separate video feeds simultaneously.
Gen. Deptula, speaking to reporters Wednesday, said there were inherent risks to using drones since they are remotely controlled and need to send and receive video and other data over great distances. "Those kinds of things are subject to listening and exploitation," he said, adding the military was trying to solve the problems by better encrypting the drones' feeds.
The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.
Last December, U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered copies of Predator drone feeds on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. "There was evidence this was not a one-time deal," this person said. The U.S. accuses Iran of providing weapons, money and training to Shiite fighters in Iraq, a charge that Tehran has long denied.
The militants use programs such as SkyGrabber, from Russian company SkySoftware. Andrew Solonikov, one of the software's developers, said he was unaware that his software could be used to intercept drone feeds. "It was developed to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that other users download from the Internet -- no military data or other commercial data, only free legal content," he said by email from Russia.
Officials stepped up efforts to prevent insurgents from intercepting video feeds after the July incident. The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there's no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter.
Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren't readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.
In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn't comment on "specific data link capabilities and limitations."
Fixing the security gap would have caused delays, according to current and former military officials. It would have added to the Predator's price. Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies.
"There's a balance between pragmatics and sophistication," said Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.
The Air Force has staked its future on unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones account for 36% of the planes in the service's proposed 2010 budget.
Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.
President Barack Obama has his troop surge. Afghanistan's beleaguered security forces have theirs.
While the new U.S. war strategy was unveiled with worldwide fanfare, Afghan's defense force has been quietly planning its own troop buildup to break the Taliban's tightening grip on swathes of the nation. The Afghan surge is the one to watch because the success of Obama's new war plan is inextricably hinged to Afghanistan's ability to recruit, train and retain security forces that can eventually take the lead in defending the nation.
Afghan Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday that he's already assigned one brigade to a new three-brigade seventh corps of the Afghan National Army. Corps 215 Maiwand is based in the Helmand capital of Lashkar Gah, where most of the 30,000 U.S. reinforcements will be deployed.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says the Afghans have promised to send 5,000 members of the new corps to partner with British troops in Helmand. Wardak insists that will be achieved with ease. He said he's already begun staffing the command's second brigade.
Moreover, he said nearly 44 additional companies of Afghan soldiers are being added to battalions in the south and east. Another Afghan commando battalion, which will graduate in January, is also headed to Helmand — the scene of a major weekend offensive by 1,000 Marines and 150 Afghan soldiers.
117 percent strength levels vowed
"We are bringing the strength level of every unit in the south to 117 percent of its authorized strength so there will be a significant increase in the number of troops," Wardak said in his office at the Ministry of Defense.
Building up the Afghan army, plagued by inefficiency, a lack of trainers and corruption, is a precursor to a U.S. troop pullout. While Obama set July 2011 as the date for the beginning of a withdrawal, he said it would happen "taking into account conditions on the ground."
That caveat was what Afghan leaders needed to hear.
"It is in the speech," Wardak said. "I don't believe the international community will just leave us like they did once before — after all these sacrifices. This enemy is not only terrorizing Afghanistan, it is terrorizing the whole international community. The nature of the threat is such that no one country will be able to deal with it."
Initially, the size of the Afghan army was scheduled to swell from 85,000 to 134,000 by 2013. That target now is expected to be reached earlier — by Oct. 31, 2011.
"We are increasing our level of recruitment and there are going to be improvements in retention," he said. "We are going to go at a very fast speed."
Goal of 240,000 not easy
However, even the defense minister acknowledges that 134,000 will not be enough. He agrees with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who has recommended a 240,000-member Afghan army.
Getting there will be a steep uphill battle, says retired. Marine Col. Jeff Haynes, who in 2008 headed a command that advised the Afghan National Army.
"The rapid expansion of the Afghan National Army will likely undermine the fragile success that has been achieved to date," Haynes wrote in an essay on the Web site defpro.com. "It will also set back, not hasten, its assumption of the lead role in defeating a resurgent Taliban.
Unfortunately, too many of the people who are developing Afghan security strategy have never worked with the Afghan National Army and do not have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
"The reality is that ANA effectiveness is already suffering because of an inadequate number of competent leaders and staff officers. ... Growing the army too fast will only exacerbate this leadership deficit."
Candace Rondeaux, senior Afghan analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the army is facing a a shortage of military trainers and is fighting endemic corruption. The question is how many troops can the Afghan government sustain in an aid-dependent country where the annual budget is under $10 billion.
"If the goal is to build a quality force of some 134,000 Afghan army soldiers by the end of 2011, then the addition of some 4,000 U.S. military trainers under the new troop levels will certainly help," she told the Council on Foreign Relations Web site. "But when it comes to expanding the Afghan National Army to 250,000 ... then stress on the system is inevitable and may blunt the positive impact that extra U.S. troops will have in the long term."
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