U.S. & Afghan Night Raids Agreement
MALVEAUX: U.S. and Afghan have reached a deal on the controversial night raids by American troops. It gives the Afghans effective veto power over those raids. Our Barbara Starr, she joins us from the Pentagon to explain a little bit more about how this would work. Barbara, what do we know.</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Suzanne, this is an agreement that had been in the works for some time. Very controversial. What you basically have here is Afghan forces will now be in the lead on all of these controversial nighttime raids, largely conducted by them and U.S. special forces. There will be an Afghan review panel that will have to look at the proposed raid and give a thumbs up before U.S. and Afghan forces can go into action. That's going to be controversial, of course, because a lot of times they don't have all the intelligence, they don't have all the information way ahead of time and they do these things very quickly on a very quick turnaround. And what we don't know is the very point you raised. Is this now, for the first time, going to give the Afghan government essentially veto authority over U.S. military action in the war? Not a lot of clear answers on all of it, but the agreement was signed over the weekend and it's being hailed, at least here at the Pentagon, as a real step forward in cooperation with the Afghans.</s>MALVEAUX: And, Barbara, set the scene for us here. Why was this agreement so important?</s>STARR: Well, you know, for many years now, even though Afghan forces have been in the lead, these night raids into private Afghan homes, compounds, often in very remote villages, are extremely controversial. Look, in this very conservative culture, these people understandably do not want troops busting into their homes in the middle of the night, potentially searching women and children, and having them come outside and be subject to even any interaction with U.S. military forces. So it's the night raids that were the most controversial. And now at least it is set down that it will be Afghan forces that mainly go in and do those. But the parameters still seem to be sorted out, Suzanne.</s>MALVEAUX: And, Barbara, is this in part, they're doing this agreement now, because the relationship, the United States and Afghan, is so tense right now on the heels of some of these incidents that took place --</s>STARR: Yes.</s>MALVEAUX: The soldier that shot the Afghan civilians and so forth, the Koran burnings?</s>STARR: You know -- sure. I think that it added certainly impetus to it. The discussion over an agreement had been in the works for some time and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, following all of these events that you've mentioned, had made it very clear that stress and strain with the U.S. relationship was really reaching all-time high levels. So they at least wanted to get this done, get this off the list of controversial items to be dealt with while they're working on all these other investigations. But again, I think we need to be very clear that there's a lot of uncertainty on the ground how this will actually sort out for U.S. troops. Suzanne.</s>MALVEAUX: All right, Barbara Starr. Thank you, Barbara.</s>STARR: Sure.</s>MALVEAUX: Last month was the warmest March on record. I loved it. We're going to break it down and pull out our crystal ball to see if there's going to be a really scorching summer. We'll see.