Afghanistan War Report Cites Progress By Troops

 

WASHINGTON — Tangible progress has been made in expanding security across Afghanistan, the Pentagon reported on Friday, saying that successes on the battlefield over the past several months could be attributed to the 30,000 additional troops sent to the war by President Obama.

But the optimistic tone of the report was tempered by assessments from senior officials in Kabul and Washington that the Taliban and other insurgent groups were expected to attempt spectacular counterattacks, perhaps in the near future.

Fighting across Afghanistan usually increases each year with the spring thaw, and Pentagon and military officials say they expect insurgent leaders to make a major effort soon to prove that their loss of territory to Mr. Obama’s troop increase could be reversed this year.

A senior Pentagon official agreed that the latest update’s tone was more optimistic, even if cautiously so, than that of previous reports, which since 2009 have described the security situation in Afghanistan as deteriorating. Congress requires the progress reports twice a year.

American, allied and Afghan forces have halted the insurgency’s momentum and have achieved “tangible progress in some really key areas,” the Pentagon official said.

Echoing a view often expressed by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, the official warned that the assessment clearly noted that the advances were fragile and reversible.

“It does show progress,” said the official, who briefed reporters under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon that precluded identifying him by name. “It also points out that we do have a resilient enemy,” the official added.

There remain significant shortages of foreign trainers, hampering the development of Afghan security forces, the official noted. And progress in economic development and governance has not kept pace with advances on the battlefield. In addition, corruption across all levels of government puts the military’s gains at risk.

“There is still a lot to do,” the official said. He agreed with military and intelligence officers who said that the public should “expect spectacular attacks” by the insurgency.

The Taliban recently scored both a tactical and a propaganda victory with a major prison break of insurgent fighters. In anticipation of an increasing pace of attacks and bombings, the official contended that individual acts of insurgent violence would not be enough to derail the allied and Afghan campaign.

Noting advances made by allied and Afghan security forces, in particular in the insurgent heartland of southern Afghanistan, the official said that “the pushback of the Taliban out of these key areas in the last year is really a strategic defeat for the Taliban.”

“How they respond, whether it’s attacks there, attacks elsewhere, I don’t know,” the official said.?“But given that strategic setback that they’ve suffered, they’re going to try and send messages to the population in other ways that they’re going to be able to come back.? And that’s going to be a big challenge for the Afghan forces, for us, as those efforts are made.”

The report on progress and stability in Afghanistan again cited the harmful effects of the safe havens that insurgent fighters maintain across the border in Pakistan, allowing them to rest, plan and train before moving back into Afghanistan to mount attacks.

The report was released as General Petraeus was finalizing his proposals for how quickly to start withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan in July, as ordered by the president.

 

Regulation of Offshore Rigs Is a Work in Progress

But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore.

“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”

Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be — promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.

Even the officials who run it, Mr. Salazar and the new director, Michael R. Bromwich, admit that they have a long way to go before government can provide the kind of rigorous oversight demanded by the complex, highly technical and deeply risky business of drilling for oil beneath the sea.

The blowout preventers in use today remain incapable of handling a well rupture of the force of the BP blast. The containment system developed by the industry to respond to another blowout has not been tested in real-life conditions and, by the industry’s own estimate, could still allow hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil to spew before a runaway well could be capped.

The seven-member commission named by President Obama to investigate the BP accident looked at the regulatory failures that contributed to it, and its conclusions were blunt.

“M.M.S. became an agency systematically lacking the resources, technical training or experience in petroleum engineering that is absolutely critical to ensuring that offshore drilling is being conducted in a safe and responsible manner,” the panel said in its final report, issued in January. “For a regulatory agency to fall so short of its essential safety mission is inexcusable.”

Many of those flaws remain, according to William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was one of two chairmen of the commission. He said last week that Mr. Bromwich was doing a creditable job, but that the agency still lacked the technical expertise needed to oversee such a specialized industry. “They changed the name, but all the people are the same,” Mr. Reilly said. “It’s embarrassing.”

The job of repairing the agency has fallen to Mr. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department inspector general who was pressured into leading the agency by Mr. Obama. While defending the employees of the agency, Mr. Bromwich, who took over last June, made no excuses for its past misbehavior, including a scandal at the Denver office that involved agency officials and oil company employees having sex and sharing drugs.

Mr. Bromwich acknowledged that accident rates for offshore drilling were several times higher in the United States than in Australia, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, in part because those countries imposed effective new rules after major accidents.

After the Deepwater Horizon spill, the regulatory agency was broken into parts, dividing the revenue collection office from the oversight division to eliminate conflicts of interest. A series of new rules involving well design, spill response and environmental review were imposed. Permitting and production were set back months while the industry absorbed the changes.

But Mr. Bromwich says his agency still lacks the resources, personnel, training, technology, enforcement tools, regulations and legislation it needs to do its job properly. He lays a large part of the blame on insufficient financing.

The bureau’s budget has been basically flat since it was created in 1982, even as drilling activity in the deep-water gulf has drastically increased and the technology has grown more complicated.

“Without more resources, we can keep doing what we’re doing, but we can’t grow,” Mr. Bromwich said in an interview during a recruiting trip to nine West Coast universities, where he was trying to lure young scientists and engineers to apply for relatively low-paying government jobs. “We need more people, and we need new people.”

Mr. Bromwich has asked the Office of Personnel Management to adjust pay schedules so his office can compete with oil companies, which in some cases are paying twice the government salary for petroleum engineers. Mr. Obama has asked for an increase of more than $100 million to the agency’s roughly $250 million annual budget. Congress provided about half that amount in the short-term budget deal reached last week, but discussions have not begun on next year’s budget.

 

Regulation of Offshore Rigs Is a Work in Progress

But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore.

“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”

Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be — promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.

Even the officials who run it, Mr. Salazar and the new director, Michael R. Bromwich, admit that they have a long way to go before government can provide the kind of rigorous oversight demanded by the complex, highly technical and deeply risky business of drilling for oil beneath the sea.

The blowout preventers in use today remain incapable of handling a well rupture of the force of the BP blast. The containment system developed by the industry to respond to another blowout has not been tested in real-life conditions and, by the industry’s own estimate, could still allow hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil to spew before a runaway well could be capped.

The seven-member commission named by President Obama to investigate the BP accident looked at the regulatory failures that contributed to it, and its conclusions were blunt.

“M.M.S. became an agency systematically lacking the resources, technical training or experience in petroleum engineering that is absolutely critical to ensuring that offshore drilling is being conducted in a safe and responsible manner,” the panel said in its final report, issued in January. “For a regulatory agency to fall so short of its essential safety mission is inexcusable.”

Many of those flaws remain, according to William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was one of two chairmen of the commission. He said last week that Mr. Bromwich was doing a creditable job, but that the agency still lacked the technical expertise needed to oversee such a specialized industry. “They changed the name, but all the people are the same,” Mr. Reilly said. “It’s embarrassing.”

The job of repairing the agency has fallen to Mr. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department inspector general who was pressured into leading the agency by Mr. Obama. While defending the employees of the agency, Mr. Bromwich, who took over last June, made no excuses for its past misbehavior, including a scandal at the Denver office that involved agency officials and oil company employees having sex and sharing drugs.

Mr. Bromwich acknowledged that accident rates for offshore drilling were several times higher in the United States than in Australia, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, in part because those countries imposed effective new rules after major accidents.

After the Deepwater Horizon spill, the regulatory agency was broken into parts, dividing the revenue collection office from the oversight division to eliminate conflicts of interest. A series of new rules involving well design, spill response and environmental review were imposed. Permitting and production were set back months while the industry absorbed the changes.

But Mr. Bromwich says his agency still lacks the resources, personnel, training, technology, enforcement tools, regulations and legislation it needs to do its job properly. He lays a large part of the blame on insufficient financing.

The bureau’s budget has been basically flat since it was created in 1982, even as drilling activity in the deep-water gulf has drastically increased and the technology has grown more complicated.

“Without more resources, we can keep doing what we’re doing, but we can’t grow,” Mr. Bromwich said in an interview during a recruiting trip to nine West Coast universities, where he was trying to lure young scientists and engineers to apply for relatively low-paying government jobs. “We need more people, and we need new people.”

Mr. Bromwich has asked the Office of Personnel Management to adjust pay schedules so his office can compete with oil companies, which in some cases are paying twice the government salary for petroleum engineers. Mr. Obama has asked for an increase of more than $100 million to the agency’s roughly $250 million annual budget. Congress provided about half that amount in the short-term budget deal reached last week, but discussions have not begun on next year’s budget.