Why the US is losing in Afghanistan - updates on the Pashtun insurgency

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November 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world/asia/22militias.html?_r=1&hp

As Afghans Resist Taliban, U.S. Spurs Rise of Militias

By DEXTER FILKINS


Leaders of anti-Taliban militias in Kunduz Province met with the Afghan government's intelligence chief in Kunduz this month.

ACHIN, Afghanistan — American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban.

The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.

The endeavor represents one of the most ambitious — and one of the riskiest — plans for regaining the initiative against the Taliban, who are fighting more vigorously than at any time since 2001.

By harnessing the militias, American and Afghan officials hope to rapidly increase the number of Afghans fighting the Taliban. That could supplement the American and Afghan forces already here, and whatever number of American troops President Obama might decide to send. The militias could also help fill the gap while the Afghan Army and police forces train and grow — a project that could take years to bear fruit.

The Americans hope the militias will encourage an increasingly demoralized Afghan population to take a stake in the war against the Taliban.

“The idea is to get people to take responsibility for their own security,” said a senior American military official in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In many places they are already doing that.”

The growth of the anti-Taliban militias runs the risk that they could turn on one another, or against the Afghan and American governments.

The Americans say they will keep the groups small and will limit the scope of their activities to protecting villages and manning checkpoints.

For now, they are not arming the groups because they already have guns.

The Americans also say they will tie them directly to the Afghan government.

These checks aim to avoid repeating mistakes of the past — either creating more Afghan warlords, who have defied the government’s authority for years, or arming Islamic militants, some of whom came back to haunt the United States.

The American plan echoes a similar movement that unfolded in Iraq, beginning in late 2006, in which Sunni tribes turned against Islamist extremists.

That movement, called the Sunni Awakening, brought tens of thousands of former insurgents into government-supervised militias and helped substantially reduce the violence in Iraq. A rebellion on a similar scale seems unlikely in Afghanistan, in large part because the tribes here are so much weaker than those in Iraq.

The first phase of the Afghan plan, now being carried out by American Special Forces soldiers, is to set up or expand the militias in areas with a population of about a million people. Special Forces soldiers have been fanning out across the countryside, descending from helicopters into valleys where the residents have taken up arms against the Taliban and offering their help.

“We are trying to reach out to these groups that have organized themselves,” Col. Christopher Kolenda said in Kabul.

Afghan and American officials say they plan to use the militias as tripwires for Taliban incursions, enabling them to call the army or the police if things get out of hand.

The official assistance to the militias so far has been modest, consisting mainly of ammunition and food, officials said. But American and Afghan officials say they are also planning to train the fighters and provide communication equipment.

“What we are talking about is a local, spontaneous and indigenous response to the Taliban,” said Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister. “The Afghans are saying, ‘We are willing and determined and capable to defend our country; just give us the resources.’ ”

In the Pashtun-dominated areas of the south and east, the anti-Taliban militias are being led by elders from local tribes. The Pashtun militias represent a reassertion of the country’s age-old tribal system, which binds villages and regions under the leadership of groups of elders.

The tribal networks have been alternately decimated and co-opted by Taliban insurgents. Local tribal leaders, while still powerful, cannot count on the allegiance of all of their tribes’ members.

Militias have begun taking up arms against the Taliban in several places where insurgents have gained a foothold, including the provinces of Nangarhar and Paktia.

So far, there appears to be some divergence in the American and Afghan efforts. While American Special Forces units have focused on helping smaller militias, Afghan officials have been channeling assistance to larger armed groups, including those around the northern city of Kunduz. In that city, several armed groups, led by ethnic Uzbek commanders as well as Pashtuns, are confronting the Taliban.

“In Kunduz, after they defeated the Taliban in their villages, they became the power and they took money and taxes from the people,” Mr. Atmar, the interior minister, said. “This is not legal, and this is warlordism.”

Colonel Kolenda said, “In the long run, that is destabilizing.”

One of the most striking examples of a local militia rising up on its own is here in Achin, a predominantly Pashtun district in Nangarhar Province that straddles the border with Pakistan.

In July, a long-running dispute between local Taliban fighters and elders from the Shinwari tribe flared up. When a local Taliban warlord named Khona brought a more senior commander from Pakistan to help in the confrontation, the elders in the Shinwari tribe rallied villagers from up and down the valley where they live, killed the commander and chased Khona away.

The elders had insisted that the Taliban stay away from a group of Afghans building a dike in the valley. When Khona’s men kidnapped two Afghan engineers, the Shinwari elders decided they had had enough.

“The whole tribe was with me,” one of the elders said in an interview. “The Taliban came to kill me, and instead we killed them.”

The two tribal elders in Achin who led the rebellion spoke at length with The New York Times about their activities. At the request of American commanders in Kabul, who feared that the elders would be killed by the Taliban, the identities of the men are being withheld.

Since the fight, the Taliban have been kept away from a string of villages in Achin District that stretch for about six miles. The elders said they were able to do so by forming a group of more than 100 fighters and posting them at each end of the valley.

The elders said they had been marked for death by Taliban commanders on both sides of the border.

“Every day people call me and tell me the Taliban is trying to kill me,” one of the Shinwari elders said. “They call me and tell me: ‘Don’t take this road. Take a different one.’ I am worried about suicide bombers.”

The feud between the Taliban and the Shinwari elders caught the attention of American officers, who sent a team of Special Forces soldiers to the valley. This reporter was unable to reach the interior of the valley where the men live, so it was difficult to verify all of the elders’ claims.

Both the Shinwari elders said that “Americans with beards” had flown into the valley twice in recent weeks and had given them flour and boxes of ammunition. (Unlike other American troops, Special Forces soldiers are allowed to wear beards.)

American officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they intended to help organize and train the Shinwari militia. They said they would give them communication gear that would enable them to call the Afghan police if they needed help.

But that, as well as other aspects of the plan, seems problematic, at least for now. There are only about 50 Afghan police officers in Achin, the district center, and none in the valley. There are no Afghan Army soldiers in the area, and the nearest American base is many miles away.

The hope, of course, is that the revolt led by the Shinwari elders spreads. Each of the elders interviewed leads a branch of the 12 Shinwari tribes. If they survive, both elders said, they believe that others will join them.

“The Taliban are not popular here, not educated,” another Shinwari elder said. “They are stray dogs.”

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Rocket Hits Luxury Hotel in Afghanistan Capital, Injuring 4

Saturday, November 21, 2009 
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576154,00.html

 AP


Photo of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan.


Nov. 20: Afghan police and Army soldiers rush to the scene where a rocket hit outside the luxury Serena Hotel.


 A rocket hit outside the luxury Serena Hotel in Afghanistan's capital late Saturday injuring four people, including a police officer and an Afghan intelligence agent, Fox News has confirmed.

The Ministry of Defense was reportedly holding a meeting at the hotel and could have been the target. The heavily guarded Serena Hotel, about two miles from the U.S. embassy, regularly houses visiting diplomats, officials and international workers.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

In Saturday's attack, a rocket hit low on the outside of a compound wall that rings the hotel, just behind a guardhouse, according to an Associated Press reporter who saw the impact spot. Rubble surrounded the area, but there was no large crater.

Dozens of police and army officers worked to secure the site as ambulance sirens wailed.

The attack comes just two days after the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai to a second term with dignitaries from around the world in attendance, including Secretary of State Clinton.

Janagha Duragat, a shopkeeper who was waiting outside the hotel to load his merchandise into a car, said he saw the rocket strike the wall. He said it appeared to have been fired from a nearby footbridge.

It has been the target of attacks before, most recently in late October when a rocket slammed into a courtyard.

In January 2008, militants wearing suicide vests stormed the hotel in a coordinated assault, killing seven people — a strike that demonstrated how militants could launch deadly attacks on even high-security targets in the capital.

Fox News' Greg Palkot and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The Sunday Times November 22, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6927086.ece

Hamid Karzai ministers face Afghanistan corruption charges


Hamid Karzai arrives to be sworn in as president of Afghanistan for a second time


by Marie Colvin in Kabul
 
Warrants have been signed for the arrest of two Afghan cabinet ministers on charges of theft and fraud, highlighting the extent of alleged corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Investigators in Afghanistan’s fledgling major crimes taskforce, under the tutelage of British and American police officers, have gathered sufficient evidence to charge Sediq Chakari, the minister of hajj and Islamic affairs.

A second cabinet minister has also had a warrant issued against him but his name has not been confirmed.

The warrants were handed to Karzai earlier this month, according to a prosecution source. Under Afghan law, Karzai must suspend a minister’s immunity before the warrant can be served. Whether the president allows his ministers to be prosecuted is seen as an early test of a promise to clean up his government.

Karzai, whose second five-year term began last week, has been warned by western backers that rampant corruption, a crooked police force and alliances with drug-dealing war lords are fuelling the Taliban insurgency.

A police source confirmed that a warrant had been issued against Chakari. The minister’s spokesman said yesterday: “We will have no comment.” But he indicated that Chakari would hold a press conference today.

The warrants follow the new force’s first arrest earlier this month — of a general accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from government funds, much of it by claiming for fictitious “ghost” staff and pocketing their salaries.

Signs of corruption are everywhere. On the road into Kabul from the south, huge “poppy villas” are under construction, built on the proceeds of the illegal opium trade. Transparency International, an organisation that tracks corruption worldwide, last week listed Afghanistan as the second most corrupt state in the world, beaten only by Somalia.

When a crime hotline opened in the southern province of Helmand recently, it was flooded with complaints about the police demanding bribes.

“Those who spread corruption should be tried and prosecuted,” Karzai said at his inauguration. “Corruption is a very dangerous enemy of the state.” The line was the only one to get spontaneous applause in an otherwise sombre ceremony.

Another early indication of Karzai’s style of government will come in the next few weeks as he appoints his cabinet and the governors to Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

He has promised appointments on merit but there are fears that he will reserve plum jobs for cronies, either to reward them for support or to prevent past corruption from being exposed.

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, who attended the inauguration and held talks with Karzai, urged him to put an end to the endemic corruption. “If officials are corrupt, it saps the spirit of the Afghan people,” he said. “We are asking of Karzai what the Afghan people are asking of him.”

With 9,000 British troops in Afghanistan and 98 killed this year, there is growing unease with the war at home. Corruption allegations deepen that disillusion.

However, Miliband is a passionate advocate of staying the course in Afghanistan. He believes withdrawal would be “catastrophic”, leading to a return to Taliban dictatorship or civil war that would allow Al-Qaeda to regroup in the country.

Miliband said Karzai had promised not just to end corruption but to work towards bringing elements of the Taliban in from the cold. He believes the majority of Taliban foot soldiers and mid-level commanders are fighting for money they cannot make elsewhere, or for tribal reasons, and could be “re-integrated” into their communities.

Despite Karzai’s vow to clean up his act, deep scepticism remains. “He needs to translate his words into deeds,” Miliband said.

Time is critical. Winter is approaching and fighting is expected to die down, giving Karzai a window of opportunity to make changes.

Afghan experts insist that Karzai should not shoulder all the blame for the failure of the past eight years. They point out that, after the Taliban were defeated in 2001, little attention was paid to the long-term challenge of rebuilding a nation that had endured decades of war.

Much western help was derisory. Drug traffickers continued untouched, often paying tithes to government officials to turn a blind eye. Large areas were left under the control of the warlords.

Afghans became fearful that international forces would leave and they would be at the mercy of a resurgent Taliban.

There are successes to build on. Under the Taliban, only 1m children were at school. Now more than 6m attend classes, 2m of them girls. Healthcare has improved dramatically.

The effect of delivering even the simplest of services was starkly evident last week in Danishmand village in the Shakardara district, south of Kabul.

A simple, one-storey health clinic built earlier this year under a programme partly funded by the UK’s Department for International Development has dramatically changed the life of the village of mud brick houses and walls.

Before the clinic, injured or ill villagers faced a 90-minute drive over rough roads. Some did not make it. “Adrugal, my neighbour, he was 22 when his foot was blown off by a landmine in the mountains,” said Ahmed Ahmedi, 38. “He made it to the village, but he bled to death on the road. He would have lived if we’d had this clinic.”

The mood of the village is now strongly opposed to the insurgency. “When the Taliban were here, they used to beat the people,” said Mahmoud Fahim, 43. “Nobody wants the Taliban to return.”

Using the millions that are disappearing into corrupt pockets to build more clinics such as this could help bring peace. Many will be watching to see if Karzai sets an example and allows the trials of allegedly corrupt officials to go ahead.

nA rocket hit the luxury Serena hotel in Kabul last night, wounding four people, the interior ministry said. The heavily guarded hotel regularly hosts visiting diplomats. The Taliban were suspected.

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As the Light onto the Nations


by Gilad Atzmon
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60322&hd=&size=1&l=e

                             
                                            Israeli Tank
November 21, 2009

'Israel is the light onto the nations’ says the Torah. Indeed it is, and not just because the Torah says so. Israel is ahead of everyone else in many fronts. Take for instance, terrorizing civilian populations and practicing some of the most devastating murderous tactics upon elders, women and young.

The Jerusalem post reported yesterday that the Chairman of NATO's Military Committee, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, visited Israel earlier this week to study "IDF tactics and methods that the military alliance can utilise for its war in Afghanistan." A senior Israeli defence official added "The one thing on NATO's mind today is how to win in Afghanistan…Di Paola was very impressed by the IDF, which is a major source of information due to our operational experience."

I would advise both the Israeli official and Admiral Di Paola to slightly curb their enthusiasm. The IDF didn’t win a single war since 1967. Yes, it murdered many civilians, it flattened many cities, it starved millions, it has been committing war crimes on a daily basis for decades and yet, it didn’t win a war. Thus, the IDF cannot really teach NATO how to win in Afghanistan. If NATO generals are stupid enough to follow IDF tactics, like the Israeli generals, they will start to see the charges of war crimes pile up against them. They may even be lucky enough to share their cells with some Israelis in due course, once justice is performed.

Admiral Di Paola spent two days with the infamous IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the man who led the IDF into Gaza last December.

In the Jewish state they were very enthusiastic with Admiral Di Paola’s visit. They regarded it as just another reassurance of 'business as usual. The visit of a NATO high supreme official was there to convince them that no one takes note of the Goldstone report. "Di Paola's visit is significant" says the Jerusalem Post, "since it comes at a time when the IDF is under increasing criticism in the wake of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead as well as a decision by Turkey - a NATO member - to ban Israel from joint aerial exercises."

However, it would be crucial to elaborate on the emerging mutual interests between the two parties, Israel and NATO. "During their meeting on Wednesday, Ashkenazi and Di Paola discussed ways to upgrade Israeli-NATO military ties as well as the plan to include an Israeli Navy vessel in Active Endeavor, a NATO mission established after the 9/11 attacks under which NATO vessels patrol the Mediterranean to prevent illegal terror trafficking". This is indeed a necessary move for the Israelis.



At the moment the Israeli Navy is operating in the Mediterranean as a bunch of Yiddish Pirates (Yidisshe Piraten), assaulting, hijacking and robbing vessels in international waters. Once operating under the NATO flag, the Israelis would be able to terrorise every vessel in the high seas in the name of the 'West’. For the Jewish state this would be a major step forward. Until now the Israelis have been committing atrocities in the name of the Jewish people. Once operating under the NATO flag, the Israelis will be able to perform their piracy in the name of 'Europe’. Such a move is further evidence of the spiritual and ideological transition within Zionism from 'promised land’ into 'promised planet’.

While the Israelis desperately need NATO’s legitimacy, NATO is far more modest. All it needs is knowledge and tactics. For some reason it insists on learning from the Israelis how to inflict pain on a civilian population. More pain, that is, than it is already making. "NATO's Defence officials said that Di Paola used his meetings with the IDF to learn about new technology that can be applied to the war in Afghanistan". The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel is a "known world leader in the development of specialized armor to protect against improvised explosive devices (IEDs), otherwise known as roadside bombs." This is indeed the case. Israeli generals realised a long time ago that their precious young soldiers prefer to hide in their tanks rather than engage with the 'enemy’ i.e. the civilian population, kids, elders and women. But it doesn’t stop there, Di Paola was also interested in "Israeli intelligence-gathering capabilities and methods that the IDF uses when operating in civilian population centers." Di Paola noted that "NATO and the IDF were facing similar threats - NATO in Afghanistan and Israel in its war against Hamas and Hizbullah."

I would suggest to Admiral Di Paola to immediately read the Goldstone report thoroughly, so he grasps his own personal legal consequences once he starts to implement 'Israeli tactics’. If Admiral Di Paola wants to serve his army, he should indeed visit Israel, he should also meet every war criminal both in the military and politics so he knows exactly what NOT to do.

NATO’s chances of winning in Afghanistan are not limited, they are actually exhausted. It can only lose. Some military analysts and veteran generals argue that it is lost already. NATO has brought enough carnage on the Afghani people without achieving any of its military or political goals. Given that Israel was severely humiliated in Lebanon in 2006 by a tiny paramilitary Hizbullah and failed to achieve its military goals in Operation Cast Lead in its genocidal war against Hamas, there is nothing for NATO to learn from the Israelis. Should NATO proceed in implementing added IDF tactics, all it will achieve is a dramatic reduction of security across Europe and America.

If we are concerned with peace and we want it to prevail, what we have to do is to move away as far as we can from any spiritual, ideological, political and military affiliation with Zionism, Israel and its lobbies. If 'Israel’ is indeed a 'light onto the nations’, someone better explain to us all, why its prospect of peace is becoming slimmer and darker.

 

 

My answer is actually simple. Israel can be easily seen as the 'light of nations’ as long as you learn from Israel what not to do. In fact this is the message passed to us by the great humanist prophets Jesus and Marx. Love your neighbour, be among others, transcend yourself beyond the tribal into the realm of the universal. In fact this is exactly what the Israelis fail to grasp. For some reason, they love themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbours.

 

If Admiral Di Paola wants to win the hearts and the minds of the Afghani people (rather than 'winning a war’), he should first learn to love. This is something he won’t learn in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Gaza, Ramallha and Nablus are more likely.

 

 

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About Patria, Pageants and Poppies

By William Bowles

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60331&hd=&size=1&l=e

November 22, 2009



"Britain’s last surviving World War I veteran shunned Remembrance Day commemorations Wednesday because he was against the glorification of war" — 'Britain’s last WWI veteran shuns Remembrance Day’

After eight years and tens of thousands of Afghan casualties, the occupiers are settling down to a war of unknown duration. And contrary to Brown’s earlier declarations that 'al-Qu’eda’ was operating out of Afghanistan, Brown, all-dressed up for the Lord Mayor’s banquet told the assorted 'dignitaries’,

"Mr Brown has acknowledged that al-Qaeda is not operating in Afghanistan but cautioned that it continued to recruit and train.

"Al-Qaeda rely on a permissive environment in the tribal areas of Pakistan and – if they can re-establish one – in Afghanistan," Mr Brown warned.

"He said there were "several hundred" foreign fighters still based in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, attending training camps to learn bomb-making and weapons skills."" — 'Brown plans Afghan handover talks’, BBC News Website, 17 November, 2009


But the real thrust of Brown’s attempt to resuscitate the British Empire is revealed by the following.

"At every point in our history where we have looked outwards, we have become stronger.

"And now, more than ever, there is no future in what was once called 'splendid isolation’."

And just in case we don’t get the message, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent James Robbins is more than willing to do the Empire’s dirty work telling us,

"But the prime minister also made clear that he regards Britain’s military presence as vital to protect ordinary people at home from plots hatched in Pakistan by al-Qaeda extremists, who would spread back into Afghanistan if allowed the opportunity to do so."

And very conveniently, the self-same Mr Robbins adds this final para,

"The prime minister said the security services in Britain were reporting to him that there was now an opportunity to inflict significant and long-lasting damage on al-Qaeda."

Well, that’s that isn’t it? Slaughtering Afghans is about protecting the 'homeland’ from "plots" devised by those dastardly 'al-Qu’eda’ who by his own admission are not even in Afghanistan! But these are desperate times for the Empire as opposition to Brown’s barbarian occupation grows even within his own ranks. These gangsters are so incompetent that they make stuff up as they go along!

Not so the 'loyal opposition’ with both Tory and Lib-Dem continuing to support the UK’s colonial war of conquest.

Of course the song and dance about 'our boys over there’ is nothing new especially when from the UK’s perspective, the entire enterprise is going pear-shaped in the public’s mind. I’m also sure that there is a direct correlation between the number of poppies on display and the increasing desperation of our barbarian political elite as they seek to patriotize the illegal and murderous invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Yes, it is disgusting that working class British boys and girls are sacrificing their lives for the Empire. On the other hand they belong to a professional army, paid to kill and be killed, so as regrettable as it is that some are dying (in minute numbers compared to the slaughter they have rained down on Iraq and continue to do so in Afghanistan), they knew the deal when they signed up. I mean come on, look at all these MoD adverts extolling the virtues of shooting people in far-off places, like this MoD promo advertizing the excitement of being a sniper.


                            

                                                           Army Jobs Sniper
Watch the ad…:

http://www.visit4info.com/advert/Army-Jobs-Sniper-MoD-British-Army-Recruitment/50528?autoplay=true


It’s an interesting conundrum for the political elite whose 'peace-keeping’ enterprises always end in horrific bloodshed. Luckily there’s five hundred year’s worth of imperial wars to draw on when it comes to pushing the Patria button. It’s a button that G. Brown has been pushing a lot recently, defending the white cliffs against the heathen hordes, blah-blah, and the media have been only too happy push out the patria to the populace. Yet in spite of the poppy onslaught on the public,

"Only 12 percent of Europeans claim to trust the media, compared to 15 percent of North Americans, 29 percent of Pacific Asians and 48 percent of Africans, the BBC has found." — 'Does Biased News Have a 'Time Bomb’ Effect?’ :
http://www.creative-i.info/?p=12131

And the percentage of those who favour a complete pullout of Afghanistan immediately, is steadily rising with around 75% saying we should get out (sometime soon? who knows with these surveys?). Something else is going on here, some kind of synergy is at work, beset as we are by endless wars, economic collapse and climate catastrophe and all at once. Perhaps it’s a step too far?

Clearly the poppy ain’t working the way it should, not even the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has made much difference, if anything it has had the opposite effect. The promise of a world freed from the grip of the 'Evil Empire’, a world of peace and plenty blah-blah, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, we have gone backwards at an increasing rate of knots, towards the world of '(helicopter) gunboat diplomacy’. A world where mind-numbing violence and threats of violence dominate the foreign and domestic policies of the so-called civilized world.

This is a world my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents would be quite familiar with, a world where might is right and the Anglo-Saxon 'race’ ruled supreme.

The point is, Capitalism needs an enemy, real or invented and the demise of communism deprived them of a handy hook onto which they could hang the planet. All the 'war on terror’ has done is terrorize everybody and drag us deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the 'new world order’.

Many of us may distrust our respective governments, they lie to us, steal from the public purse, spy on us, lock us up for thinking, start wars in our name but the idea that they are insane enough to launch a global conflagration is perhaps a step too far for most of us to swallow. Yet twice in the past century, the capitalists and their servants have started world wars in which hundreds of millions have been slaughtered and with a posse of psychopathic fingers on the trigger right now, it looks like we may be in for the next one.

But surely they can’t be that mad what with the world awash with nuclear weapons? Yet from the former Yugoslavia to Somalia the Anglo-Saxon Empire is busy turning the planet into a graveyard, polluting the air, water and earth as it goes. Mad you say? Just look at what the 'masters of the universe’ say concerning their objectives and the lengths they will go to preserve their rule.

US Space Command
Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US national interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.

                                

'National interests and investment’ says it all for this is what it’s really all about. The US Space Command’s 'Vision 20-20’ document goes on to say that,

"Just as land dominance, sea control, and air superiority have become critical elements of current military strategy, space superiority is emerging as an essential element of battlefield success and future warfare.The challenge extends to space."

http://williambowles.info/empire/vision_2020.pdf

It’s this context that makes the UK government’s role in this sordid and murderous enterprise so really depraved and criminal. A government that has become nothing more than a hitman for the Empire and a pretty incompetent one at that.

Oh how the mighty have fallen!



 

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Afghan soldier fires at US troops, injures several

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:45:59 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111888&sectionid=351020403   
 
A number of US troops have been injured when an Afghan soldier opened fire at their convoy in Khost province, the third such accident in less than two months.

Local officials in eastern Afghanistan announced on Sunday that an Afghan soldier opened fire on a US convoy injuring several US troops late Saturday, IRNA reported.

The officials who wanted to remain unnamed added that the Afghan soldier was also injured during the incident. However, it was not clear whether he was shot by the US soldiers or himself.

This is the third time such an accident has happened in the past two months. Earlier in November, an Afghan policeman opened fire on British soldiers in the volatile southern province of Helmand, killing five of them.

The incident came almost exactly a month after an Afghan policeman on patrol with US soldiers opened fire on the Americans, killing two before fleeing.

RZS/SC/DT

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Arrest warrant issued against two ministers in Karzai’s cabinet

Thaindian News

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60340&hd=&size=1&l=e

Kabul, Nov. 22, 2009 (ANI): Two ministers in Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet are facing arrests on theft and fraud charges, as investigators in the country’s newly set-up anti-corruption force have gathered sufficient evidence against the two ministers.

Warrants have been signed for the arrest of Sediq Chakari, the minister of hajj and Islamic affairs and another cabinet minister whose name has not been confirmed, Times Online reports.

According to a prosecution source, the warrants were handed to Karzai earlier this month.

Karzai must suspend a minister’s immunity before the warrant can be served under Afghan law. Whether he allows his ministers to be prosecuted is being seen as a litmus test by the west.

Karzai, whose second five-year term began last week, has been warned by western backers that widespread corruption, a crooked police force and alliances with drug-dealing war lords.

A police source confirmed that a warrant had been issued against Chakari.

The warrants follow the new force’s first arrest earlier this month - of a general accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from government funds, much of it by claiming for fictitious "ghost" staff and pocketing their salaries.

Transparency International, an organisation that tracks corruption worldwide, last week listed Afghanistan as the second most corrupt state in the world, beaten only by Somalia. (ANI)






 

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US pours millions into anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan

by Jon Boone in Kabul

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60363&hd=&size=1&l=e

• Special forces funding fighters in Afghanistan
• Fears strategy could further destabilise country

November 22, 2009

US special forces are supporting anti-Taliban militias in at least 14 areas of Afghanistan as part of a secretive programme that experts warn could fuel long-term instability in the country.

The Community Defence Initiative (CDI) is enthusiastically backed by Stanley McChrystal, the US general commanding Nato forces in Afghanistan, but details about the programme have been held back from non-US alliance members who are likely to strongly protest.

The attempt to create what one official described as "pockets of tribal resistance" to the Taliban involves US special forces embedding themselves with armed groups and even disgruntled insurgents who are then given training and support.

In return for stabilising their local area the militia helps to win development aid for their local communities, although they will not receive arms, a US official said.

Special forces will be able to access money from a US military fund to pay for the projects. The hope is that the militias supplement the Nato and Afghan forces fighting the Taliban. But the prospect of re-empowering militias after billions of international dollars were spent after the US-led invasion in 2001 to disarm illegally armed groups alarms many experts.

Senior generals in the Afghan ministries of interior and defence are also worried about what they see as a return to the failed strategies of the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan.

Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said the US risked losing control over groups which have in the past turned to looting shops and setting up illegal road checkpoints when they lose foreign support.

"It is not enough to talk to a few tribal elders and decide that you trust them," Ruttig said. "No matter how well-trained and culturally aware the special forces are they will never be able to get to know enough about a local area to trust the people they are dealing with."

Another controversial aspect of the programme is the involvement of Arif Noorzai, an Afghan politician from Helmand who is widely distrusted by many members of the international community.

Although many western officials want to sideline Noorzai and give oversight to the Afghan army and police, some of the CDI militias will build upon the 12,500 militiamen in 22 provinces Noorzai helped to set up this summer in the run up to the presidential elections on 20 August, an official said.

Despite the lack of any announcement about the programme, which could radically affect conditions in unstable areas across Afghanistan, it has begun in 14 areas in the south, east and west, but is expected to extend far beyond that.

Another diplomat in the south-east of the country said in the last six weeks special forces have held several meetings with elders in restive districts in Paktia, close to the Pakistani border, seeking to embed themselves with the local people.

The diplomat said: "It is not clear anything has happened yet, but the elders in the area are all seeing dollar signs and very much want to qualify for this programme."

According to some western officials, the US government will make a pot of $1.3bn (£790m) available for the programme, although the US embassy said it could not yet comment on CDI.

A US military spokesman also declined to comment saying the programme was still in its early phases and public discussion could jeopardise the lives of some of the Afghans involved.

The plan represents a significant change in tack from a scheme promoted just last year by General McChrystal's predecessor, David McKiernan. The Afghan Public Protection Force (APrison Planet Forum) was piloted in Wardak province and involved the rigorous vetting of recruits who were then given basic training, a uniform and came under the authority of the Afghan police.

"McChrystal was always quite dismissive about APrison Planet Forum," a senior Nato official in Kabul said. "It was too resource-intensive and so slow we would have lost long before it had been spread to the whole country."

He added: "He wanted to move to a much more informal model, which is far less visible and unaccountable, using Noorzai to find people through his own networks and then simply paying out cash for them to defend their areas."

The US has shared few details of its plans with its allies. The programme is controlled by a newly created special forces group that reports directly to McChrystal as head of US forces in the country, but which sits outside the authority of the International Security Assistance Force, the Nato mission in Afghanistan.




 

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South Asia
Nov 24, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK24Df01.html 
 
Afghan forces fight an enemy within

By Lal Aqa Sherin

KABUL - A Taliban fighter infiltrated the Afghan police force, killing seven Afghan officers and British soldiers. Similar attacks have taken the lives of US troops.

The Interior and Defense ministries deny that the screening of prospective soldiers is poor, but a police officer admitted to Killid that he was accepted into the Afghan National Police (ANP) after submitting falsified papers that were never verified by recruiters.

On November 3, in Helmand's Nad e'Ali district, a group of British soldiers from the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards sat down to breakfast at an ANP compound known as Blue 25. Among them was an ANP officer named Gulbadeen from Musa Kala district. Gulbadeen had been with the ANP for two years, and graduated from police academy last year.

But on that November morning his true allegiance became clear. While inside the Blue 25 compound, Gulbadeen drew his weapon, fired first at his Afghan commander and assistant commander and then turned the gun on the British soldiers who were there to mentor and train the Afghan police. In all, five foreign soldiers and two ANP were killed. Another five British soldiers were injured before Gulbadeen fled the compound, hopped on a motorcycle and made good his escape.

Despite a massive dragnet by the Ministry of Interior (MOI), secret police and British forces, Gulbadeen remains a free man. MOI officials declined to comment about the incident, citing the continuing investigation, but a Taliban group later took credit for the shootings.

This is not the first such attack on coalition forces by a member of the Afghan security services. Last March, an Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier opened fire on a group of US soldiers in Mazar-e-Sharif, killing two and wounding a third. One of the dead was a female navy officer named Florence Choe, a doctor who specialized in treating Afghan children.

Attacks like these undermine a crucial aspect of the coalition effort in Afghanistan. Battlefield training and mentoring programs are contingent on a foundation of trust between Afghans who want a more secure nation and foreign armies delivering knowledge and expertise. But when Western soldiers lose trust in the men they are mentoring, resentment builds on both sides and the mission breaks down.

At the heart of these attacks lies a frightening commonality: poor screening of police and army applicants. Apparently all it takes to join these forces is an easily forged national identity card and at least one working leg.

It's hard to blame the police and army for taking allcomers, however. The security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating more quickly than new recruits can be given uniforms and with expanding units - such as the southern border guards - security forces will need fresh personnel for some time.

Also, one in 10 ANP officers will die in the line of duty this year. As grim as it sounds, those men need to be replaced, even if it is by those of lesser mettle.

Experts and former members of the Afghan security forces fear that the lax selection process has allowed insurgents easy access to the ranks of police and army.

Retired Colonel Aqa Muhammad Logari says that attacks like the one on November 3 are proof that insurgents have a toe-hold within the security forces and worries about more such attacks if the government does not become more careful about whom it hires and arms.

"The government should take this issue more seriously," Logari says. "They should not let just anyone join the army and police. It damages everything from moral to the [Afghan security forces'] public image."

Despite their protestations to the contrary, some Afghan government officials acknowledge that there is an effort on the part of insurgents to break into government security forces.

In the aftermath of the attack on British soldiers, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Washington Post that the ANA has had to be "very watchful because we do have reports that [insurgents] are really trying to infiltrate." Wardak did, however, say "as far as the army's concerned, we have been relatively successful. It has not been a major problem up to now."

Wardak says that the army wants to implement a biometric scanning system of the kind used by coalition forces in Afghanistan. The scanners record retinal images, fingerprints and other data. The information can be checked against an existing biometric database of insurgents as well as used as a record of all successful recruits.

Wardak repeated that the police had a much bigger insurgent infiltration problem than the army.

When asked about The Washington Post story, an MOI spokesman, Zmarai Bashari, blanched, denying the defense chief's statement. "We do not approve this report," Bashari says of the story. "It is not true. The MOI does not have any reports that enemies have infiltrated the police, except in one or two instances."

Some of the friction between the MOI and Wardak could come from the fact that Wardak's ministry is responsible for the army and the MOI is responsible for the police.

But despite intra-agency squabbles, a parliamentarian, Khalid Pashtoon, says that insurgents have long tried to infiltrate government security forces, even back in the days when the government was Soviet.

"The mujahideen were always trying to find ways to break into the police," Pashtoon says. "It was the perfect way to strike against the government."

In many ways, it still is.

(This report was originally published in the Killid Weekly. Afghanistan's independent Killid Group and Inter Press Service have been partners since 2004.)

(Inter Press Service) 
 
 

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Afghanistan Contractors Outnumber Troops

Despite Surge in U.S. Deployments, More Civilians Are Posted in War Zone


By August Cole
 
Global Research, November 22, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16230
Wall Street Journal - 2009-08-22




Even as U.S. troops surge to new highs in Afghanistan they are outnumbered by military contractors working alongside them, according to a Defense Department census due to be distributed to Congress -- illustrating how hard it is for the U.S. to wean itself from the large numbers of war-zone contractors that proved controversial in Iraq.

The number of military contractors in Afghanistan rose to almost 74,000 by June 30, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground at that point. As the military force in Afghanistan grows further, to a planned 68,000 by the end of the year, the Defense Department expects the ranks of contractors to increase more.

The ranks of military contractors in Afghanistan have been growing along with the surge in troops. Above, contractor barracks at the Kandahar airfield.

The military requires contractors for essential functions ranging from supplying food and laundry services to guarding convoys and even military bases -- functions that were once performed by military personnel but have been outsourced so a slimmed-down military can focus more on battle-related tasks.

The Obama administration has sought to reduce its reliance on military contractors, worried that the Pentagon was ceding too much power to outside companies, failing to rein in costs and not achieving desired results.

President Obama has repeatedly called defense contractors to task since taking office. "In Iraq, too much money has been paid out for services that were never performed, buildings that were never completed, companies that skimmed off the top," he said during a March speech.

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to hire 30,000 civilian officials during to cut the percentage of contractors in the Pentagon's own work force, and last month he told an audience of soldiers that contractor use overseas needed better controls.


 
Military contractors' personnel for a time outnumbered U.S. troops in Iraq. The large contractor force was accompanied by issues ranging from questionable costs billed to the government to shooting of civilians by armed security guards. A September 2007 shooting incident involving Blackwater Worldwide guards working for the U.S. State Department, in which 17 Iraqis were killed, forced the U.S. to aggressively rework oversight of security firms.

Yet in Afghanistan as in Iraq, the Pentagon has found that the military has shrunk so much since the Cold War ended that it isn't big enough to sustain operations without using companies to directly support military operations.

"Because of the surge, we're trying to get ahead of the troops," said Gary Motsek, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Program Support, who helps oversee the Pentagon's battlefield contractor efforts. "So we're pushing contractors in place, doing it as fast as we can, and trying to be responsible about it."

The heavy reliance on contractors in Afghanistan signals that a situation that defense planners once considered temporary has become a standard fixture of U.S. military operations.

"For a sustained fight like our current commitments, the U.S. military can't go to war without contractors on the battlefield," said Steven Arnold, a former Army general and retired executive at logistics specialists Ecolog USA and KBR Inc. KBR was formerly owned by Halliburton Co. He added, "For that matter, neither can NATO."

That poses a challenge for military planners who must keep tabs on tens of thousands of people who are crucial to their operations yet are civilians outside the chain of command.

In Congress, there's a particular concern about security contractors who might upset diplomatic and military relationships. "We've had incidents when force has been used, we believe, improperly against citizens by contractors," said Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. "This creates huge problems, obviously, for those who have been injured or killed and their families, but it also creates huge problems for us and our policies in Afghanistan."

In Iraq, as of June 30 there were 119,706 military contractors, down 10% from three months earlier and smaller than the number of U.S. troops, which stood at approximately 132,000. But as the Pentagon has been drawing down contractors in Iraq, their ranks have been growing in Afghanistan -- rising by 9% over that same three-month period to 73,968. More than two-thirds of those are local, which reflects the desire to employ Afghans as part of the counterinsurgency there.
Many contractors in Afghanistan are likely to face combat-like conditions, particularly those manning far-flung outposts, and are exposed to possible militant attacks -- blurring the line between soldier and support staff.

The reliance on contractors has prompted a shift in the defense industry, sending more money to logistics and construction companies that can perform everything from basic functions to project engineering.

A recent contract is worth up to $15 billion to two firms, DynCorp International Inc. and Fluor Corp., to build and support U.S. military bases throughout Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, government auditors have repeatedly uncovered military mismanagement of contractors. The Wartime Contracting Commission reported finding during an April trip that the military had accepted a new headquarters building in Kabul hobbled by shoddy construction. Officials in Iraq and Afghanistan were unable to give the commission complete lists of work being contracted out at the bases they visited.

Coordination of security contractors, one of the most charged issues in Iraq, is being beefed up for Afghanistan, said Mr. Motsek, the Pentagon official. A new umbrella contract planned for later this year is designed to make awarding work speedier and to help oversight and vetting.

As well, he said more Defense Department civilians are being sent to oversee all types of contracts, and they will stay longer overseas than their predecessors did in Iraq.

Video conferencing and other remote management tools had fallen short as a substitute. The Army is also adding hundreds of civilian contracting personnel, among the measures being put in place.


Write to August Cole at august.cole@dowjones.com
 

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November 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/world/asia/23military.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Military Analysis

In 3 Tacks for Afghan War, a Game of Trade-Offs

By ELISABETH BUMILLER


The mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The number of troops the east would get varies in the options before President Obama.

WASHINGTON — Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

The rest could be deployed flexibly across the country, including to the NATO headquarters in Kabul, the capital, and in clandestine operations.

If Mr. Obama limited any additional American troops to 10,000 to 15,000, the military would deploy them largely as trainers, with some reinforcements likely in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home. The neighboring, and opium-rich, Helmand Province and the eastern border with Pakistan, military analysts say, would receive few if any American troops and would remain largely as they are today.

Such trade-offs are part of the discussions under way in the West Wing and at the Pentagon as Mr. Obama and his top advisers debate escalating the eight-year-old war. And they drive home the basic point that while the numbers will dominate the headlines, what is really at stake is how to fight the war.

Here is a primer, culled from the diverse views of administration officials and military analysts, on the military utility of some of the force options before the president to bolster the 68,000 American troops already in Afghanistan.

40,000 troops

In late September, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sent three different troop options to the Pentagon: about 80,000; 40,000 or more; or 10,000 to 15,000. The White House quickly discarded the idea of sending 80,000, making his middle option the high one under consideration by the president.

With 40,000 troops, the military priority would be to deploy as many as 10,000 to Kandahar, the desert province abutting Pakistan; its big city, also called Kandahar, is the second largest in Afghanistan. Currently there are about 3,200 United States troops and 1,600 Canadian soldiers in the area. The Taliban control much of Kandahar Province and are contesting control of the city.

“We do not now have enough troops around Kandahar to secure this area from the enemy,” said Kimberly Kagan, the president of the Institute for the Study of War, who over the summer was part of a team that helped General McChrystal assess the Afghan conflict for the president. Control of Kandahar, the hub of Taliban operations in the south, would be a major strategic accomplishment for the United States military and a psychological blow to the enemy.

An additional 5,000 American troops would probably be sent to the contested Helmand Province, home to the poppy crop that is a major source of income for the Taliban who traffic in opium. The province is the vital breadbasket of Afghanistan, where the river valley is a fertile ground for pomegranates, wheat and other fruits and grains.

Some 4,000 Marines are now in the area, but they have been unable to secure large parts of the province, including guerrilla strongholds in southern and central Helmand.

Yet another 5,000 would probably be sent to the eastern area that some military planners refer to as “P2K,” for the Afghan provinces of Paktika, Paktia and Khost. The three provinces border the mountainous tribal area of Pakistan, including North and South Waziristan. The Pakistani region has become a haven for the senior leadership of Al Qaeda.

“The preponderance of forces, no matter what number you pick, will be in the south, and there will be some in the east,” said a senior defense official, who would not specify further. The relatively stable north and west, he said, “will remain areas of an economy of force.”

Perhaps as many as 10,000 troops would be deployed as trainers with the Afghan security forces, with NATO pledging to send thousands more.

20,000 to 35,000 troops

This way encompasses a number of mid-range options under discussion at the Pentagon and the White House. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have coalesced around a plan to send 30,000 or more troops to Afghanistan, although there are variations in their positions and they are not working in lock step.

The difference between 30,000 and 40,000, military analysts say, is that there might be 5,000 trainers rather than 10,000, and fewer troops to spread flexibly across the country over all, although there would still be a strong concentration in the south.

“Kandahar is pretty crucial, and we should not skimp there,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution who just returned from a trip to Afghanistan.

Administration officials say that the additional troops would also be deployed to protect some dozen population clusters across the country, including not only Kandahar and Kabul but also Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz in the north, Herat in the west and Jalalabad in the east.

Military officials say that three-quarters of any additional troops sent, no matter the number, will be working side by side with Afghan security forces in a “partnering” or apprentice arrangement. They will be separate from American trainers, whose job is to put raw recruits through a basic military training regime.

Under the partnering arrangement, Afghan troops will share the same bases as the Americans, a defense official said, and although there will be separate sleeping quarters and dining facilities, “they’re going to live together, work together, plan together and operate together.”

Should Mr. Obama send 20,000 troops, military analysts say, there would probably be no fourth brigade to use around the country, and parts of Helmand and the east would receive few if any additional troops. With this number, Mr. Obama would expect a greater contribution of troops from NATO allies (about 35,000 troops from other NATO countries are currently in Afghanistan). Much of the American mission would focus on training.

Administration officials estimate the cost of sending 30,000 more troops at $25 billion to $30 billion a year and the cost of sending 20,000 troops at $21 billion a year.

10,000 to 15,000 troops

Under this approach, advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the United States would accelerate the training of the Afghan security forces and focus on eliminating the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan through drone strikes.

Mr. Obama is likely to announce his new Afghanistan strategy in the first week of December, administration officials say.

Despite the attention to the troop number, Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cautioned that it would be about as helpful to understanding the president’s war strategy as counting the number of parts in a Ferrari to determine how it would handle the road.

[bigron]

Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940679,00.html

Talking with the Taliban

By Aryn Baker / Kabul

Abdul Jameel was ready for peace. The commander of a small group of Taliban fighters in the province of Wardak, Afghanistan, Jameel was able to persuade his men to surrender to the government in exchange for amnesty and the chance to return to a life of farming or shopkeeping. But he never got that chance. Just weeks after he approached the government, Jameel and several members of his family were gunned down. It is unclear if the Taliban killed him or if old rivals were seeking revenge. Nevertheless, Jameel's story — which quickly spread around the province — provided a potent deterrent to other would-be reconcilers and a lesson in the complexities of talking with the Taliban.

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai embarks on his second five-year term, he maintains that his primary agenda is to bring the war in Afghanistan to a peaceful close through negotiations with members of the Taliban insurgency. Karzai has gone so far as to invite his "Taliban brothers" to "embrace their land" and join him in talks. The U.S. too is growing weary of the war. As President Barack Obama finalizes his new strategy for Afghanistan and deliberates over how many more troops he should send to the front, he is facing pressure to define a clear exit strategy. What was once anathema — talking to an enemy that was overthrown by U.S. forces in 2001 in retaliation for sheltering Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network — is now gaining acceptance, as the generals realize that military tactics alone will not win this war. For many U.S., European and U.N. diplomats as well as Afghan officials, talking with the Taliban seems to be the fastest, and perhaps only, way out of the quagmire. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1653255,00.html

Is it really? Or is a dialogue with the Taliban just another dead end?

For those who think that negotiations are worth trying and that so-called moderate Taliban can be coaxed to break ranks with their extremist leaders, there is a hopeful precedent. Starting in early 2007, tens of thousands of Iraqi insurgents were persuaded to lay down their weapons in exchange for cash and jobs, usually as part of local militias fighting their former al-Qaeda allies. Building on that example, General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan, wrote in his recent assessment of the Afghan war that NATO "must identify opportunities to reintegrate former mid- to low-level insurgent fighters into normal society by offering them a way out." Lieut. General Graeme Lamb, a former head of Britain's special forces who was asked by McChrystal to head the program, which was announced in September, says insurgents need to be offered security, vocational training, jobs and amnesty for past crimes. "This is not rocket science," says Lamb. "Insurgents have been reconciling and reintegrating back into society for centuries. This is about entering a dialogue where they can see opportunities, because the way you counter an insurgency is with a better life." (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' offensive in Afghanistan.) http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1908500,00.html

Both Afghan and Western officials have embraced the new terminology: they seek reintegration for low-level Taliban members who are assumed to be fighting for money or personal grievances, and reconciliation for Taliban leaders who are motivated by ideology. The plan, according to U.S. officials, will be undertaken in concert with the Afghan government. "We think that reintegration, if done right, if done by Afghan leaders and people, helps to create conditions for broader-scale reconciliation," says a U.S. diplomat.

The Taliban leadership, needless to say, has greeted all this with a snort of derision. "The mujahedin of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are not mercenaries," said Mullah Brader Akhund in a statement. "This war will come to an end when all invaders leave our country and an Islamic government based on the aspirations of our people is formed." Such a denunciation was to be expected. But even those who back the plan worry that Karzai's corruption-riddled government is so detested that money and jobs will not be enough, on their own, to woo fighters to switch sides. "Paying the low-level [Taliban] may work temporarily, but it won't solve the main problems," says Ishaq Nizami, the former head of the TV and Radio Directorate under the Taliban regime. "There is so much corruption and no laws. In many areas the Taliban have been able to bring security and justice, which the government has not done. Even if some fighters turn, they will turn back again when they understand that their lives are not better." For reintegration to work, in other words, Afghanistan needs to have a government worth fighting for. So far it does not.

See pictures of suicide in recruiters' ranks.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1889200,00.html

See pictures of Osama Bin Laden.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1888705,00.html

You Can't Help if You Aren't There
Persuading fighters to think of laying down their arms might be the easiest part of a new approach. They also need to believe they will be safe if they do so. Many Taliban foot soldiers joined the movement simply because they ended up on the wrong side of a local power equation. As with Jameel in Wardak province, affiliation with the Taliban offered them protection. So if they are going to disarm, they need to be confident that the side they are joining will stay and win — otherwise, desertion could be a death sentence.

Trouble is, that means making the sort of guarantee that the U.S. and its allies shy away from. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that the U.S. is "not interested in staying [in Afghanistan]" and has "no long-term stake there," she probably — if inadvertently — caused fence sitters to reconsider their options. Indeed, Masoom Stanekzai, Karzai's point man on the reintegration policy, says that for it to work, a U.S. commitment of more troops is important. "The stronger presence of security forces in an area means that more Taliban commanders are under pressure," says Stanekzai. "They will ask themselves, 'Continue and be killed, or join the peace process?'" (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House.) http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1863062_1863058,00.html

So far, the new policy has focused on low-level Taliban fighters. But there have been moves to engage the insurgency's leaders too. In a sign of mounting frustration with Karzai's government, Obama recently requested an analysis of Afghanistan's provinces to determine which of them had leaders with whom the U.S. could work directly. The request apparently did not exclude Taliban commanders, a move that has met with approval among Afghans. "There are many capable people in the Taliban ... [who] can be an asset [to the government] if they agree to lay down their arms," says Haleem Fidayee, governor of Wardak province. To many, the Taliban are no worse than the warlords who preceded them in power. Several such warlords are now serving in Karzai's Cabinet. If they can be brought into the tent, the reasoning goes, why can't the Taliban leadership? "If you want to get important results, you have to talk to important people," says Talatbek Masadykov, director of political affairs at the U.N.

But do those important people want a conversation? In recent months, Mullah Omar, the one-eyed veteran Taliban leader, seems to have distanced himself from al-Qaeda. In a September statement, Omar assured foreign nations that Afghanistan would never again be used as a launching ground for international terrorism, as it was before 9/11. "We assure all countries," he said, "that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others." Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network and author of a recent book on the war, is convinced that the Taliban is trying to send a message. "They are presenting themselves as a parallel government. Even before 9/11 they wanted to play ball. We didn't take them seriously then, but we should start doing that now." (See what happened to the accused 9/11 plotters.)
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1939309_1939306,00.html

Others might dispute that analysis. In 2001, the Taliban leadership was fractured between moderates, who sought international engagement, and conservatives, influenced by al-Qaeda, who preferred continued isolation. But assuming that at least some Taliban leaders want to reach out to the West, what would a conversation with them be about? "Everyone says we have to talk to the Taliban," says Hekmat Karzai, director of the Kabul-based Center for Conflict and Peace Studies. "But when you do, what the hell are you going to say?" It's a good question. The first thing the Taliban would want is a cease-fire, says Antonio Giustozzi, author of Decoding the New Taliban. "They crave the kind of legitimacy that such a cease-fire would bring. They want to be counted as a legitimate force with legitimate grievances." But a cease-fire would mean that Taliban senior leaders would be removed from the U.N. sanctions list as well as the Pentagon's Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List, which catalogs authorized targets for U.S. forces. Doing so shouldn't be that difficult. It could even be used as a bargaining tool to lure some of the Taliban to the table.

See pictures of a Jihadist's journey.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1883150,00.html

See who's who on the CIA payroll.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1933053_1933052,00.html

The al-Qaeda Connection
Other key Taliban demands will be less easy to meet. In any negotiations, for example, the Taliban would want to see a timeline for the withdrawal of international forces. The problem there, Hekmat Karzai says, is that "Afghans know that if the international soldiers leave we won't have a solid security institution, so foreign withdrawal has to be concomitant with increased Afghan security forces." But training of the Afghan army and police force is going more slowly than planned, and U.S. and European instructors are in short supply. It will be several years before Afghan troops can defend the country on their own. Before it withdraws its forces, the U.S. will want to be sure that all al-Qaeda bases have been destroyed and that the group will not be able to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for further terrorist attacks. In theory, that is doable. Intelligence officials estimate that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, but for the Taliban to completely renounce their al-Qaeda sponsors, says Giustozzi, they will have to be provided with alternative sources of income. (See more about the Taliban.)
http://www.time.com/time/searchresults?Ntt=Taliban

Even if Saudi Arabia or others stepped into the financial breach, not all Afghans are convinced that the Taliban leadership can be easily peeled away from al-Qaeda. A senior Afghan security official points to a recent attack on the U.N. compound in Kabul that was planned and financed by al-Qaeda but executed by the Taliban. The war has brought their causes closer together, he says. "Now the real Taliban is no different from the real al-Qaeda. They are not a bunch of hungry guys fighting because al-Qaeda is paying them. They will never accept our vision of a stable, democratic Afghanistan."

That rejection extends to Western demands for Afghan women to have basic rights. Listen to Abdul Wahid, 26, a Taliban member jailed for his involvement in a car-bomb blast that claimed several lives. Wahid says compromise on the establishment of Islamic law is out of the question — and to him, that means women would not be able to work. "They could leave the house, but only if they were dressed appropriately. They could go to school, but they would never be able to work in offices — only in women's hospitals or as teachers at girls' schools." If the Obama Administration were willing to negotiate with the Taliban in the hope of a quick exit, such issues would not just create outrage at home; they would disillusion those Afghans who still believe in Western promises of human rights and democracy. "Afghans don't really want reconciliation," says the Afghan security official. "They are not prepared to have the Taliban return. They are desperate to come to an end of the fighting — that is all."

So too is the U.S. And that is why Hekmat Karzai sees the enthusiasm for talks less as a considered proposal for a long-term Afghan solution and more as a way for the U.S. and its allies to get out as soon as they can. "If we are going to initiate dialogue, it should not be so the West can immediately leave Afghanistan, saying, 'Look, now they have come together. They have developed a solution Afghans are happy with, so we can back off.' If you did that, this country would collapse back into chaos. We have to do this because we want to make sure there is a lasting peace."

Talking to the Taliban, on that view, will work only if it is accompanied by an extensive nation-building program, leading to a clean government that protects its people and gives them real opportunity. Pity that is precisely the long-term commitment to Afghanistan the U.S. is trying to avoid.

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Obama’s Third Way in Afghanistan


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_third_way_in_afghanistan_20091122/
Posted on Nov 22, 2009
By E.J. Dionne

When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.

Afghanistan has presented President Barack Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.

If we wanted to be successful in Afghanistan, we wouldn’t choose to start from where we are now. We wouldn’t have put this war on the back burner for so long, and we would have dealt much earlier with the debilitating deficiencies of President Hamid Karzai’s government.

Obama can change none of this. And unlike enthusiasts for an all-out counterinsurgency strategy, Obama knows he has to make a decision that’s sustainable over the long run, which means taking into account domestic economic and political realities.

One of these is the weariness over a truth that Andrew Bacevich, the hardheaded foreign policy analyst, put more plainly than most: “that permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States.”

Americans have always been willing to battle terrorists. What they did not count on—and were not led to expect when the Bush administration committed troops first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq—were two long, violent, indefinite occupations costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Advocates of a big counterinsurgency strategy are offended at anyone who raises the financial costs of our commitments. Those most angered by any talk about the immense expense of these wars are typically the very conservatives who bemoan America’s fiscal condition and the dangers of long-term deficits—yet had no qualms over starting two wars and cutting taxes at the same time.

The costs are definitely worrying Obama and getting under the skin of congressional Democrats tired of attacks on their fiscal credentials. That’s why it’s significant that a group of House Democrats led by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chose last week, in anticipation of the president’s decision, to introduce a bill requiring the president to set a surtax to pay for war costs in Afghanistan.

“As we’ve struggled to pass health care reform, we’ve been told that we have to pay for the bill,” the Democrats said in a statement. “Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.”

The proposal may never become law but it sends a clear message: Any troop increase Obama proposes will be wildly unpopular among a large share of those who have been his strongest backers—and most popular with those whom he cannot count on for support in any other area.

Obama knows that patience with permanent war is wearing out. This is why he will insist that he is not committing new troops indefinitely. 

One senior administration official, emphasizing that final choices have not been made, described the policy Obama is likely to announce in early December this way: “It will not be open-ended, it will be limited in time, and the focus will be on strategy, not the number of troops.” It’s likely that the number of troops he’ll send will be below the 40,000 proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. 

The president has decided that Afghanistan is neither Iraq nor Vietnam. This is a view that puts him at odds with both the hawks, who constantly use the 2007 Iraq surge metaphor, and the doves, who constantly look to Vietnam as a cautionary tale. 

Obama insists that a surge in Afghanistan cannot work in the same way it did in Iraq because conditions on the ground are so different. Yet in the wake of 9/11, he sees the United States as having vital interests in Afghanistan that it did not have in Vietnam: the need to defeat terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to be mindful about the impact of our choices on the future of Pakistan.

No issue has presented a tougher test for Obama’s non-ideological pragmatism than Afghanistan. Those with the greatest political stake in the debate reject the middle ground and doubt the president can think his way around the all-in-or-all-out dilemma. Yet this is exactly the kind of thinking Obama promised last year, and he’s right to try to make it work.
   
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
   

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Four US soldiers killed in Afghanistan

By HEIDI VOGT (AP)

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60390&hd=&size=1&l=e
 

4 US service members die in Afghan attacks

November 23, 2009

KABUL — Bomb attacks and a firefight killed four U.S. troops in 24 hours in Afghanistan, the military said Monday, adding to the growing toll as NATO and the U.S. consider whether to send more forces to the war.

Three of the Americans died in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, NATO said in a statement. Two of them were killed in a bomb attack and the third in a separate firefight.

The statement said a bomb killed the fourth American in the east Monday.

The deaths bring the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan in November to 15. October was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year war, with 58 dead.

Meanwhile, Afghan officials said three Afghan soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Helmand province.

The Defense Ministry said the bombing occurred on Sunday in Musa Qala district. It did not give further details and it was not clear if there was any connection between the Afghan deaths and the American deaths.

In Brussels, NATO said Monday it wants allied nations to commit more forces to Afghanistan ahead of a U.S. decision on whether to send more troops.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in the midst of intense negotiations on getting more troops, equipment, funding and other resources for the newly established NATO Training Mission, spokesman James Appathurai said.

NATO currently has about 71,000 troops in Afghanistan, nearly half of them American. The U.S. military also has another 36,000 soldiers in Afghanistan who serve outside NATO under independent command.

The Obama administration is considering military proposals to send 10,000 to 40,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year. An announcement is expected in the next two weeks after months of deliberations over the war.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, inaugurated Thursday for a second five-year term, wants more U.S. help to secure his country against the Taliban-led insurgency.

Although several allies have said they will dispatch some reinforcements, most NATO nations have so far shied away from making firm commitments.

___

Associated Press writer Slobodan Lekic contributed to this report from Brussels.

(This version CORRECTS ADDS background, photos. SUBS 6th graf to correct that statement came from the defense ministry.)

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.



 

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Afghan Resistance Statement

The Aims of Mujahideen

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60383&hd=&size=1&l=e

                                 

November 23, 2009


Dhu al-Hijjah 3, 1430 A.H, November 21, 2009

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate

As an Islamic liberation force, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate represent aspirations of the Afghan masses who want to free themselves from the claws of colonialism. This is the only force, the people look to for realization of their noble aims.

Therefore, to live up to the expectation of the people, the Mujahideen’s objectives are clear. They want to establish an Islamic system based on justice and equality and gain independence of the country where the Afghans will be owners of their own country and fate. Education, spiritual and material uplift and reconstructions are other aims of the Islamic Emirate. It has declared time and again that it will implement these goals upon gaining independence.

However, the intelligence agencies of the invading countries and the biased media are trying to mar the good name of Mujahideen. Under the notorious name of terrorism, they want to create hatred among the people against the true sons of this land (Afghanistan). Even some time, these agencies resort to perpetrating gruesome crimes like explosions in congested places where hundreds of innocent people lose their lives. Some time, they flare up sectarian violence as per the old divide and rule formula of colonialism. Then, they accuse Mujahideen of being involved these crimes. The Mujahideen are free from all such charges. No Mujahid will ever want to kill an innocent Muslim or Muslima.

But the biased media constantly publish the official story and the people under the influence of the partial reports are confused and some time, misjudge the events because they do not know to tell facts from lies. On the other hand, the mainstream media do not publish the stand of Mujahideen regarding every event, fearing the invading Americans will accuse them of helping the so-called terrorists. In fact, the world has now been taken hostage by the media suffocation unleashed by the colonialism.

Pentagon has a psychological war department. This department is charged with spreading lies against Mujahideen. They spend millions of dollars to make it possible that the lies fabricated in Pentagon reach every ear in the world. They pay high sum of money to journalists who is ready to publish maligning stories against Mujahideen.

According to a media report, a CIA cell in one of the neighboring countries of Afghanistan pay a journalist $1000 for a story against Mujahideen. They put on air dramas aimed at marring the image of Mujahideen. Ironically, the colonialists have taken this war from the battle fields to the fields of media, labor unions, business circles and scholar forums. So they should be confronted in all these fields.

Those journalists who are committed to human dignity, liberation, and justice should form Mujahideen Support Groups and wage an unwavering and constant campaign against the black propaganda launched by the colonialists because in the final analysis, this is not the war of Taliban. This is the war of all freedom-loving and justice-loving people all over the world who want to live as free people without the sword of colonialism hanging over their heads in this 21st century.


Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan


 

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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
12:56 Mecca time, 09:56 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/11/2009112425134993963.html
   
News Americas  
 
Obama holds Afghan war meeting  

 
Obama's decision is expected before Nato meets on sending more trainers next month [EPA]

 
The US president has met his national security team for what looks like the final time before he decides on whether to send more troops to bolster the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The White House had indicated that Monday's meeting - Barack Obama's ninth with his senior advisers on the war - will be the last before he announces his decision.

Obama met Joe Biden, the vice-president, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, and other senior officials at the White House.

No decision is expected to be announced until next Monday at the earliest, with Washington all but closing down for the Thanksgiving holiday later this week.

"It's not going to happen this week," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said. "Obviously the first possible time would be some time next week."

US officials and Western diplomats say they expect his announcement before a Nato meeting on December 7 in Europe in which alliance members could agree to send thousands of additional trainers to Afghanistan.

The US currently has nearly 68,000 troops deployed to fight a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Options

As Obama debates a revised strategy in the eight-year war, officials say he is considering four options.


Afghanistan options :

The US currently has nearly 68,000 troops deployed to fight a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. As Obama debates a revised strategy in the eight-year war, officials say he is considering four options.

One option is the request put forward by the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for 40,000 more troops to secure the towns and cities.

Another option, said to be carrying the most favour among officials, is an increase of 30,000. Washington could then try to convince Nato allies to contribute, bringing the number of troops to the 40,000 McChrystal recommended.

Options three and four include significantly lower troop deployments, from 20,000 to 15,000, most of who would serve as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

 
One option is the request put forward by the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for 40,000 more troops to secure the towns and cities.

Another option, said to be carrying the most favour among officials, is an increase of 30,000. Washington could then try to convince Nato allies to make up the shortfall of 10,000.

Options three and four include significantly lower troop deployments, from 15,000 to 20,000, most of whom would serve as trainers for the Afghan security forces.
 
Obama and his advisers have debated options ranging from sending the tens of thousands more troops requested by McChrystal to limiting troop increases and concentrating on attacking al-Qaeda targets.

But reports have suggested that the advisers are rallying around options that would see a deployment of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops and trainers sent to Afghanistan.

Moves to send more troops face opposition from a public disillusioned with the long-running conflict and politicians from Obama's own Democratic party, who say the US must start looking for a way out of Afghanistan.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that 46 per cent of Americans support a large influx of troops to battle Taliban fighters and train the Afghan military, while 45 per cent favour a smaller number to focus on training Afghan security forces.

Obama's decision has also been complicated by concerns about corruption and governance in the administration of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Karzai was sworn in for a second term last week after an election marred by widespread fraud and farce as his main challenger refused to take part in a second round run-off.

Delays and doubts

Opposition Republicans, who tend to favour sending a large number of troops, have criticised Obama for taking as long as he has to decide.
 
Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, told a radio show on Monday that "the delay is not cost-free".

"Every day that goes by raises doubts in the minds of our friends in the region about what you're going to do, raises doubts in the minds of the troops."

Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, hit back at critics who say Obama is dithering.

"I've seen a lot of these things. This is the most thorough, the most sustained, the most thoughtful process I have ever seen," he said , on Monday before the White House meeting.

"Over the long course of it, we have all learnt a great deal from each other in a way which I think is exactly the way a decision should be made."

Gibbs pointed out that the president was making "a complicated decision" and said: "I think the American people want the president to take the time to get this decision right, rather than to make a hasty decision," he said.

Meanwhile, the violence continues unabated, with seven soldiers, - four Americans and three Afghans - as well as five Afghan civilians killed in a series of attacks across the country in the past two days.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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Inconveniently situated

By David Chater in  Asia  on November 24th, 2009
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2009/11/24/inconveniently-situated


Photo by EPA


Kabul's five-star Serena hotel, a spot popular with journalists and Afghanistan's politicians, comes under rocket attack. But at least one VIP diner appears unconcerned by the incident.

Kabul's Serena Hotel proudly describes itself in its own publicity literature as "conveniently situated in the centre of the city ... close to all the embassies and ministries" dominating a busy junction.

It was something I found far from convenient tonight when the sound of a large explosion shook the windows of my room. Looking through them I could see a large cloud of dust hanging in the lamplight of the courtyard and armed soldiers and security guards sprinting across it. Definitely too close for comfort.

Those guns were waved in my face as I attempted to go outside on the street to find out what had happened. I was to remain only an ear-witness to the event. The sound of sirens converging on the hotel, though, soon made it clear that the Serena had been the target.

As I phoned through a report to the Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, my colleague James Bays told me a security consultant outside the hotel had seen a rocket propelled grenade whoosh past him and strike a police checkpoint at the end of the road. He'd also heard the sound of gunfire.

Looking around the courtyard it soon became apparent to both of us that there were a lot of camouflaged uniforms. Sure enough, it turned out the Afghan defence minister was "savouring the  tranquility and sumptuous food" of the hotel's main restaurant. (That publicity literature again).

After a discrete time had passed Abdul Rahim Wardak emerged into the courtyard to say that rockets didn't worry him. They were always so inaccurate.

Only that morning he had announced the Afghan National Army was to be almost tripled in strength. And everyone of them will be needed if President Karzai's promise to shoulder the main responsibility for the fight against the Taliban within three years is not to prove an empty one.

But there's a worrying point, not least for the guests of the five star Serena and its visiting VIPs: the accurate intelligence supplied to the Taliban which allowed them to launch an attack with however an inaccurate weapon - while the defence minister was sampling the delights of the hotel's buffet.

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Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by The Hill


Obey Wants 'War Surtax' to Fund Afghan Effort

by Michael O'Brien

WASHINGTON, DC - Any troop increase for Afghanistan should come with a "war surtax" on high income Americans, a top House chairman said Monday.


Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, warned that if President Barack Obama decides to send additional troops to Afghanistan, it should be funded with the new tax. Obey said his proposed tax would be a "graduated" tax on income that would help offset the roughly $40 billion in new costs needed to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a cost estimated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag. (Photo: Getty Images)

Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, warned that if President Barack Obama decides to send additional troops to Afghanistan, it should be funded with the new tax.

"If we have to pay for the healthcare bill, we should pay for the war as well," Obey told ABC News [1] in an interview, "by having a war surtax."

Obey said his proposed tax would be a "graduated" tax on income that would help offset the roughly $40 billion in new costs needed to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a cost estimated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag.

"I want the president and every American to think ahead of time about what it means if you do add to our involvement in Afghanistan," Obey told ABC [1], pointing to the war costs that affected the presidencies and domestic agendas of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.
The call for a new tax mirrors a similar demand over the weekend from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on funding the war effort in Afghanistan. Levin told Bloomberg News [2] that he favored an "additional income tax" on incomes over $200,000 or $250,000 to finance any troop surge.

"If we don't pay for it, then the cost of the Afghan war will wipe out every other initiative that we have to try to rebuild our own economy," he said. "I'm going to be fighting to get whatever they do paid for."


© 2009 The Hill

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/23-3

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USA Sets Up Death Squads In Afghanistan

RedBedHead

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60417&hd=&size=1&l=e

November 23, 2009

IN POLITE COMPANY THEY DON'T CALL THEM DEATH SQUADS, instead they are euphemistically labelled "anti-Taliban militias". And the USA is pouring millions into the secretive program - the details of which they aren't even revealing to their allies. But we've seen this counter-insurgency strategy many times before.

The Americans used it in Nicaragua where they trained and armed Contras to fight against the leftist Sandinista government. Even earlier they used this strategy in Angola, funding the vicious UNITA army of Joseph Savimbi.

And, of course, they used it in Iraq as part of their divide on conquer strategy by stoking up a near civil war between Sunni and Shia militias, then co-opting the Sunnis into the Awakening movement to crush Al Qaeda, then turning on them - or allowing the Shiite-led government to turn on them. In every case it has meant the most horrendous escalation of violence as village is turned against village, neighbour against neighbour. The poor compete in brutality to get access to development funds by increasing their body count.

Alas, this is nothing new.

But, in this instance, it is the act of a desperate imperial force, which is fast losing ground, with defeat a widely mooted possibility. Over the weekend at the Halifax International Security Forum, a gathering of warmongers from Europe and the Americas, Canada's former army chief General Rick Hillier said that the West has "one last shot" in the next 18 months to get it right in Afghanistan. Former Republican presidential candidate, John McCain made clear what that means:


It's not going to be easy. Casualties will go up ... and it will require a degree of steadfastness that will try the governments not only of our allies, but in the United States as well, as public opinion may be not totally in favour of what we're doing.

Even America's staunchest ally in the region, Pakistan, is getting worried. According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, Pakistan officials are pressing Obama to negotiate with the Taliban leadership - including Mullah Omar, a key founder and leader - rather than sending thousands more troops, as the US military leadership want. Some Pakistani are already negotiating with the Taliban and think that a reconciliation plan is possible with Karzai as a powerless figurehead and power divided between the Pashtun majority and representatives of the other ethnic groups.

The US disagrees thinking, not unreasonably, that the Taliban have no reason to negotiate at the moment since they are on the ascendent. The trouble is, as the Pakistanis point out, if the Americans surge, Taliban will pour into Pakistan, destabilizing the country further, especially if the US continued to not guard the border. Clearly the Americans are hoping to get around some of this through their death squad strategy of peeling away the "moderate" or "non-ideological" Taliban using cash incentives. However, as the CSM article makes clear, many think this is a non-starter:


"The Americans have wasted a lot of time over this 'moderate Taliban' idea. It is never going to pan out. It misunderstands the Taliban phenomenon," said Simbal Khan, an analyst at Institute of Strategic Studies, a policy institute funded by the Pakistani government. "If you try to break off elements with cash, they'll take your money and still fight you."

What this demonstrates is the growth of tensions between two powers that have broadly the same goals but lack the ability to implement them on either sides of the borders they control. In the wilds of the Hindu Kush and Waziristan, neither the Americans nor the Pakistani military know how to defeat the insurgency. And the strain is starting to show.


 

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South Asia
Nov 25, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK25Df01.html 
 
SPEAKING FREELY

A route for South Asian peace via Afghanistan

By Raja Karthikeya



As the war in Afghanistan takes a turn for the worse, the burden of blame has increasingly come to rest on the state of relations between India and Pakistan and their rivalry in Afghanistan. The conclusions of the report of General Stanley McChrystal, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, the recent bombing at the Indian Embassy in Kabul, and the continuing reports in Pakistani media about Indians in Afghanistan being involved in fomenting the insurgency in Pakistan's Balochistan province, have ratcheted up tension between the neighbors.

It is therefore relevant to ask if Pakistan and India's interests in Afghanistan are indeed incompatible. It is indisputable that Pakistan and India have deeper cultural and historic relations with Afghanistan than perhaps any of the country's neighbors except Iran, and have a major stake in the stability and future of Afghanistan. But such is the two countries' post-partition history that one can sometimes read too much into it. Diplomacy requires fresh thinking and the courage to act on bold ideas. It needs leaving behind the baggage of history without necessarily forgetting it. If we peel through the layers of perceptions, we can find several converging interests.

Achieving convergence
First, there is a need to recognize that fears based on history are often exaggerated. For instance the fear of "strategic encirclement", a key argument with reference to Afghanistan. A commonly cited fear in Pakistan is that if there is a hostile regime in Kabul, in the event of a war with India, the Afghans would invade to claim Pashtun lands in their pursuit of creating Pashtunistan. And yet, in none of the Pakistan-India wars (1965 and 1971 being the most significant ones) did a government in Kabul commit aggression against Pakistan while the latter was distracted by the war with India.

In the case of India, a longstanding fear involves aggression by China to take advantage of an India-Pakistan conflict or in support of Pakistan. Yet, declassified archives show that during the 1971 war, despite the Richard Nixon administration's appeals in support of the Yahya Khan regime, the Chinese did not open a front against India.

Secondly, the Cold War is now over, and the neighbors must move away the vocabulary, sentiments and perceptions that were imposed on the subcontinent. The concept of "strategic depth", which dominates literature on Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, is hardly relevant in an age of nuclear deterrence between the two neighbors.

There is also an equal need to dispel mutual misperceptions about the ethos that guides either country's foreign policy. For instance, hardly anybody in India today reads, much less admires, the Arthashastra, an archaic 4th century BC text whose Machiavellian tenets are often cited in Pakistan as the fountainhead of modern India's foreign policy towards Afghanistan. It would equally be a mistake for Indian strategists to believe that Pakistan's foreign policy, which has been highly pragmatic, is exclusively guided by religious identity.

In terms of perceptions, it would be delusional for either side to believe that territorial disputes, including Kashmir, in which both sides have enormous stakes, can be resolved through force (direct or covert), or that a policy of payback can ever act as an enduring deterrent.

Thirdly, as two nations that threw off the yoke of imperialism and achieved self-rule after decades of struggle, India and Pakistan are obligated to respect each other's sovereignty and, at the very least, recognize each other's stake in regional stability. No doubt both nations are aware that a break-up of the other country creates unparalleled dangers and instability. Therefore, repeating pledges to respect each other's territorial integrity and believing each other's pledge would help.

It also involves recognizing that both nations have a stake in South Asia and neither has an exclusive "sphere of influence", and neither can India dictate Pakistan's relationship with Bangladesh, nor Pakistan the relationship between India and Afghanistan. Diplomatic ties go a lot longer than the miles of border shared.

Fourth, either side should acknowledge that national interests are never static and evolve with time and changing ground realities. The respective interests of Pakistan and India vis-a-vis Afghanistan have changed considerably over the past three decades. Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan go well beyond containing Indian influence. The dominant reasons for Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s were to ensure a buffer against Soviet expansion that could be an existential threat to Pakistan, and to create conditions for the return of the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

But by the early 1990s, as ambassador S Iftikhar Ahmed has essayed, they had metamorphosed into a need to end the Afghan civil war, restore stability in Pakistan's neighborhood, and to create conditions for uninterrupted trade with Central Asia. This included courting several mujahideen members including, at times, leaders of the Northern Alliance.

India's objectives in Afghanistan have been equally diverse. India, which had been a peripheral player in Afghanistan in the 1980s, began to see its interest piqued in Afghanistan after what Zahid Hussain calls "the privatization of jihad" happened in the late 1980s - a situation in which non-state actors and individuals from across the world had begun declaring "jihad" (in a gross distortion of the word) in Afghanistan with no sanction of their respective states.

After the collapse of the mujahideen government, India's support to the Northern Alliance was predicated on regional stability and a fear of such non-state actors. The hijack of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in December 1999 and the subsequent drama in which the Taliban allowed the escape of the terrorists released by India in exchange for the passengers, and the fact that non-state actors like al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba freely used Afghanistan as a sanctuary in the late 1990s precipitated India's role today in Afghanistan. Understanding these interests would help reject the web of suspicion into which the neighbors have woven themselves.

Breaking the deadlock
After crossing the barrier of history, there is a need now to look ahead. This means that besides identifying the neighbor's national interests, one needs to appreciate his legitimate interests. As Rajmohan Gandhi recently wrote, "Indians should recognize that ties of geography, ethnicity and family bring to the Pak-Afghan relationship a depth that can never enter the India-Afghan relationship." To translate this into action, India should quietly encourage Afghanistan to resolve the Durand line dispute with Pakistan, a major source of concern for Pakistan's strategists.

India should never refrain from stating that it sees preserving Pakistan's territorial integrity as a priority. On its part, Pakistan should encourage rather than oppose India's efforts at infrastructure reconstruction in Afghanistan, the fifth-poorest country on the planet. Pakistan should also effectively act against the presence in Waziristan of groups like the Haqqani network, whose attack on the Indian Embassy last year and ties to other terrorist groups have threatened peace efforts between the two neighbors and between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The moot political question remains the Taliban. Here again, there is more convergence of interest between Pakistan and India than acknowledged. Pakistan and India have been in and out of favor of Afghanistan's Pashtuns in turn over the past two decades. But both India and Pakistan want the same - that Pashtuns have adequate representation in power in Kabul.

So should the Taliban be that Pashtun voice? The Afghan Taliban's agenda lacked (and continues to lack) any plan of governance. It also damaged Pakistan's relations with Iran and sowed the seeds of widespread Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian violence in the region - indeed, as a senior Pakistani diplomat of that era confessed, "after 1999, Pakistan's government could no longer affect the trajectory of the Taliban and they increasingly fell under the influence of the Arabs [that is, al-Qaeda]".

Given the fact that the Taliban today is more of an ideology and a worldview than a political movement, they are a threat to the subcontinent's stability. However, as long as an insurgent gives up the tag, violence and radical worldview of a Talib, he can be recognized as a legitimate voice of the Afghans and be reconciled with. Despite differences in articulation, this political vision is common to both Pakistan and India. In fact, Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna's recent statement supporting a political solution in Afghanistan can be seen as an allusion to this.

The benefits
There are at least four benefits accruable from believing in a convergence of interests. Having a strong, stable, pluralistic government in power in Afghanistan helps regional stability, secures Pakistan and almost by corollary, India.

Secondly, terrorism is a threat to both countries today, and sooner than later, the same elements threaten both countries - as in the case of Jaish-e-Mohammed, founded by Masood Azhar, one of the men released by India to the Taliban in Kandahar after the 1999 hijack. The group is since believed to have been involved in both the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the recent attack on the Pakistan army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Thirdly, the two neighbors are the most energy-deficient nations in the region. Tapping into the energy resources of Central Asia (for example, through the trans-Afghanistan or TAPI pipeline) would help cater to their energy demand and also reduce their disproportionate dependence on the Middle East, especially as piracy and periodic saber-rattling between the West and Iran imperils oil supplies from the Gulf.

Fourth, allowing transit of Indian goods to Afghanistan would not harm the interests of Pakistan. On the contrary, the transit tolls from Indian goods can actually help the Pakistani government make up for the loss of coalition's goods traffic to former Soviet republics. Indeed, allowing Afghanistan-India two-way transit trade through Pakistan could lay the foundation for much-needed direct commerce between Pakistan and India.

Although the idea of recognizing converging interests is not new to diplomats on either side, it has often been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. However, arrival at this understanding should not be done in a back-channel process away from the glare of the media. There is a need to take the people along.

In the interim, the neighbors should desist from blaming each other for terrorist attacks. Conspiracy theories should be quickly de-legitimized. Diplomatic relations cannot fall prey to irrational rabble-rousers, talk-show hosts or conspiracy theorists. Instead of being a new theater for conflict, Afghanistan can be a new beginning for Pakistan-India relations. Exploring and building upon this convergence is our responsibility not just to the Afghan people, but to the people of India and Pakistan.

Raja Karthikeya is a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.

(Copyright 2009, Raja Karthikeya)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.  http://www.atimes.net/speakingfreely

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Afghan Escalation Could Cost $40 Billion Per Year

White House Estimates $1 Million Per Year Per Soldier

by Jason Ditz, November 23, 2009


 
The financial cost of war is often little more than an afterthought, but President Obama’s decision to take several months to announce his decision on the Afghanistan escalation has allowed people to ask, what will this cost?

The answer seems to be: depends who you ask. The Pentagon is estimating around $500,000 per soldier, per year. The White House estimates that it’ll actually cost about twice that much.

The matter is contentious, but officials in both camps say the price “could change “over time, and in matters military that almost always means “could go up.”

Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, these numbers may not seem like much. But with 30,000-40,000 troops each costing so much and all staying for an unknown number of years, it will rapidly add up to a bill that the Obama Administration, whose military budgets going forward foresaw a significant drop in the cost of overseas adventures, hadn’t prepared for.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/11/23/predicted-cost-of-afghan-escalation-a-matter-of-contention/

 

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Afghan Escalation Could Cost $40 Billion Per Year

Stoking the fire of the phoenix to be burned and reborn as the nwo

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McChrystal and U.S. ambassador to testify on Afghanistan war

Obama, advisers confer again; troop decision may come next week

By Michael D. Shear and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/23/AR2009112303711_pf.html


The top U.S. general and the U.S ambassador in Afghanistan have been told to prepare to testify before Congress as early as next week, according to White House and other U.S. officials, giving an indication of how and when President Obama plans to announce his war strategy.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have yet to be announced, said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry have not been given a date for their appearance before committees that would consider additional war funding requests.

But, the officials said, the two have been told that their testimony would quickly follow Obama's announcement, so that they could offer details and support for the president's strategy for how to proceed with the eight-year-old war. Opinion polls show that most Americans believe it is no longer worth fighting.

On Monday night, Obama met in the White House Situation Room with his senior national security advisers, including Eikenberry and McChrystal, who was expected to join the session by teleconference from Kabul. In an effort to weaken the Taliban insurgency and destroy al-Qaeda, Obama is choosing from several strategic options, all of which call for deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops and would cost tens of billions of dollars a year.

Several leading Democrats have already raised the possibility of a surtax on the wealthiest Americans to help pay for an expanded war effort.


McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has requested 40,000 additional U.S. troops to reverse the Taliban's momentum and to train more quickly Afghan forces. But Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who served in Afghanistan, opposes additional troop deployments until President Hamid Karzai roots out corruption in his administration and takes other steps to strengthen the country. Given their opposing views, their congressional testimony could prove politically delicate.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters Monday that Obama is still seeking information on "not just how we get people there, but what's the strategy for getting them out." He said the subject would be the focus of the Monday evening review session, the last one that has been scheduled.

For much of the fall, Obama has been meeting with his war council to determine a new strategy in Afghanistan, where 68,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed. Now he has 18 weekdays left to announce his decision -- not counting Thanksgiving break -- before he leaves for his Christmas-holiday vacation in Hawaii.

But his schedule for the rest of November and December is filling up with other events and appearances, some of which could create public relations challenges if they happen too close to the presentation of an expanded war effort.

Administration officials have said Obama will not outline his decision until after Thanksgiving, and it appears increasingly probable he will do so early next week. In addition to McChrystal and Eikenberry, senior administration officials whose support for the strategy is essential are preparing to be in town for possible appearances before Congress.

For example, Greek officials announced Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will not be attending next week's Athens meeting of foreign ministers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Clinton missed the last OSCE meeting after breaking her elbow. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also has no announced plans to travel next week.

Obama will probably have to make the announcement early next week because he has scheduled a "jobs summit" at the White House on Dec. 3. The next day he plans to travel to Allentown, Pa., to talk about jobs and the economy.

Obama could push the announcement back another week, but that might create other conflicts.

His schedule is largely open early the week of Dec. 7. But that day, of course, is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and an announcement that day would require another political calculation by the White House over whether that is a symbolically beneficial or inappropriate time for an important wartime speech.

Later in the week of Dec. 7, Obama is to travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, and it seems unlikely that his advisers would want the echo of a new Afghan policy reverberating through that event.

If Obama needs more time, he could wait until the week of Dec. 14, which at this point also appears open on his schedule. But the health-care debate is sure to be roiling the Senate by then, as lawmakers race to meet the president's call to send him a bill by the end of the year.

Along with the timing of the Afghanistan announcement, it is also not clear how the White House plans to present the plan to the public, although the testimony by McChrystal and Eikenberry before Congress offers some clarity. Options being considered include an Oval Office address to the nation, a speech in front of an audience, or a prime-time news conference.

Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Paul Kane and Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.

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Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by Inter Press Service


Déjà Vu: Afghan Army Turnover Rate Threatens US War Plans

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the U.S. Defense Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals.

That high rate of turnover in the ANA, driven by extremely high rates of desertion, spells trouble for the strategy that President Barack Obama has reportedly decided on, which is said to include the dispatch of thousands of additional U.S. military trainers in order to rapidly increase the size of the ANA.

The ANA has been touted by U.S. officials for years as a success story. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal called in his August 2009 strategy paper for increasing the ANA to 134,000 troops by October 2010 and eventually to 240,000.

But an administration source, who insisted on speaking without attribution because of the sensitivity of the subject, confirmed to IPS that 25 percent has been used as the turnover rate for the ANA in internal discussions, and that it is regarded by some officials as a serious problem.

The 35,000 troops recruited in the year ending Sept. 1 is the highest by the ANA in any year thus far, but the net increase of 19,000 troops for the year is 33 percent less than the 26,000 net increases during both of the previous two years.

Those figures indicate that the rate of turnover in the ANA is accelerating rather than slowing down. That acceleration could increase further, as the number of troops whose three-year enlistment contracts end rises rapidly in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department sought to obscure the problem of the high ANA turnover rate in its reports to Congress on Afghanistan in January and June 2009, which avoided the issues of attrition and desertion entirely.

Instead they referred to what DOD calls the "AWOL" (Absent without Leave) rate in the ANA, which measures those unavailable for duty but still in the army. It claimed in June that the AWOL rate was nine percent through May 2009, compared with seven percent in 2008.

The reports also confused the question of turnover in the ANA by using questionable accounting methods in DOD's reporting on monthly changes in personnel. It provided figures for total ANA personnel in 2009 showing an increase from 66,000 in September 2008 to 94,000 in September 2009.

Those figures have made it appear that ANA manpower increased by 28,000 during the year. But nearly half the increase turns out to be accounted for by a decision on the part of the U.S. command responsible for tracking ANA manpower to change what was being measured.

Previously the total had included only those who had been trained and assigned to a military unit. But in late September 2008, CSTC-A started counting 12,000 men who had not previously been considered as part of the ANA.

In response to a query from IPS, Sgt. Grady L. Epperly, chief of media relations for CSTC-A, acknowledged that the U.S. command had abruptly changed what it included in its overall strength figures for the Afghan Army in late September 2008.

"The way numbers were reported was switched from reporting only Operational Forces to including all Soldiers, Officers and civilians, regardless of training status and command," Epperly wrote in an e-mail.

The graphs in the DOD reports of January and June 2009 are still identified as "Afghan National Army Trained and Assigned". But the text of the report reveals that the personnel totals shown on the graph were no longer for the Afghan National Army but for the Ministry of Defence.

That meant that the totals included for the first time those still in training, including even high school cadets, and others not assigned to any unit.

That deceptive accounting change obscured the fact that the total number of personnel assigned to ANA units in September 2009 was actually 82,000 rather than the 94,000 shown, and that the increase in ANA personnel over the year was only 16,000 rather than 28,000.

Using the corrected totals for changes in personnel during the year, the 25 percent turnover rate for ANA combat troops can be calculated from the available data on recruitment and the breakdown between combat and non-combat troops (See Sidebar).

ANA turnover as a proportion of ANA combat troops is a more significant indicator of instability than turnover as a proportion of all personnel, because there is little or no desertion and far higher reenlistment rates in non-combat jobs. ANA non-combat personnel totals also include thousands of civilians.

The impact of the 25-percent combat troop turnover rate on the ANA is actually more acute than it would appear, because of the high absenteeism rate in the ANA. The GAO report revealed that, as of February 2008, out of 32,000 combat troops on the rolls, only 26,000 were available for duty - a 19 percent absenteeism rate.

Assuming that same rate of absenteeism remained during the past year, the number of ANA combat troops actually available for duty increased only by about 9,000 from 37,000 to 46,000.

As serious as the turnover rate was in 2009-2009, turnover in the first two or three years of the ANA was much worse. ANA recruitment and reenlistment figures show that 18,000 of the first 25,000 troops recruited from 2003 to 2005 deserted.

That desertion rate prompted analysts at the U.S. Army Center for Lessons Learned at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas to conclude that the ANA would not be able to grow beyond 100,000, according to an article in the current issue of "Military Review", published at the same Army base.

The authors, Chris Mason and Thomas Johnson, both of whom have had extensive experience in Afghanistan, write that that the analysts at the Army Center concluded that by the time the ANA got to 100,000 troops, its annual losses from desertions and attrition would roughly equal its gains from recruitment.

The Center for Lessons Learned refused to confirm or deny those assertions. When asked about the assertion in the Military Review article, an official of the Center for Lessons Learned, operations officer Randy Cole, refused to comment except to refer IPS to the authors of the article.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam [1]", was published in 2006.

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/24-11

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Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by the McClatchy Newspapers


Déjà Vu: Obama Plans to Send 34,000 More Troops to Afghanistan

by Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/capt_0.jpg
ESCALATION -- US Marines search a compound in Lakari, Helmand Province on November 21, 2009. US President, Barack Obama, has huddled with his war cabinet for what officials indicated could be the final time before he decides whether to dispatch tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan.
(AFP/Manpreet Romana)

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn't originate in the White House.

They said the commander of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, could arrive in Washington as early as Sunday to participate in the rollout of the new plan, including testifying before Congress toward the end of next week. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry also are expected to appear before congressional committees.

As it now stands, the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan - to which the U.S. has long been committed - and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to brief America's NATO allies after next week's announcement, and the allies are to meet again on Dec. 7 in Belgium to discuss whether some other nations might contribute additional troops.

The Monday evening meeting was the ninth that Obama has held on the crisis in Afghanistan, where the worsening war entered its ninth year last month. This year has seen violence reach unprecedented levels as the Taliban and allied groups have gained strength and expanded their reach.

A U.S. military official used the term "decisional" to describe Monday evening's meeting among Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, Clinton, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Eikenberry and senior U.S. military commanders.

The administration's plan contains "off-ramps," points starting next June at which Obama could decide to continue the flow of troops, halt the deployments and adopt a more limited strategy or "begin looking very quickly at exiting" the country, depending on political and military progress, one defense official said.

"We have to start showing progress within six months on the political side or military side or that's it," the U.S. defense official said.

It's "not just how we get people there, but what's the strategy for getting them out," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday.

The approach is driven in part by concerns that Afghan President Hamid Karzai won't keep his promises to root out corruption and support political reforms, and in part by growing domestic opposition to the war, the U.S. officials said.

As McClatchy reported last month, the Obama administration has been quietly working with U.S. allies and Afghan officials on an "Afghanistan Compact," a package of political reforms and anti-corruption measures that it hopes will boost popular support for Karzai and erase the doubts about his legitimacy raised by his fraud-tainted re-election.

The British government is offering to host a conference early next year to win international support for the compact.

Last week, Clinton suddenly adopted a more conciliatory tone toward Karzai, whom she and other administration officials had been pressing to clean up the rampant corruption and cut his ties to local warlords, some of whom traffic in opium.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she said that Karzai had demonstrated "good faith" and added: "Well, there are warlords and there are warlords."

As part of its new plan, the administration, which remains skeptical of Karzai, will "work around him" by working directly with provincial and district leaders, a senior U.S. defense official told McClatchy.

The plan adopted by Obama would fall well short of the 80,000 troops McChrystal suggested in August as a "low-risk option" that would offer the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan.

It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a "high-risk" approach that called for 20,000 additional troops and a "medium-risk" option that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.

There are 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 from other countries in Afghanistan. The U.S. Army's recently revised counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan's population would require about 600,000 troops.

The administration's plan is expected to encounter opposition on Capitol Hill, where some senior Democrats have suggested that the administration may need to raise taxes in order to pay for the additional troops.

Obama campaigned saying that he'd fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from the defense budget, but Mullen has said that the Afghan war - which some administration officials privately concede could cost $700 billion to $1 trillion over 10 years - might require a supplemental funding bill next year.

The administration's protracted deliberations have escalated into open warfare between McChrystal and his supporters and advocates of a more limited strategy led by Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that often played out in dueling leaks to news organizations.

© 2009 McClatchy Newspapers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/24

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
05:30 Mecca time, 02:30 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/11/2009112501946557804.html
 
News Americas 
 
Obama vows to 'finish' Afghan job 

 
Obama is set to reveal if and how many more troops will be added to the 68,000 already deployed [AFP]

 
The US president has vowed to "finish the job" in the eight-year war in Afghanistan and said he would announce his decision on additional troop deployments and a new strategy "shortly".

Barack Obama said on Tuesday that he plans to end weeks of intense speculation about the way forward in Afghanistan after a three-month strategic review that has drawn fire from opposition critics who accuse him of dithering.

Late on Monday, the president held the ninth and apparently last meeting with his top commanders and national security advisers on the war effort.

Obama faces conflicting pressures amid differences among politicians and the pentagon on an Afghan strategy, as well as waning public support for the war.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that 46 per cent of Americans support a large influx of troops to battle Taliban fighters and train the Afghan military, while 45 per cent favour a smaller number to focus on training Afghan security forces.
 
But the US commander-in-chief said he believes the public will support a new strategy once the details are announced.

"After eight years, some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done, it is my intention to finish the job," Obama said at a news conference with Manmohan Singh, the visiting Indian prime minister, at the White House on Tuesday.

"I will be making an announcement to the American people about how we intend to move forward; I will be doing so shortly."

Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said Obama seemed to indicate some form of additional US troop deployment.

International pressure

But aside from pressures at home, he will have to also overcome growing political pressure in Canada, France and the UK against additional deployment as the Nato allies count the cost of the increasingly deadly war against the Taliban, our correspondent said.

Afghanistan options
The US currently has nearly 68,000 troops deployed to fight a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. As Obama debates a revised strategy in the eight-year war, officials say he is considering four options.

One option is the request put forward by the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for 40,000 more troops to secure the towns and cities.

Another option, said to be carrying the most favour among officials, is an increase of 30,000. Washington could then try to convince Nato allies to contribute, bringing the number of troops to the 40,000 McChrystal recommended.

Options three and four include significantly lower troop deployments, from 20,000 to 15,000, most of who would serve as trainers for the Afghan security forces.
 
The US leader will have to appeal not just to the Nato leadership but also the populations in member countries to avoid creating an impression that the US is an occupying or colonising power inside Afghanistan.

Obama's decision has also been complicated by concerns about corruption and governance in the administration of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Karzai was sworn in for a second term last week after an election marred by widespread fraud and farce as his main challenger refused to take part in a second round run-off.

US officials and Western diplomats say they expect Obama's announcement before a Nato meeting on December 7 in Europe in which alliance members could agree to send thousands of additional trainers to Afghanistan.

Obama and his advisers have debated options ranging from sending the tens of thousands more troops requested by General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, to limiting troop increases and concentrating on attacking al-Qaeda targets.

Reports have suggested that the advisers are rallying around options that would see a deployment of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops and trainers sent to Afghanistan.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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Pentagon preparing to send 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, official says

STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

-NEW: NATO allies will also be asked to send more troops, officials say

-Announcement on troop increase to come after Thanksgiving

-Obama met with national security team Monday night to discuss Afghanistan

-Obama wanted clarification on how, when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility


U.S. Marines patrol with Afghan soldiers in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on Tuesday.

Washington (CNN) -- The Pentagon is making detailed plans to send about 34,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in anticipation of President Obama's decision on the future of the eight-year-old war, a defense official said Tuesday.

Obama held a lengthy meeting with top advisers Monday night and said Tuesday that he would announce plans for Afghanistan after the Thanksgiving holiday.

A Defense Department official with direct knowledge of the process said there has been no final word on the president's decision. But planners have been tasked with preparing to send 34,000 additional American troops into battle with the expectation that is the number Obama is leaning toward approving, the official said.

Obama ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly has called for up to 40,000 more to wage a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic militia originally ousted by the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The president has weighed several options for bolstering the American contingent, ranging from sending a few thousand troops to sending the 40,000 McChrystal requested.

McChrystal was among those who took part in Monday's conference with Obama and other top advisers, which broke up at 10 p.m.

Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, were among the other senior officials in the meeting.

Obama said Tuesday that the deliberations have been "comprehensive and extremely useful."

"It's going to be important to recognize that in order for us to succeed there, you've got to have a comprehensive strategy that includes civilian and diplomatic efforts," he said at a news conference Tuesday with visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The military has planning under way to send these units: three U.S. Army brigades, totaling about 15,000 troops; a Marine brigade with about 8,000 troops; a headquarters element of about 7,000; and between 4,000 and 5,000 support troops -- a total of approximately 34,000 troops, according to a defense official with direct knowledge of Pentagon operations.

CNN reported last month that this was the preferred option within the Pentagon.

The troops would be dispatched throughout Afghanistan but would be focused mainly on the southern and southeastern provinces, where much of the recent fighting has taken place.

Currently, brigades from Fort Drum in upstate New York and Fort Campbell in Kentucky are among those that are next in line to deploy.

About 68,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, along with about 45,000 from the NATO alliance.

Two U.S. military officials said NATO countries would be asked to contribute more troops to fill the gap between the 34,000 the Pentagon expects Obama to send and the 40,000 McChrystal wanted. The request is expected to come during a December 7 meeting at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell would not discuss specific numbers, but he said NATO would be asked for additional help.

"Clearly, if the president decides to commit additional forces to Afghanistan, there would be an expectation that our allies would also commit additional forces," Morrell said.

U.S.-led troops invaded Afghanistan in response to the al Qaeda terrorist network's September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The invasion overthrew the Taliban, which had allowed al Qaeda to operate from its territory, but most of the top al Qaeda and Taliban leadership escaped the onslaught.

Taliban fighters have since regrouped in the mountainous region along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, battling U.S. and Afghan government forces on one side and Pakistani troops on the other.

Al Qaeda's top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large and are suspected to be hiding in the same region.

The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 900 Americans and nearly 600 allied troops.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday suggests that the U.S public is split over whether more troops should be sent to Afghanistan. Fifty percent of those polled said they would support such a decision, with 49 percent opposed.

The poll found that 66 percent of Americans believe the war is going badly, up 11 percentage points from a similar survey in March. Overall support for the war has fallen to 45 percent, with 52 percent opposed.

iReporters sound off; share your views on sending more troops in Afghanistan

Afghanistan was among the topics Obama and Singh discussed in their meetings Tuesday. Singh said the international community needs "to sustain its engagement in Afghanistan, to help it emerge as a modern state."

"The forces of terrorism in our region pose a grave threat to the entire civilized world and have to be defeated," he said. "President Obama and I have decided to strengthen our cooperation in the area of counterterrorism."

India is one Afghanistan's biggest international donors, contributing $1.2 billion in aid. That involvement has been met with suspicion in Pakistan, India's nuclear rival in South Asia. But it has helped the United States by sharing some of the burden of stabilizing the country and providing civilian support.

In addition, several leading analysts have argued that settling the decades-old tensions between India and Pakistan would allow both sides to pull troops off their borders, giving Pakistan more resources to battle the Taliban along its northwest frontier.

"I think that will certainly be at the center of the agenda this week," Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official, said on CNN's "American Morning." U.S. prospects in Afghanistan depend partly "on convincing Pakistan to be more cooperative in the fight against those terrorist groups."

"The United States is not going to be an outright mediator between Pakistan and India, but we can quietly, behind the scenes, push them to reduce their problems," Burns said.

CNN's Elaine Quijano and Mike Mount contributed to this report.
 

  
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/24/us.afghanistan/index.html  

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NOVEMBER 25, 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125910374196463061.html

Surge Targets Taliban Bastion

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS


Nov. 19: U.S. Army soldiers stand next to their vehicles at a checkpoint near the town of Balisal Afghan, Afghanistan. (AP)

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Commanders in Afghanistan say they will devote the majority of the fresh troops expected from the White House to securing the country's troubled south and will especially target this volatile city, the Taliban's main power base.

President Barack Obama will announce his revamped war strategy in an address early next week, likely Tuesday. He is widely expected to adopt a plan that sends between 20,000 and 40,000 more troops to bolster a flagging military campaign and the 68,000 U.S. troops now fighting it.


Reuters A U.S. soldier snaps an image of an Afghan man's iris to be used for identification. Commanders will concentrate any new troops in the southern part of the country, putting a ring around the Taliban power base of Kandahar.
.
But even before Mr. Obama takes his case to the public, military commanders on the battlefield are ready to implement a plan that makes a defensive ring around Kandahar a linchpin of the fight to come. No matter how many troops the president decides to authorize, the Kandahar campaign will be an early, large-scale test of U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plan of refocusing allied military, political and economic efforts on population centers and away from sparsely peopled rural areas.

The new commander of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, and his staff detailed how they will put the McChrystal approach into action, in interviews with The Wall Street Journal: They plan to mass thousands of troops now scattered around the south and pack them into a tight cordon around the outskirts of Kandahar city.

At the same time, the coalition plans to pour economic, police and political assistance into the urban core to try to persuade residents that the Afghan government serves them better than the Taliban alternative. "We have to regain the initiative, and we have to get some momentum going," said Gen. Carter.

As Gen. McChrystal's team scrambles to reverse Taliban gains in Kandahar, they will also dispatch thousands of American soldiers to secure the major highways that pass through the city to Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

As soon as this weekend, officers expect to order the fast-moving armored Stryker Brigade to devote itself full time to securing roads plagued by hidden bombs and illegal checkpoints run by insurgents, bandits and corrupt police.

Commanders say the Kandahar campaign will force them to pull troops away from less-urgent fights. "There's no slack out there," said U.S. Brig. Gen. Frederick "Ben" Hodges, director of operations in the south. "Additional forces -- I need them big time. I can't dominate all of the places I want to dominate."


Reuters A U.S. soldier from the armored Stryker Brigade, soon expected to secure roads in the Kandahar area, patrols the city recently.
.
Thousands of the new troops also would likely be deployed to expand the Kandahar approach to the most densely populated districts of the Helmand River Valley in neighboring Helmand province. Together, the two areas contain about two million of the estimated three million residents of southern Afghanistan.

The new southern strategy is an explicit recognition that a move this past summer to position a few thousand Canadian and U.S. troops outside Kandahar failed to stop insurgents from infiltrating the city.

For years the coalition paid little attention to the city, despite a huge allied presence at the airfield outside town. That neglect allowed the Taliban, whose Islamist movement was born in Kandahar, to again make inroads.

Insurgents have intimidated residents with threats and bombings and set up rudimentary courts to adjudicate local disputes -- a direct challenge to the government's right to control the instruments of justice.

Gen. McChrystal's urban strategy has its detractors, among them Arturo Munoz, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. "Retreating from rural areas to focus on populated areas would put us in the same position as the Russians at the end of their failed campaign" in Afghanistan a generation ago, Mr. Munoz wrote in an email. "They held the cities, but the insurgents held the countryside. If we cannot engage the enemy in the countryside, then we have lost already."

But allied and Afghan officials say Kandahar is too crucial to lose. "The history of Afghanistan always was, always is and always will be determined from Kandahar," provincial Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said in an interview.


The city is a crossroads on trade routes to Pakistan. The Taliban came to power in the 1990s in part on the strength of their ability to make the roads safe for travelers and truckers. The Taliban were toppled by the U.S.-led invasion after the 2001 attacks on America.

Now insurgents, common criminals and corrupt police officers set up illegal checkpoints along the highways. Allied officials say such insecurity has crippled the local economy and that Gen. Carter's plan to protect roads is central to establishing credibility for the government and the coalition.

The Stryker Brigade will have road engineers and intelligence teams on board, and will likely use high-tech surveillance equipment to try to ensure that insurgents don't plant explosives or extort money from passersby, officials say.

For security reasons, allied officers don't want to publicize how many soldiers will be involved in the Kandahar operation. They say their plan will boost the troops encircling Kandahar by 50%, while reducing the area they cover by 90%, making the cordon harder for insurgents to penetrate.

Gen. Carter is wary of inserting large numbers of foreign troops into the center of Kandahar, an ethnically Pashtun city in a Pashtun insurgency. There is a small Canadian security and economic-aid team inside the city and a 150-man U.S. military-police company. Gen. Carter plans to boost that with another small MP unit to bolster the Afghan National Police.

The Taliban's influence in the city is so pervasive that the Afghan police are often too frightened of kidnapping and assassination threats to move about the city freely, especially at night. One precinct commander refuses to go downtown from his station house unless accompanied by five armed patrolmen. "The Taliban would kill me," said the commander, Lt. Col. Abdul Qader.

One of Gen. Carter's priorities is to persuade local political authorities to organize a Kandahar council of tribal elders, or shura, to help guide the city and make peace with insurgents amenable to reconciliation. In Afghan culture, such institutions are used to resolve disputes.

The coalition also plans to flood Kandahar and its environs with economic aid, including a $50 million Canadian irrigation system, a U.S. farm-and-jobs project and a new electrical-distribution network expected to cost some $20 million.

The economic surge is intended to generate employment and address festering complaints that the Karzai government and its international backers cannot provide a better life for Kandahar residents.

Mr. Obama met most recently with his war council on Monday to discuss his troop plans, in the first such meeting since just before his nine-day trip to Asia. On Tuesday, he told reporters at the White House: "After eight years -- some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done -- it is my intention to finish the job."



 .—Jonathan Weisman contributed to this article.
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1

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Dumb and Dumber Wars

by Jeff Huber, November 25, 2009

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/11/24/dumb-and-dumber-wars/

Michael O’Hanlon, a war hawk tank-thinker with the Brookings Institution who encouraged us to invade Iraq, says we should "remain hopeful" about Afghanistan. Even though the news about Afghanistan has been "dispiriting," O’Hanlon tells us, "Most foreign and Afghan officials and officers who I encountered on a recent week-long visit sponsored by the U.S. military are guardedly optimistic about our prospects."

That’s because the Afghan officials and officers O’Hanlon met were guardedly selected to feed him a line of bull feathers. Our adventure in Afghanistan is as impossible to justify, or be optimistic about, as the follies conducted there by Alexander the Great and the British and the Soviets.

Harvard Crimson sass Anthony Bonilla whines, "It has been almost three months since Gen. McChrystal reported to Obama that U.S. efforts in Afghanistan would fail if 40,000 additional troops were not deployed there. McChrystal’s experience as the commander of the military’s clandestine service has given him expert insight into how insurgencies operate." Bonilla is scheduled to graduate from Harvard in 2012. We’ve seen the amount of harm Harvard graduates can do. One of them got us into two wars that seem to have no end.

Stanley McChrystal’s experience doesn’t give him "expert insight" as to how insurgencies work. McChrystal was the head of an assassination ring that worked for Dick Cheney, who had no legal standing in the military chain of command.

McChrystal may have seen a PowerPoint brief on counterinsurgency at some point in his life. He probably hadn’t slept much the night before – one hears he doesn’t sleep much (one hears that from his public affairs people like Smith who want to make Stan the Man seem manlier than mere mortal men, like he’s Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D.).

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who doesn’t think we can afford health care reform, does think that we can afford to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Lieberman, if you haven’t noticed yet, is dumber than a quarry.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we might "withhold money" from Hamid Karzai’s government if it doesn’t do something about that nasty old corruption stuff. But we’ll still send more troops to Afghanistan, apparently, and, uh, something, something, something. Troops and money go together. If we pour more troops into Afghanistan, national treasure will end up in Karzai’s pals’ pockets. You’d think that Gates, whose old outfit the CIA is paying off Karzai’s drug-dealing brother, would understand those sorts of things.

Karzai is a bung buddy of the Taliban, who we’re supposedly fighting but who we are also funding.

As Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer, said in February 2009, Afghanistan is "not worth the cost in blood and treasure." Bacevich notes that, our military supremacy didn’t "drain the swamp." Hell no, it didn’t. It made the swamp bigger and created quagmires from which we can’t extract ourselves.

The terrain in Afghanistan and Pakistan is horrifying, and as best we can tell, al-Qaeda (remember them?), the outfit we’re supposedly fighting, has vanished like a blind dowager’s tea service. There may be fewer than a dozen of the so-and-sos left.

President Obama had his ninth big honking meeting with his big honking national security team on Monday. I’m not sure why he’s bothering with all these meetings, unless he’s trying to improve the employment rates by keeping PowerPoint geeks busy.

Richard Holbrooke, who has a kind of sort of job with the State Department as a kind of sort of special dude in kind of sort of honchoing relationships with Afghanistan and Pakistan, says that we’ll know success in that region "when we see it." Holbrooke has also confirmed that we’re cutting dope deals with the Taliban via the Saudis.

Foreign policy doesn’t get more half-baked than that. We’re the most powerful nation in human history, and we make more mistakes than any other nation in human history. It’s as if we’re a nation of compulsive molesters.

The Washington Post reports that both McChrystal and Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star who once had McChrystal’s job as military commander in Afghanistan, "have been told to prepare to testify before Congress as early as next week." Some fun. McChrystal has asked for up to 80,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan. Eikenberry says that corruption in Afghanistan is so rampant the country is not worth investing any more blood and treasure in. The funky part about this testimony stuff is that Stan the Man and the Berry will testify after Obama has made his decision on how many more troops to send to Afghanistan.

And, oh yeah, it turns out we’re actually funding the Taliban, whom we’re supposedly fighting. According to The Nation, "a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts – hundreds of millions of dollars – consists of payments to insurgents." Ain’t that a kick in the sack? We should can Karzai and give the country back to the Taliban.

Invading Iraq was dumb. Escalating the war in Afghanistan will be even dumber. It will cost a lot of money and won’t accomplish a doggone thing except get a lot of people killed – most of whom will be civilians who want nothing more than for us to leave them alone.

The latest sanctioned leak says we’ll send another 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, and if Gen. Ray Odierno, the Desert Ox, has his way, we’ll have that many troops in Iraq through 2015 or whenever.

God help America. We have no strategy. We have no achievable objectives. We have no idea what we’re doing.

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November 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/world/asia/25rollout.html?_r=2&ref=global-home

News Analysis

U.S. Strategy on Afghanistan Will Contain Many Messages


By DAVID E. SANGER


American soldiers were on patrol in Kashmiri Bala, a village in Logar Province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday

WASHINGTON—In declaring Tuesday that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan, President Obama used a phrase clearly meant to imply that even as he deploys an additional 30,000 or so troops, he has finally figured out how to bring the eight-year-long conflict to an end.

But offering that reassuring if somewhat contradictory signal — that by adding troops he can speed the United States toward an exit — is just the first of a set of tricky messages Mr. Obama will have to deliver as he rolls out his strategy publicly.

Over the next week, he will deliver multiple messages to multiple audiences: voters at home, allies, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the extremists who are the enemy. And as Mr. Obama’s own aides concede, the messages directed at some may undercut the messages sent to others.

He must convince Democrats, especially the antiwar base that helped elect him, and the slim majority of the country that tells pollsters the conflict is no longer worth the sacrifice, that in sending more troops he is not escalating the war L.B.J.-style. In fact, some of those involved in the deliberations on an Afghanistan strategy say Mr. Obama will argue that providing the additional numbers is the fastest way to assure that the United States will be able to “finish the job,” because it will speed the training of the Afghan national army.

But at the same moment, he must persuade Republicans that he is giving the military what it needs to beat back the Taliban and keep Al Qaeda from threatening the United States.

That would be a difficult task even if Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s strategic assessments and troop requests had not been paraded across front pages, including his contention that the task will require 40,000 or more troops if Mr. Obama wants to create true security in the country’s major population centers.

At a time when Mr. Obama is vowing to reduce sky-high deficits, he must make the case that the price tag — roughly $1 million per soldier — is justified. He already faced pre-emptive resistance on Tuesday from the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

So it is no surprise that one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged Tuesday that the forthcoming speech was a “potential minefield.” One of his national security strategists put Mr. Obama’s challenge this way: The trick, he said, will be “signaling resolve to the allies while not signaling open-ended commitment to the American people.”

Both sides of that equation are complicated.

Mr. Obama must signal resolve — and staying power — because the Dutch and the Canadians are both scheduled to be pulling their troops out of Afghanistan just as Mr. Obama is putting more forces in. In quiet meetings over the past month, American defense and national security officials have been trying to forestall those departures, while obtaining commitments of increasing numbers of troops from NATO allies.

So far, the administration has been successful only with the British, who have pledged an additional 500 troops. Germany, Italy and other NATO contributors have been silent, explaining to their American visitors that the war has become so unpopular at home that they can barely sustain the troop levels now in place.

“I think we’ll get there,” said an official who has been sent for those conversations. “But not in time for the president’s announcement.” Others said it may be early next year before Mr. Obama can extract any additional commitments.

Pakistan poses a particularly difficult problem. Mr. Obama has been highly attuned to the need to declare that the United States is not in what he recently called “an open-ended commitment” in Afghanistan.

But for years, throughout the Bush administration and into the Obama administration, American officials have been making trips to Pakistan to reassure its government that the United States has no intention of pulling out of Afghanistan as it did 20 years ago, after the Soviets retreated from the country. Inside the Pakistani Army and the intelligence service, which is known as the ISI, it is an article of faith among some officers that the United States is deceiving them, and that it will replay 1989.

If that happens, some Pakistanis argue, India will fill the void in southern Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan surrounded by its longtime enemy. So any talk of exit strategies is bound to reaffirm the belief of some Pakistani officials that they have to maintain their contacts with the Taliban — their hedge against Indian encroachment.

So the United States is stuck, one official said, between not wanting to suggest it will be a military presence in the region forever and showing enough commitment to encourage Pakistan to change its behavior.

Mr. Obama has a similar signaling problem with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. A parade of Washington officials, most recently Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have traveled to Kabul to warn that continuing American help is dependent on the Afghan government’s meeting benchmarks in tackling corruption and building up credible security forces. But Mr. Obama is not likely to say what will happen if Mr. Karzai fails to deliver, for fear of further alienating the mercurial Afghan president.

At home, the more urgent issues are troop numbers and the cost of the escalation. Here, Mr. Obama will have more room to maneuver. Over the past two weeks, military officials have been expecting a decision that will give them roughly 34,000 additional troops, not far from what was sought by General McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan. At the White House and among the allies, the figure most commonly heard is just under 30,000.

Both figures, and anything in between, could prove right. Counting support troops and “trainers” is an art form in the military. The troops will be dispatched in phases, and Mr. Obama is likely to declare that he will review the deployment next year, to evaluate its progress.

That gives him the flexibility to tell the Democrats that his commitment is limited, and to tell the Republicans that he will do whatever it takes to win what, only three months ago, he called a “war of necessity.”

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Message from Mullah Mohammad Omar on the eve of Eid ul-Adha


by Mullah Mohammad Omar


                                 

                                       Amir-ul-Momineen Mullah Mohammad Omar

November 25, 2009
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60458&hd=&size=1&l=e

Message of Felicitation of the Esteemed Amir ul Momineen on the Eve of Eid ul-Adha.

In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate


Praise be to Allah Who honored His pledge and granted victory to His servant and exalted His army and lonely defeated all armed confederates. Peace be on the leader of Mujahideen and chief of the Messengers, owner of lofty behavior, our master and prophet, Mohammad and on his descendants and all his companions.

The Almighty Allah says in the Holy Quran:



(Such (is his state): and whoever holds in honor the Rites of Allah, (in the sacrifice of animals)

Such (honor) should come truly from Piety of heart.

In them, ye have benefits for a term appointed:

In the end, their place of sacrifice is near the Ancient House." S. 22:32-33


I extend my heartfelt felicitation:


-To all Mujahid people of Afghanistan,

- To the esteemed families of martyrs and prisoners who have been imprisoned by the enemy,

- To the gallant Mujhideen,

-And to all believing masses of the Islamic Ummah on the occasion of this Eidul Odha.


I pray to Allah (SwT) to always bestow on this Ummah, the blessing of celebration of Eid ul Odha while they are dignified and having independence and grant them happiness, prosperity and success in these blessed days. Likely, I pray to Allah (SwT) to accept the pilgrimage of the pilgrims and accept in His Sight their worship and prayers. I also pray to Him to make this congregation (of Muslims), a factor for the unity of the whole Ummah.

While extending to you my felicitation on the eve of Eid ul Odha, I want to touch on some essential issues as regards the current situation:


1. To The Mujahid Nation:


I thank my Muslim people for their positive response to the Call of the Islamic Emirate ( of Afghanistan) and for their foiling the American melodrama by avoiding participation in the American process under the name of elections. I firmly believe, if the Mujahid people remain constant in their multi-sided and honest help (with Mujahideen), the Almighty Allah will expose and thwart all conspiracies of the enemy one after another. It is due to your selfless sacrifices that the arrogant enemy is facing both defeat, jittery and disgrace. I hope you will continue your legitimate Jihad and struggle in the way of realizing your Islamic aspirations; help the sacrificing Mujahideen of the path of freedom and strengthen their ranks with your persons and wealth, particularly, show your protection and empathy with the blessed families of the martyrs and prisoners on the basis of your Islamic responsibility and break off all relations with the stooge Kabul Administration.

Those who have occupied our country and taken our people as hostage, want to use the stratagem of negotiation like they used the drama of elections for some time in order to achieve their colonialist objectives. The invaders do not want negotiation aimed at granting independence to Afghanistan and ending their invasion but they want negotiation which will prolong their evil process of colonization and occupation. However, the people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiation which prolongs and legitimatizes the invaders military presence in our beloved country. Afghanistan is our home. No one will ever be ready to negotiate with any one else about ownership of one’s home --still more to give share in administration and control of the home and himself ends up becoming homeless, powerless and servant in his own home.


The foreigners have occupied the land of the Afghans by dent of (military) might and savagery. If they want solution of the issue, they should put an end to the occupation of Afghanistan. The invading Americans want Mujahideen to surrender under the pretext of the negotiation. This is some thing impossible. Otherwise, we have noble principles and vast experiences for solution of our internal differences and commencement of good conduct with the people of the world. Therefore, the stand of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as regards the negotiation emanates from our Islamic and national interests and is based on strong grounds.


2.To the Gallant and Honor-loving Mujahideen of the Front lines!


Your victory over the invading disbelievers is the result of the Divine help. If you seek His pleasure, as a gratitude to the blessing of Allah (SwT), and make the service of common people your objective, Allah ( Swt) will bestow on you His ever growing blessing. The enemy will lose their hearts and you will have the honor to defeat the greatest colonialist power of this century. The signs ( of this victory) have been appearing, if God willing.

Implement the injunctions of Allah practically and fully; constantly strive for unity among your ranks and keep away from discord and friction. Obey your chiefs in all affairs of Jihad; pay heed to the protection of public and national properties during the conduct of military operations, particularly during martyrdom-seeking operations, focus on the invaders and their lackeys and other important targets. It is the Islamic responsibility of every believing man to avoid causing casualty to common people. There is no justification in Sharia for murder and injury of common people, nor is there any room for such deed in our sacred religion.

The cunning enemy wants to attack people’s congestion places like religious centers, mosques and other similar places in order to malign Mujahideen. They also launch sanguinary attacks under the name of martyrdom-seeking operations to mar the good name of Mujahiden. The Mujahideen should be on guard against these activities of the enemy and fully avoid from carrying out any analogous activity. Well-being and prosperity of people should make your priority. Pay respect to elders and influential among the people and have compassion over the youngsters. Observe true justice when you are authorized to dispense to a deserving person his due right. Implement the Regulation of the Code of Conduct of the Islamic Emirate and observe other principles in order to ensure achievement of ever-increasing advancement in the affairs of Jihad. Make the most of experience, consultation and proven tactics in the military operations and other affairs of Jihad so that you will block the door of differences, complaints and losses. Similarly, take every precaution for the protection of your persons and make efforts in this way. Take care of the rights of those who surrender to you from the enemy side. This process ( of surrendering to Mujhideen) is now continuing.

The ( former) communists formed tribal and unscrupulous groups under the name of tribal militia at a time when they were on the verge of defeat. The aim was to provoke internal conflicts, biases, racial differences and resultantly revenge themselves on (our) Mujahid people. The Americans and their allies too want to repeat the same failed experience. I am of the opinion that the recent efforts launched by the enemy will further malign it and will meet its defeat but you should make every effort to foil this last conspiracy of the enemy with the help of your Mujahid people. Mete out an exemplary punishment to those who are leading these mischief-making activities so that the dark and notorious history of the barbaric militias does not recur anew.


3. To the Ruler’s and Employees of the Puppet Administration of Kabul:


Stop oppressing and torturing your miserable Muslim people as a sign of your service and slavery to the non-believing invaders. The foreign invaders are not benefactors of the Afghan people. They are bent on wiping out the belief and holy places of this people and want to bring under their belly all our material wealth. They use the empty slogans of development and reconstruction of Afghanistan for realization of their illegitimate objectives. They have stashed away thousands of millions of dollars in their pockets which they had collected in the name of reconstruction of Afghanistan.

They want to keep our country entangled in a net of usury and interest according to a calculated conspiracy and are determined to subjugate our distinguished people.

I call on you all as I did last time and as per my responsibility, to put an end to your life of humiliation; shun hostility with your people and join the Mujahideen in the strongholds of pride, honor and belief instead of continuing with your present life of debasement. The enemy want to lay his gun over your shoulder and kill your countrymen but you should try, and by utilizing a proper opportunity, should rescue yourself from the fate of the pro-Britain Shah Shuja, pro-Russian Taraki, Amin , Karmal, Najib and their followers. If you honestly part ways with the evil, you will have success in this world and in the world to come.


You should understand that the epoch of dread of the Western colonialism has reached its end. Ground realities in our beloved country indicate that the invaders are about to escape. The caravan of truth is steadily approaching its rationale destination of victory. Mujahideen gain strength with the passage of time as they obtain good experience in political, media, and social fields. The invaders and their stooges’ moribund efforts are tantamount to erecting a mound of sand in front of the turbulent river of the Jihadic movement. These waves of resistance which have been originated from the midst of the honor-loving nation will wash away the torsos of the arrogant invaders, if God willing.


4.To Islamic Conference and the So-called Human Rights Organizations:


I call on the Islamic Conference and all organizations that have been established under the name of human rights protection to take steps for the prevention of civilian casualties caused by the invading forces of America and the coalition and should raise voice for the punishment of the perpetrators of this crime. Similarly, the invading forces under the leadership of America and the surrogate regime of Kabul have erected prisons under different names in all parts of the country in contravention to international principles. A great number of our miserable and innocent countrymen are brutally tortured there. All human rights organizations who claim being advocates of human rights should promptly and as per their responsibility, take steps to prevent occurrence of such brutal acts. Many of our prisoners have been martyred and maimed as a result of harsh conduct and torture in these prisons. If the human rights organizations are not willing to fulfill their responsibility in order to please America and the West, then they should renounce their title of human rights advocacy as a matter of moral obligation.


5. To Scholars, Writers and Men of Letters.


I urge independent scholars, teachers and statesmen to raise the legitimate cause of their miserable people in every hearing and forum and support it. Inform the countrymen and public of the world about the ground realities in Afghanistan through your write-ups and speeches. By waging a Jihad of words and pen, render thanks for the gift of talents bestowed on you by God. I call on all distinguished writers and journalists to play their due role in this critical juncture of our history when our land is under the blatant aggression. They should struggle in the field of media for the obtainment of independence of our Islamic country and a true Islamic system and, as per their responsibility, portray the impeachable facts so that they reach the ears of the public. With the power of belief and an unflinching ardor, make struggle to tell and unveil the truth.

I also urge the committed and sensible poets to preserve the Jihadic epics and acts of heroism of Mujahideen in their poems and literary pieces and generate emotions for independence, honor , national unity and Islamic resurgence. Not only that but further bolster them.


6. To Regional and Neighboring Countries:


Colonialist plans of expansionism of the West are in full swing in the region. The economic assistance, the mercenaries, the overt and covert ploys of the wicked companies have paved the way for( execution of these plans) and have set off hatred, discrimination and rivalries in the region.


In fact, this is an act against the humane values, justice, peace, rules of interstate relations and independence. If the regional countries still remain neutral versus the colonialist interventions of America and the vast military presence, the whole regional will be gripped by instability; the process of development will hamper and ultimately( the region) will become powerless.

We emphatically say that the strong determination and unwavering resistance ( of Mujahideen ) has eroded the capability of the enemy; has wiped out ( their) shock and awe era and frustrated their wicked plans. Therefore, as a sign of gratitude for the sacrifices offered by our oppressed people, you should assist us in the cause of freedom of our country. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measure together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.

We consider the whole region as a common home against colonialism and, as a responsible force, want to play our role in stability and peace of the region in future.


7. To the Rulers of the White House and the Belligerent Americans:


The ground realities in Afghanistan indicate, the Americans and other allied invaders will certainly face a route --this is a defeat which can’t be averted by reinforcement and formulation of successive irrational strategies. You should understand that coercion and militarism has lost its splendor. You will not be able to subjugate the brave Afghan people with the power of your military might or the mantra of your devilish ploys.

The people, whom you have chosen for confrontation, have the honor of dismantling the arrogant empires. They have good capability and historical experience. Our believing people will not allow the Western colonialism to make our country a hotbed against our independence and vital values and aggressive designs against regional countries. These are the people who before you, have wiped out two empires – the British and Russians empires-- from the map of the world. They are holding the stronghold of honor and Jihad with strong determination and high morale against the demoralized and moribund troops. And on the basis of their belief, they are sure that they will gain victory and you will face defeat.


It is better for you to choose the path of rationale instead of militarism and put an end to the occupation of Afghanistan. You should understand your belligerent and aggressive policy will create for you so many enemies in the world which would make for you this world a bed of thorns. It will make your life harsh because the policy of coercion and tyranny is intolerable to all.


8. To the Public of Europe Particularly To the Freedom-loving People of the West:


Your colonialist rulers have invaded our country under the pretext of terrorism to augment the wealth of a few capitalists and spread the net of neo-colonialism over our country.

Every day, our youths, old men, women and children are martyred by your bombs and rounds of mortars. The invaders raid houses of our people at night. They destroy our green gardens, public properties, educational and commercial centers.

Countering this atrocity and aggression and the defense against it, is our legitimate and national right. We will use this right of ours with all our resources and sacrifices.


You should not fall prey to the misleading assertions of your colonialist rulers as they call this war, a war of necessity. This is a farce weapon in the hands of your rulers under the colonialist pretext of fight against terrorism. Thus they want to throw dust into the eyes of people. It is the demand of your conscience and moral duty to raise your voice for the prevention of this savagery.


We only want establishment of an Islamic system in our country which will protect rights of all individuals of this nation both men and women—a system depending on its own feet, fully independent, its internal and external policy being based on this Islamic principle: not harming others and not allowing others to harm us.


Fight against terrorism is an unjustified colonialist term fabricated by Pentagon and Washington. They want to colonize independent countries by using this proposition and bring under their belly natural riches and economic resources of these countries and trample on belief and religious traditions of these countries.


9. To the Islamic Ummah:


I remind Muslim brothers in every part of the world, of the words of Hazarat Omar Farouq (May Allah be pleased with him), the Great Caliph of Islam who said: "We are people whom Allah exalted by Islam. If we still seek exaltation in things other than Islam, Allah will humiliate us."

I advise you to fully abide by the sacred rules of Islam in order to achieve the magnanimity and grandeur of Islam. Help (your) oppressed Muslim brothers and use your wisdom, sagacity and sobriety in the cause of Jihad and confrontation with the tyrant aggressors, particularly, the chiefs of the Jihadic movements should ponder over all aspects during performance of affairs of Jihad; avoid disunity and splintering among your ranks and be heedful to the conspiracies being engineered to malign Mujahideen.


Avoid from deeds that cause great losses to Islam and Muslims instead of bringing in benefits to the Muslims. Focus your efforts on beating the invading, usurping enemy; do not engage in purposeless activities, rather turn your attention to the main objective.


All Muslims should remember in their prayers, the Muahideen-- the protectors of Islam and Islamic Ummah-- and extend them moral and Islamic support and should defend their cause as a legitimate Islamic cause. The Americans and its allies have been hammering out plans overtly and covertly to destabilize the Islamic world and provoke differences in the Islamic countries. Every Muslim should realize his/her arch enemy and be on guard against the conspiracies of the enemies.


To end, I remind all my Muslim brothers of this Divine verse (bearing) good news ( of victory):


"Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden (of Bliss)

Without such (trials) as came to those who passed away before you?

They encountered suffering and adversity,

And were so shaken in spirit that even the Messenger

And those of faith who were with him Cried:

"When (will come) the help of Allah"

Ah! Verily, the help of Allah is (always) near!"

Al-baqara: V.124.


Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid



 

[bigron]

Why Afghans Dig Empire Graveyards

By Nicolas J S Davies

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60456&hd=&size=1&l=e

November 25, 2009

Editor’s Note: Many Americans – and especially U.S. media pundits – view the world through a self-absorbed nearsightedness, acting as if the histories of countries only began when they did something that attracted U.S. attention.

In ancient lands like Iraq and Afghanistan, this American myopia has become very dangerous, by ignoring how and why these countries have resisted past instances of foreign imperialism, as Nicolas J S Davies notes in this guest article:

Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires." But just why do empires keep sending thousands of their young people to die in Afghanistan?

American blood-letting in Afghanistan is generally explained in terms of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but it was the earlier U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (in the 1980s) that led to the emergence of these movements in the first place, not the other way around.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has used al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks to justify much more than simply retaliation for 9/11 or even prevention of some future recurrence of 9/11. The attacks have served as an excuse for U.S. invasions and occupations (including Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11), flagrant war crimes (including torture), and the largest U.S. military budget since World War II.

To accomplish this, the government has persuaded many Americans that their country faces a unique and unprecedented threat that justifies these extreme measures, not least the savage, eight-year war in Afghanistan.

A Dutch friend of mine tried to have a rational conversation with an American co-worker about 9/11 and the so-called "war on terror," and was told, "You can't possibly understand. Your country has never been attacked like this."

The puzzled Dutch woman had to ask, "Did you never hear anything about the Second World War?"

Of course, it is precisely the far greater dangers that people in other countries have faced in the past that enable them to put the threat of terrorism in perspective. Paradoxically, it is the relative safety of the United States that makes Americans so vulnerable to panic and propaganda when faced with such a limited threat.

In fact, the response of the U.S. government to the terrorist attacks has been exactly as Osama bin Laden and his colleagues intended. They did not expect to defeat the United States by knocking down a few buildings. Nor were they motivated by some irrational hatred of freedom.

Rather the attacks were designed to provoke a reaction that would expose the hypocrisy of the United States, laying bare the hard iron fist of militarism and violence within the soft velvet glove of Hollywood and soda-pop.

The explicit goal was to goad the American empire into using its vast arsenal of destructive weapons in ways that would gradually undermine its own economic and military power. Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri understood so much better than America’s deluded leaders that this would be a war the United States could not win.

But neither the opportunism nor the hypocrisy of U.S. policy explain why American soldiers are fighting, killing and dying in Afghanistan of all places.

While Americans think of the war in terms of 9/11 and terrorism, Afghans are not afflicted with such a myopic view. They see the war in the context of a much longer history that is shaped by their country's mountainous geography and strategic location between Iran to the west, Russia to the north and India and Pakistan to the south and east - and of their own ability to defend it against the world's greatest empires.

Or, as noted in the resignation letter of Matthew Hoh, an American diplomat who resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan last September: "I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul. The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency."

Unlike Destroyer

At first glance, Afghanistan seems an unlikely destroyer of empires.

My friend Gregg spent seven years there in the 1970s, and he encountered nothing but the legendary hospitality of the Pashtun tribes-people. That's why he stayed for seven years. But then Gregg was a respectful traveler fleeing the violence of his native Northern Ireland, not a soldier in an occupying army.

Conventional military powers consistently underestimate the Afghans until they are over-committed and faced with humiliation.

The first modern empire brought down by the Afghans was the 200-year-old Safavid Empire of Persia. Local Pashtun tribes-people rose up in rebellion under Mirwais Khan Hotak in 1706 and expelled Persia from Western Afghanistan.

Mirwais's son, Mir Mahmud Hotaki, continued the war and sacked the splendid Persian capital of Isfahan in 1722. The Safavid dynasty was already economically weak, as Dutch merchant ships were sailing away with the bulk of regional trade from its formerly lucrative trade-routes. But the Afghans delivered the coup de grace.

In the early 19th century, as the Russian Empire expanded in the Caucasus and Central Asia, a weakened Persia gradually lost territory. The British came to see Persia as a Russian puppet and adopted a "forward policy," to keep Afghanistan as a buffer between British India and the expanding Russian Empire.

This effectively made Herat in Western Afghanistan the new outer frontier of the British Empire that Britain was committed to keeping out of the hands of Russia and Persia.

A Persian army besieged Herat for 280 days in 1837-1838. The failure of the siege exposed the weakness of Persia, which continued to disintegrate. But it also highlighted the vulnerability of Afghanistan, which was ruled at the time by different tribal leaders in Herat, Kandahar and Kabul, following the collapse of the Durrani dynasty.

So the British and their Sikh allies from the Punjab marched into Afghanistan to restore the former Amir of Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, who had been deposed and exiled in 1809.

This was the so-called First Afghan War. In a parallel with the present crisis, the British plan was to stay only as long as necessary to leave Shah Shuja in firm control of the country, but this proved to be impossible. He effectively ruled only Kabul, where he owed his position to the presence of British and Indian troops and officials.

The longer the British stayed the more they alienated the Afghans.

British officials brought their families to Kabul and established a small colony, complete with soirees and cricket matches. Their expenditures caused runaway inflation, which alienated the merchant class of Kabul, and a riot in Kabul in November 1841 soon grew into a full-blown rebellion against British occupation.

Mohammed Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohammed, the leader the British had deposed in Kabul, came down from the mountains to lead the rebellion.

The Afghans killed the British commander General MacNaghten, dragged his body through the streets of Kabul and put it on display it in the bazaar. His deputy General Elphinstone negotiated with Akbar Khan for safe passage to Jalalabad for occupation officials and their families.

Death Trap

Seven hundred British troops, 3,800 Indian troops and 12,000 civilians set out for Jalajabad, 90 miles away, on Jan. 6, 1842. At every pass through the mountains they were greeted by Afghan tribesmen waiting in ambush. They were all massacred or they froze to death long before they could reach Jalalabad.

The sole survivor, assistant surgeon William Brydon, rode into Jalalabad with a piece of his skull sheared off by a sword after being rescued by an Afghan shepherd. Asked for news of the British army from Kabul, he replied "I am the army".

The British sent another expedition to rescue some prisoners and take revenge on the people of Kabul, but they abandoned the effort to occupy or control Afghanistan. The Afghans had established their independence, and neither Britain, Russia nor Persia occupied Afghan territory for the next 36 years.

Mohammed Akbar Khan died, but Dost Mohammed and his other sons united Afghanistan and established mutually respectful relations with the British. Ironically, a truly independent Afghanistan served as a very effective buffer between the British and Russian Empires, and the British helped the Afghans to repel more Persian attacks on Herat in 1852 and 1856.

The Second Afghan war began after Sher Ali Khan, Dost Mohammed's third son, accepted a Russian diplomatic mission to Kabul in 1878 but then rebuffed a British one. This resurrected the recurring specter of British insecurity over Afghanistan.

Britain invaded again and occupied much of the country. Sher Ali died in February 1879 and the British persuaded his son Mohammad Yaqub Khan to sign the Treaty of Gandamak, which ceded Quetta and the Khyber Pass to Britain and gave Britain control over Afghan foreign policy in exchange for financial support.

The British army withdrew, but it left behind a diplomatic mission in Kabul. A few months later, the remaining British officials were all killed during a local rebellion.

The British invaded again. After 10 months of savage fighting, they defeated an Afghan army under Yaqub's brother Ayub Khan at Kandahar. The British finally withdrew, but this time they did not leave a diplomatic mission behind in Kabul to be killed!

Afghanistan became fully independent from Britain as a result of the Third Afghan War in 1919, which was an Afghan invasion of the North West Frontier province of British India.

Existential Concerns

Throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan's people confronted the same existential questions as people in other non-Western countries. What aspects of modern Western technology and culture could they adopt without losing what they valued in their own way of life?

As elsewhere, different classes within Afghan society answered this question according to their own interests, and the resulting divisions left Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunistic exploitation and intervention by foreign powers, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Amanullah Khan, the King of Afghanistan who won independence from Britain in 1919, admired the modernist regime of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. He mandated compulsory elementary education, opened co-educational schools and formally abolished the burqa for women. But conservative tribal and religious leaders rebelled, and forced him to abdicate in 1929.

The last King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, ruled for 40 years (1933-1973) by pursuing a more gradual approach to modernization.

Afghanistan was still in the same position geographically, but the world around it had changed. Instead of being sandwiched between the Russian and British Empires, it was now wedged between the Soviet Union and independent Pakistan.

Mohammed Daoud Khan, the King's cousin, was his prime minister from 1953 until 1963. Daoud envisioned a reunification of the Pashtun territories on either side of the British colonial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

After this initiative was rebuffed by Pakistan, Daoud increasingly turned northward to the U.S.S.R. for both military and development aid.

In 1973, Daoud seized power from his cousin, but, instead of declaring himself King, he abolished the monarchy and became Afghanistan's first President. He began by renewing Afghanistan's relationship with the U.S.S.R. and used Soviet aid to build up the Afghan army.

But he soon broke with his Marxist allies in the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), distanced Afghanistan from the Soviet Union, and began to improve relations with Pakistan, Egypt and other Western-oriented Muslim countries.

In 1978, a leading PDPA politician was murdered, leading the other PDPA leaders to believe that Daoud was planning to have them all killed. They staged a coup, killed Daoud and his family and formed the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

The Marxists launched a radical secular reform program, banning burqas and forced marriages, closing mosques, redistributing land and abolishing farmers' debts.

Anehita Ratebzad, a female member of the Revolutionary Council, wrote in a New Kabul Times editorial, "Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country ... Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention."

The U.S.S.R. quickly provided $1.2 billion to build roads, schools, hospitals and wells. The relatively small urban population welcomed the reforms and new development, but the interests of rural landowners and tribal and religious leaders were seriously threatened and they began to fund and support mujahedeen to commit terrorism and resist government forces.

A New Great Game

Seeing Afghanistan as a new front in the Cold War, the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi governments began to provide funds, training and weapons to the mujahedeen. A new version of the "great game" was under way.

For the Soviets, Afghanistan had lost none of its value since the 19th century. Their empire extended from Europe to Siberia, but nowhere did it reach southward to warm-water ports and the sea-routes to South Asia and Africa.

The United States now controlled those sea-lanes and had the same interest as Britain in the 19th century in keeping a buffer between the Russians and the ports of Pakistan. The establishment of a Soviet client state in Afghanistan offered the U.S.S.R. the tantalizing promise of fulfilling historic ambitions.

In funding, supplying, supporting and training the mujahedeen, U.S. policy-makers believed they had found a low-cost means to neutralize a serious geostrategic challenge.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev began this new "great game" as a proxy war, to be fought mainly by Afghans against other Afghans. But the conflict escalated dramatically after Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981.

Before withdrawing in 1989, Soviet forces lost 13,000 lives, while Afghan dead were estimated at about one million. Even after the Soviet departure, both Moscow and Washington continued supplying their client Afghan armies. [See Consortiumnews.com’s "Why Afghanistan Really Fell Apart."]

During the period, both the United States and the Soviet Union became engaged in Afghanistan because they had important strategic interests at stake, long before the emergence of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Since the end of the Cold War, the two main thrusts of U.S. foreign policy have been to impose military control over every part of the world where oil is produced or shipped; and to encircle Russia with a ring of U.S. allies and military bases from Poland to Georgia to Central Asia.

Afghanistan's position between Iran, Central Asia and Pakistan makes it a critical part of the pipeline map, potentially supplying Pakistan and India with oil and gas from Western operations in the Caspian Sea via the projected Unocal (now Chevron) pipeline through Afghanistan.

A strategically-located Afghanistan – allied with the United States and permitting American bases – would add an important link in the military encirclement of Russia, China and Iran.

On the other hand, if Afghanistan were aligned with Russia, it could equally well serve as a route for a pipeline to transport Russian oil and gas to Pakistan and beyond, and place Russian military or intelligence bases on the borders of Pakistan and Iran.

The U.S. interest in denying the Russians a pipeline route to the Arabian Sea and a client state on the border of Pakistan corresponds closely to Britain's fears of Russian expansion into Afghanistan in the 19th century.

Equally frightening from a U.S. point of view, even an independent Afghanistan that was free from U.S. or Russian influence could link Iran to China via yet another pipeline route.

Fear of Russia

It was fear of Russian ambitions that led Britain to keep intervening in Afghanistan in the 19th century, more than any ambitions of its own to rule this unconquerable country.

The United States is now reluctant to withdraw from Afghanistan because of similar fears, that Russia and/or Iran will move in to fill the vacuum, consolidating their dominant roles in the region, gaining extraordinarily valuable strategic and commercial assets and excluding U.S. interests.

But as in the mid-19th century, a genuinely independent Afghanistan could actually be a stable and effective buffer between the great powers.

As the Maliki government in Iraq has gradually slipped the American leash, it has awarded oil contracts to Russian, Chinese and South Korean companies as well as to Western ones, and a future Afghan government could ultimately do likewise, playing suitors for pipeline deals off against each other in the traditional fashion.

In Iraq, Western oil companies have welcomed partnerships with Asian companies that can supply cheaper labor and equipment and are not tainted by a role in the invasion and destruction of the country.

In fact, as commerce of all kinds has begun to flow again in Iraq, the United States has been delivered a powerful message that aggression and military occupation do not pay.

Total Iraqi imports grew from $25.7 billion in 2007 to $43.5 billion in 2008. But even as other countries' trade with Iraq has grown, exports from the United States to Iraq have remained flat at a meager $2 billion per year, most of that stemming from existing contracts with the U.S.-backed government.

By contrast, Turkey, which refused to support the U.S. invasion, has become one of Iraq's largest trading partners, with exports of $10 billion to Iraq in 2008. At a recent trade fair in Baghdad, an Iraqi executive explained that his construction company preferred to do business with Turkish firms because costs were lower and the Turks "are not an occupier."

Other countries that opposed the invasion, in particular Iran, France and Brazil, have likewise become major trading partners. On condition of anonymity, a European ambassador to Baghdad told the New York Times that his country's business relations with Iraq improved greatly once it withdrew its troops.

"Being considered an occupier handicapped us extremely," he said. "The farther we are away from that, the more our companies can be accepted on their own merits."

In some of the largest government contracts awarded since the invasion, the Iraqi transportation ministry recently awarded $30 billion to rebuild Iraq's railroads to a combination of British, Italian and Czech companies. And the Russian company RusAir has won an exclusive air cargo contract that has forced FedEx to terminate its operations in Iraq.

The Afghan Dilemma

As in other parts of the world, the U.S. effort to control events by the threat and use of military force is the central obstacle to a peaceful resolution for Afghanistan. The resurgence of the Taliban and other fighting forces in Afghanistan since 2006 can be directly traced to a massive escalation of U.S. air-strikes that year, even as numbers of U.S. casualties remained flat.

Only 98 American troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, one less than the 99 killed in 2005. And yet the number of air-strikes exploded from 176 in 2005 to 1,770 in 2006, a ten-fold increase.

The flat casualty figures make it clear that this was an escalation initiated by U.S. forces, not by the Afghan resistance. The year 2007 saw a further escalation to 2,926 air-strikes.

The successful response of the Afghan resistance to the American escalation was entirely predictable, but it appears to have surprised U.S. planners.

As in Iraq, the U.S. reacted to the failure of its puppet government to establish any legitimacy or control over most of the country with a massive escalation of military force, launching a desperate and bloody campaign to bomb and terrorize the population into submission.

This brutal escalation was an abysmal failure, leading directly to the brink of defeat, where U.S. forces now find themselves.

The so-called "surge" in Iraq provided cover for a similar escalation of aerial bombardment, from 229 air-strikes in 2006 to 1,119 in 2007, and 110 per month through most of 2008.

In Afghanistan as in Iraq (and Vietnam), despite endless lip-service to phrases like "winning hearts and minds" and "clear, hold and build," American military strategists cling to the core belief that their virtually unlimited capacity for violence can ultimately carry the day if enough legal and political constraints are removed.

Instead, the failures of U.S. military force and the success of "Anti-Coalition Forces" everywhere have confirmed Richard Barnet's Vietnam-era judgment that, "at the very moment the number one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of political domination."

The United States military budget is higher than at any time since the Second World War because U.S. officials now regard more of the world as critical to U.S. interests than ever before and are determined to militarily control all of it.

Fortunately for people everywhere, this policy, if it even deserves to be called one, is neither realistic nor economically sustainable. But the whole world faces a critical period of transition as the U.S. military-industrial complex wrestles with the impossible challenge of an unconquerable world, experimenting with new weapons and strategies at the expense of countless lives and squandering resources that could otherwise be used to solve real problems.

Gabriel Kolko has been writing for decades about the failure of U.S. foreign policy to define its interests in a way that leads to achievable or manageable goals. Instead of defining and prioritizing its interests like any other country, the United States wreaks havoc in international affairs by clinging to virtually unlimited ambitions that it pursues on an opportunistic basis, with no regard for the impact on billions of human beings or the future of the world.

This has resulted in gigantic military budgets and a long series of unwinnable wars that the United States should never have embarked on, even from the amoral "realist" point of view that its deluded strategists aspire to.

Collapsing Empires

Afghans believe that it was they who brought down the Safavids and the Soviets. While the Afghans definitely did their part, the forces that led to the collapse of those empires were really much closer to home in both cases.

The real graveyard of the Soviet empire lay in the Kremlin, where absolute power insulated its leaders from the forces at work in the real world beyond its walls. The Afghan war was only one of many causes of discontent and dissolution within the Soviet political and economic system.

A quiet underground movement of non-violent popular opposition grew steadily beneath the surface until, in defiance of all conventional wisdom, it burst through into the light of day and the U.S.S.R. was quite suddenly dissolved.

The American people now face a similar crisis. It should be no surprise that a predatory political and economic system that won't provide healthcare, public services or economic opportunity to its own people is also resorting to war and militarism in a desperate effort to feed its insatiable appetite for growth and profit.

Since the 1970s, America's leaders have consolidated their political and economic power into effective monopolies. Most industries are dominated by two or three huge firms, and the political system is controlled by a similar duopoly.

Research on economic competition has established that such near-monopolies take on many of the characteristics of actual monopolies, stifling innovation and competition, destroying smaller businesses, exploiting employees, building inefficient bureaucracies and spending more on marketing than on research and development.

The U.S. health insurance industry employs 30 times as many administrative staff as it did in 1970. American firms spend $290 billion per year on advertising, almost $1,000 for every person in the country.

And corporate control of politics has systematically dismantled every mechanism that could restore effective management or halt the system's relentless drive to devour everything including itself. Looking for solutions from any of the leaders promoted by such a dysfunctional system is pure folly.

However, by learning from the example of popular movements in other countries throughout history, ordinary people in the United States can organize politically to elect very different people to public office and to stimulate mass public opposition to war, militarism and corporate politics.

It is the policy of the United States, not that of Afghanistan, that is filling the graveyards, and the great game that can stop the funerals will not be played out in Afghanistan but in Washington and in local communities all over the United States as Americans begin to organize for a post-imperial, post-corporate and more democratic future.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood on Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, due out in March 2010 from Nimble Books. He is also the local coordinator of Progressive Democrats of America (www.pdamerica.org) in Miami.




 

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Video - Robert Baer:

What We're Up Against In Afghanistan Is A "War Of National Resistance"


HuffingtonPost

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60466&hd=&size=1&l=e

November 25, 2009



In the latest video from the Brave New Foundation's "Rethink Afghanistan" project, former CIA agent Robert Bear says that what the U.S. faces when it comes to the Afghan insurgency isn't terrorism, but a war of national resistance.

"The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda," Baer says. "They simply want us gone because we're foreigners, and they're rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters."

Because these insurgents see the U.S. as a colonial force, Baer says, they are unlikely to ever rally around the Afghan national army the U.S. is looking to establish. "This is an occupying force," explains Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. official in Afghanistan who resigned last month over the war. "The Afghan National Army is led by Tajiks and Uzbeks and urban Pashtuns, and it is occupying the rural Pashtun South."

This is why the U.S. should ask itself, Hoh says, "do we want to support one side in a civil war?"

WATCH :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH60o8RmOUU&feature=player_embedded


 

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Afghanistan: Taliban leader denies negotiations with US


AKI

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60468&hd=&size=1&l=e

November 25, 2009

Rome, 25 Nov. (AKI) - By Syed Saleem Shahzad - Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar has denied any negotiations with the United States in a message for the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday. The message claimed foreign troops were losing the war in Afghanistan and said the Afghan people would not agree to any talks that prolonged the presence of foreign forces in the country.

"The invaders do not want negotiation aimed at granting independence to Afghanistan and ending their invasion but they want negotiation which will prolong their evil process of colonisation and occupation," said the message.

"However, the people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiation which prolongs and legitimises the invaders' military presence in our beloved country."

Omar led the Taliban regime that was toppled by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. He hasn’t been seen in years. Afghan officials claim he’s hiding in Pakistan.

"Those who have occupied our country and taken our people as hostage, want to use the stratagem of negotiation like they used the drama of elections in order to achieve their colonialist objectives," Omar said.

The message was posted on a website used by the Taliban and was e-mailed to journalists from an address often used to send out Omar’s messages

The message decried the tribal militias which which the US has formed to fight against the Taliban in the southern and eastern Afghanistan.

It urged Afghans to "mete out exemplary punishment to those who are leading these mischief-making activities."

"The realities on the ground in Afghanistan indicate, the Americans and other allied invaders will certainly face a route - this is a defeat which can’t be averted by reinforcement and formulation of successive irrational strategies," it said.

US president Barack Obama is expected next week to make an announcement on the possible despatch of up to 40,000 extra military personnel to Afghanistan to combat the increasingly violent, Taliban-led insurgency.

"The people, whom you have chosen for confrontation, have the honour of dismantling the arrogant empires," the message said.

"These are the people who before you, have wiped out two empires – the British and Russian empires - from the map of the world," it continued.

"It is better for you to choose the path of rationale instead of militarism and put an end to the occupation of Afghanistan."

The message said the "freedom loving people of Europe and the west" they should not be fooled "by the misleading assertions of your colonialist rulers who call this war a war of necessity."

"Your colonialist rulers have invaded our country under the pretext of terrorism to augment the wealth of a few capitalists and spread the net of neo-colonialism over our country.

"Countering this atrocity and aggression and the defense against it, is our legitimate and national right. We will use this right of ours with all our resources and sacrifices," it said.

The message called on neighbouring countries like Pakistan to help the 'mujahadeen' or 'holy warriors' waging Jihad in Afghanistan.

Militants were to blame for about three-quarters of the 1,500 Afghan civilian deaths the first eight months of this year, according to the United Nations.

However, Omar's message blamed US and NATO forces for killing civilians in military operations, and said these nations are guilty of human rights abuses because of the mistreatment of prisoners.

It said the Organization of Islamic Countries should protect Afghans from the human right abuses by international forces in Afghanistan.

The message urged Afghans to break off all relations with the "stooge Kabul administration" of Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Karzai said in his inauguration speech last week it was was important to include in the government former Taliban who were ready to renounce terrorism.







Full Text of Mullah Omar's Statement:

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m60458



 

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Obama: Profile in Courage, or Cave-In?

By Ray McGovern

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24063.htm

November 25, 2009 "ICH" -- "It took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military - and do the right thing," said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA (ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article "The Generals' Revolt."

Wilkerson, who was chief of staff at the State Department (2002-2005) and now teaches at George Washington University, was alluding to President John F. Kennedy's courage in 1962, when he faced down his top generals and refused to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear war.  That was as close as we came to nuclear calamity during the entire Cold War.

Despite the urgency of the threat posed by the Russian military buildup in Cuba (we now know the Russians had already placed nuclear weapons on the island), Kennedy's deliberate decision-making style allowed enough time for cooler heads to prevail and yielded a peaceful solution.

A hallmark trait of John Kennedy was his ability to listen and learn.  At the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom.

Call that "dithering," if you wish.  I, for one, applaud President Barack Obama for following Kennedy's calm, deliberative style, as Obama faces similar pressure from the military to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

Kennedy: Out of Vietnam

The Cuban crisis was not the only time JFK found himself at loggerheads with generals who thought they knew better and who verged on the insubordinate.  Kennedy's sustained arm wrestling with his senior generals over whether to send more troops to Vietnam was just as tense, and much more sustained.

In the end, he concluded that they had it wrong and he decided against them.  In short, he opted to behave like a president-a "decider" (pardon the odd word).  His overruling of the U.S. military brass on Vietnam had huge implications, both short- and long-term.  This "real history" is highly relevant today.

The 46th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination passed by last Sunday virtually unnoticed.  The unfortunate thing is this: his legacy on Vietnam is so widely misunderstood that it is easy to miss the relevance of his decision making in the early Sixties to the dilemma faced by President Barack Obama today as he decides whether to stand up to-or cave in to-the Pentagon's plans for escalating another misbegotten war in Afghanistan.

Faux history has it that President Lyndon Baines Johnson's infusion of hundreds of thousands, up to 536,000, combat troops into Vietnam was a straight-line continuation of a buildup started by his slain predecessor.  Kennedy did raise the U.S. troop level there from about 1,000 to 16,500 "advisers" - a significant increase.

But as he studied the options, cost, and likely outcomes, Kennedy came to see U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a fool's errand.  Few Americans are aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965.

The Pentagon was hell bent on thwarting such plans, and Defense Secretary McNamara found it an uphill struggle to enforce the President's will on the top brass.  Senior military officers were experts at "slowrolling" politicians who favored a course that the Pentagon didn't like.  When in May 1962 Kennedy ordered up a contingency troop-withdrawal plan, it took more than a year for the military brass to draw one up.

As the President encountered continuing resistance, he paid increasing attention to more levelheaded military and civilian advisers as well as to his own intuition and instincts.  Kennedy asked the Marine Commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, "to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him."  Shoup told the President:

"Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control."

Kennedy concluded that there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers.  He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

How To Do It

My Irish grandmother called Kennedy "a clever lad" and she was right.

Realizing that he had to exercise the utmost care in navigating choppy military and political waters, Kennedy employed the artifice of sending Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor on a "fact-finding" trip to Saigon.  At the end of the trip they would "recommend" the course the President had already chosen.

Stopping in Hawaii en route back to Washington, McNamara and Taylor were given "their" report, which had been written by John and Robert Kennedy.  It was instantly named the "McNamara-Taylor report" and the two travelers presented it to the President on the morning of Oct. 2, 1963.  Wasting no time, the President convened a National Security Council meeting that evening to discuss the report.

The senior military saw through the subterfuge and strongly opposed the key recommendations of the report.  In his memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara wrote that the NSC meeting saw "heated debate about our recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 men by the end of the year."  In McNamara's words, there was "a total lack of consensus."

However, there is only one "decider" on the National Security Council - the President.  Kennedy stepped up to the plate and decided, bypassing the majority opposed.

Thirty-two years later in a Sept. 12, 1995 letter to the New York Times, McNamara took strong issue with a charge in an earlier op-ed that  "the groundwork was being laid for our tragic escalation of the war" before President Kennedy was killed.  McNamara described the President's reasoning in deciding to go ahead, despite the lack of consensus:

"...[T]he President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing that either our training and logistical support led to the progress claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the situation and, in either case, we should plan to withdraw."

His decision made, Kennedy wasted no time in acting, well, like a President.  He told McNamara to announce it immediately in order to "set it in concrete," according to McNamara.  As the defense secretary was leaving the NSC meeting to tell White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too," according to Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers in their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Action Memorandum

The President's policy was formalized nine days later in his National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of October 11, 1963.  That document put into effect the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, which provided that:

"A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time....[and] the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963."

Whether Kennedy truly believed that the U.S. training program would succeed in helping the South Vietnamese prevail is doubtful.  Clearly, he wanted out.  He carried around in his conscience, and from time to time spoke of, the number of American troops already killed.  (Eight died under Eisenhower; about 170 during Kennedy's tenure.)

Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, to whom fell the task of announcing President Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before.  Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

"I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam.  We're losing too damned many people over there.  It's time for us to get out.  The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves.  We're the ones who are doing the fighting.

After I come back from Texas, that's going to change.  There is no reason for us to lose another man over there.  Vietnam is not worth another American life."

A month before, during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, "I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.

Kennedy understood that decisions on Vietnam were far too important to be left to myopic generals.  They were still chafing at what they considered Kennedy's failure in 1962 to seize the moment and obliterate Cuba-and perhaps also the U.S.S.R., while we were at it.  Add Kennedy's clear desire to work closely (often secretly) with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a priority effort to prevent another Cuba-type crisis, and then letting generic "Communists" take over Vietnam-with dominoes likely to fall all over the place-and the military brass became convinced they needed to strongly oppose such "appeasement."

"Best and Brightest"

And it was not only the generals.  Far from it.  The "best and the brightest," first and foremost McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, were also strongly opposed to Kennedy's decision to pull troops out of Vietnam.  Bundy disagreed with the recommendations in the McNamara-Taylor report.  He also resisted Kennedy's frequently expressed doubts that foreign troops, even in large numbers, could prevail in guerrilla war, and Kennedy's determination never to send combat troops to Vietnam.

Bundy thought he knew better, refusing to believe that the President would ever "let South Vietnam go."  Years later, Bundy's memoirs defended his views and advice to Kennedy on Vietnam.

However, after McNamara published In Retrospect in 1995, in which he concluded that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" on Vietnam, Bundy went back to the drawing board to rethink his assessment.

Bundy hired a man half his age, Gordon Goldstein, as research assistant to help him in what turned out to be Bundy's personal quest to discover the roots of his own mistakes which, for the most part, were the result of hubris, pure and simple.

Early this year, author William Pfaff reviewed what started out as the Bundy Memoir Part II (McGeorge Bundy died in 1996), but ended up as Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Goldstein.  In his review, Pfaff highlights Bundy's pedigree: tops at Groton, professor of government at Harvard and youngest dean of faculty; his mother a Boston Brahmin, his father a diplomat.  Pfaff is ruthlessly on point in describing Bundy's attitude:

"American had to ‘win' in Vietnam because America always wins.  America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and other elite universities.  America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

"Goldstein's decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident.  He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war.  He answered, ‘the endurance of the enemy.'  Goldstein writes: ‘He didn't understand the enemy ‘because, frankly, he didn't think they warranted his attention.'"

The good news for today comes from press reporting that top officials of the Obama administration, including the President, have read Goldstein's book.  Drawing a connection between Kennedy's challenge on Vietnam and Obama's on Afghanistan, a Wall Street Journal report of Oct. 7 noted, "For opponents of a major troop increase ... ‘Lessons in Disaster' encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged."

Obama Must Decide

There are hints that Obama is more Chicago than Harvard-and that, like Kennedy, he carries casualty figures around in his conscience.  His late-night, early-morning appearance at Dover Air Force Base a few weeks ago to salute what the Washington Post called "transfer cases" coming home from the war is, I believe, a telling sign.  Obama knows they are not just "transfer cases."

This young President, too, is a "clever lad;" he is also a politician.  Intellectually, he is surely equipped to understand the March of Folly that would be involved, were he to send substantial additional forces to Afghanistan.  And he is surely aware that the majority of Americans are no longer deceived by the pundits at Fox News.  Recent polls show broader and broader popular opposition to sending more troops.

The choice, in my view, is between courage and cowardice cloaked as politics of the possible.  Let me guess what you're thinking - "But that's asking too much of the young President; "cowardice" is too strong a word; Obama cannot possibly face down the entire military establishment."

Yes He Can

John Kennedy did.  So the question is whether Barack Obama is "no Jack Kennedy," or whether he will summon the courage to stand up to the misguided military brass of today.  We are talking, after all, about thousands more being killed-and for what?

I would suggest to the President that he give another close read to Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster" and then ponder the lessons that leap out of Barbara Tuchman's The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Obama may also wish to ponder the words of W.E.B. Dubois:

"Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.  It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.  It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow...."

Note:  In his book JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass has arrayed-and documented-his narrative with such care, that it has been all too easy for me to plagiarize from it.  Actually, the book takes the JFK story much further, to include a thorough discussion of what-and who-Douglass believes killed the President.  I recommend the book highly.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
An earlier version of this article first appeared at www.Consortiumnews.com .

[bigron]

Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance

By Jeff Cohen

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24064.htm

November 25, 2009 "Huffington Post" -- With President Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it's not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.

There's another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative "triumph" -- NAFTA -- thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition.

It was 16 years ago this month when Clinton assembled his coalition with the GOP to bulldoze public skepticism about the trade treaty and overpower a stop-NAFTA movement led by unions, environmentalists and consumer rights groups. How did Clinton win his majority in Congress? With the votes of almost 80 percent of GOP senators and nearly 70 percent of House Republicans. Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA by more than 3 to 2, with fierce opponents including the Democratic majority leader and majority whip.

To get a majority today in Congress on Afghanistan, the Obama White House is apparently bent on a strategy replicating the tragic farce that Clinton pulled off: Ignore the informed doubts of your own party while making common cause with extremist Republicans who never accepted your presidency in the first place.

"Deather" conspiracists are not new to the Grand Old Party. Clinton engendered a similar loathing on the right despite his centrist, corporate-friendly policies. When conservative Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey delivered to Clinton (and corporate elites) the NAFTA victory, it didn't slow down right-wing operatives who circulated wacky videos accusing Clinton death squads of murdering reporters and others.

For those who elected Obama, it's important to remember the downward spiral that was accelerated by Clinton's GOP alliance to pass NAFTA. It should set off alarm bells for us today on Afghanistan.

NAFTA was quickly followed by the debacle of Clinton health care "reform" largely drafted by giant insurance companies, which was followed by a stunning election defeat for Congressional Democrats in November 1994, as progressive and labor activists were lethargic while right-wing activists in overdrive put Gingrich into the Speaker's chair.

A year later, advised by his chief political strategist Dick Morris (yes, the Obama-basher now at Fox), Clinton declared: "The era of big government is over." In the coming years, Clinton proved that the era of big business was far from over -- working with Republican leaders to grant corporate welfare to media conglomerates (1996 Telecom Act) and investment banks (1999 abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act).

Today, it's crucial to ask where Obama is heading. From the stimulus to health care, he's shown a Clinton-like willingness to roll over progressives in Congress on his way to corrupt legislation and frantic efforts to compromise for the votes of corporate Democrats or "moderate" Republicans. Meanwhile, the incredible shrinking "public option" has become a sick joke.

As he glides from retreats on civil liberties to health reform that appeases corporate interests to his Bush-like pledge this week to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, an Obama reliance on Congressional Republicans to fund his troop escalation could be the final straw in disorienting and demobilizing the progressive activists who elected him a year ago.

Throughout the centuries, no foreign power has been able to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, but President Obama thinks he's a tough enough Commander-in-Chief to do it. Too bad he hasn't demonstrated such toughness in the face of obstructionist Republicans and corporate lobbyists. For them, it's been more like "compromiser-in-chief."

When you start in the center (on, say, health care or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease right-wing politicians or lobbyists or generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.

It's been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008. For some of us who'd scrutinized the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, the buzz was killed days after Obama's election when he chose his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a top Clinton strategist and architect of the alliance that pushed NAFTA through Congress.

If Obama stands tough on more troops to Afghanistan (as Clinton fought ferociously for NAFTA), only an unprecedented mobilization of progressives -- including many who worked tirelessly to elect Obama -- will be able to stop him. Trust me: The Republicans who yell and scream about Obama budget deficits when they're obstructing public health care will become deficit doves in spending the estimated $1 million per year per new soldier (not to mention private contractors) headed off to Asia.

The only good news I can see: Maybe it will take a White House/GOP alliance over Afghanistan to wake up the base of liberal groups (like MoveOn) to take a closer and more critical look at President Obama's policies.

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America.

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Unforced Error

by Jeff Huber, November 26, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/11/25/unforced-error/

President Barack Obama is about to make the biggest mistake of the 21st century by sending 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan.   


We currently have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan.  NATO countries supply an additional 42,000.  There are maybe 100 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and maybe 300 in Pakistan.  Some estimates say al-Qaeda is down to fewer than a dozen core fighters.  And we already have 110,000 mechanized, highly trained and well paid dudes gunning for them.  There are also 200,000 Afghan forces under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal who suck, but that’s a lot of forces.  All told, McChrystal already outnumbers al-Qaeda nearly 800 to one at a conservative estimate.     


If we grant that the Taliban and the other militias in Afghanistan are the enemy, which is a dopey notion because those cats just want us to leave their bleak country, we still outnumber them by 12 to one — there are no more than 25,000 Taliban.


The Taliban are supposedly the enemy because they support al-Qaeda.  Problem: Hamid Karzai, whose government we’re supporting in that sinkhole, not only just stole two elections, but he’s thigh rubbing pals with the Taliban.  His brother Ahmed is hairline deep in the Afghan drug industry and he’s on the CIA payroll.  Among other things, Ahmed acts as a broker between the Taliban and us. 


Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who has said that we will recognize success in Afghanistan "when we see it," has confirmed that we’re trying to cut dope deals with the Taliban.  We’re doing this through Pakistan’s Inter-service Intelligence Agency (ISI), who are a bigger bunch of crooks than the crooks Hamid Karzai is in league with.   


So why is Obama sending more troops there?


He shot himself in the metatarsal during his campaign with his crock of jive about how the Iraq surge took our eyes off the prize of the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan, where we needed to "finish the job."  The war in Afghanistan is as necessary as removing the prostate gland of a healthy 12-year old boy.


The notion of American exceptionalism has worn itself transparent.  We’re making the world a worse place, not a better one.  Our counterproductive wars have nothing to do with national security.  The al-Qaeda that attacked us with 19 guys on 9/11 who didn’t have the equivalent of a Chicago school system high school diploma is, for all practical purposes, dead and gone.  Their work is finished.  They suckered us into massive commitments of national blood and treasure into sinkholes that shouldn’t matter to the world’s sole superpower. 


The notion that we can create an "exit strategy" by training Afghan troops to take over the counterinsurgency task is, to put it mildly, quaint.  Afghan soldiers and police are as reliable as a flock of cats.   


We need to get out of Central Asia as soon as we can.  Alexander the Great couldn’t tame that patch of mountain and desert, nor could the British, nor could the Russians, and we won’t either.   


I had hoped that Obama would stand up to the Pentagon’s insistence on a Long War approach to Afghanistan, but alas.  We’re going to be stuck with this pig, lipstick and all, for a long time.  It’s a boondoggle that will make Iraq look like a smooth move.   


This big re-re-escalation of Afghanistan is a big mistake.  It’s a grand execution of a flawed doctrine.  Counterinsurgency (COIN), the Pentagon’s latest flimsy excuse to exist, is based on a host of internal fallacies.  Premier among them is the notion that the host nation must be a "legitimate government" that provided "good governance."  Mohammed on a crutch, if you have good governance from a legitimate government, by and large, you don’t have an insurgency. 


Talk of an exit strategy for Afghanistan is low comedy.  If you put troops into a country you’ll have to get them out with the hugest pair of pliers ever made. The way to exit Afghanistan is to exit, not to put more troops there.     


Reports will say Obama will define the "precise U.S. goals in Afghanistan."  Give me a break.  We haven’t had precise goals in a war since World War II, when the goal was unconditional surrender.  There’s no such thing as surrender in the wars we’re fighting now.  The best thing we can achieve is to bribe our enemies into playing along with us.  Bribery, after all, is the essence of our COIN doctrine. 


Bribery has been the spine of our foreign aid for a really long time.  We use the term "foreign aid," like we’re somehow feeding "those poor kids" in wherever-land, but we’re really just making crooked high rollers richer.   


I had such high hopes that Obama would really change things.  Not any more, as Inspector Clouseau once said.   


An excellent article inArmed Forces Journal by retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor titled "Refusing Battle" deserves wide attention.  MacGregor wisely admonishes: 
http://www.afji.com/2009/04/3901424/

America’s experience since 2001 teaches the strategic lesson that in the 21st century, the use of American military power, even against Arab and Afghan opponents with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air defenses, can have costly, unintended strategic consequences. Put in the language of tennis, the use of American military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of "unforced errors." 


Obama has caved in to the Long War Pentagon and its supporters in the Congress and the press who have been so wrong for so long that nobody should be listening to them anymore.   He’s still talking his "finish the job" nonsense.  What job?  How will we know when it’s finished?

[bigron]

The Cost of War

by Philip Giraldi, November 26, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/11/25/the-cost-of-war/

War may be hell, but it also doesn’t come cheap and it is time that the US taxpayer begin to question what he is getting for his money.  Napoleon once famously said that an army travels on its stomach.  He meant that feeding and supplying an army so that it would arrive to do battle in good condition were keys to victory.  He frequently cut costs, however, provisioning his troops by looting the food supplies of the local population. That ad hoc policy led to disaster when confronted by the Russian scorched earth response on his retreat from Moscow in 1812 when he lost most of his army. 

Rudyard Kipling, a witness to British Colonial fighting against Afghan and Pakistani tribesmen, also understood the economic reality of warfare.  In his poem "Arithmetic on the Frontier," describing fighting in Afghanistan, he wrote about how a British officer possessed of a superb classical education might well be shot dead by an illiterate tribesman wielding an old musket firing a homemade bullet worth two cents:

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap — alas! as we are dear.

What would Napoleon and Kipling have thought about America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  Napoleon would have been astute enough to understand immediately that the American efforts lack any clear political objective beyond supporting the status quo, but he would undoubtedly also note the vast and wasteful expense of the enterprise.  If Kipling were to tally up the new American rendition of arithmetic on the frontier he would undoubtedly be astonished and would want to double check his numbers.  Both Napoleon and Kipling would have appreciated how the insurgents have the upper hand, free to engage in asymmetrical warfare against the clumsy invader who is totally reliant on extended and vulnerable supply lines. 

The fiscal year 2010 Federal government budget included $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or somewhat more than $10 billion per month.  The White House estimates that it will cost one billion dollars per year to deploy an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan.  If President Obama makes the unfortunate decision to add 34,000 soldiers, as is being rumored, that cost would be $34 billion higher, raising the total to something approaching $14 billion per month.  Exactly how the $1 billion number for each 1,000 addition is derived is not completely clear, but it appears to assume that there is complete elasticity in the supply arrangements, meaning that costs will not escalate because of increased demand or because of enemy action.  It also does not address the six hundred pound gorilla in the room, which is the legacy issue that comes from fighting a war with borrowed money.  As the Obama White House is so deep in the red that even George W. Bush appears in hindsight to have been a model of frugality, it should be assumed that Obama’s "war of necessity" will not be fully funded by Congress.  That means either borrowing from the Asians or just printing the money while watching the dollar slide down the toilet.   It has to be assumed that the US Treasury will do a bit of both.

Why are these wars so expensive?  It goes back to Napoleon: logistics.  US bases in Iraq are supplied by a 344-mile road running north from huge depots in Kuwait and by another artery running south from Turkey, both of which require convoys of trucks with armed guards dramatically raising the costs of everything being brought in.  It is similar in Afghanistan but worse. The main supply route starts in Karachi, Pakistan, and works its way up through the Khyber Pass, at which point the truck convoys are frequently attacked by insurgents.  When a convoy is destroyed the US Army assumes the loss as no one will insure such a perilous enterprise.  Sometimes the trucking companies pay off the attackers to be left alone, ironically putting US taxpayer-provided money into the hands of those seeking to kill American soldiers.

The US Army, which used to manage its own logistics, now contracts out the work of running in the military supplies as well as water, food, and fuel.  Contracting provides flexibility but it also means everything will be done for profit and therefore be more expensive.  It also guarantees a high level of corruption.  Even drinking water became a valued commodity in Iraq where summer temperatures sometimes reach 130 degrees and the country’s water purification system was destroyed by coalition bombs.  A senior CIA officer Kyle Dusty Foggo has gone to jail based on his reported manipulation of multimillion dollar contracts to supply water to Agency bases in Iraq.  Contractors in Kuwait paid $15 million in bribes to three US Army procurement officers between 2004 and 2007 to obtain the enormous contracts to supply bottled water to American forces.  There is even a Burger King at the US Embassy in Baghdad which trucks in all its raw materials subsidized by the government through the military’s Army and Air Force Exchange System as well as other Burger Kings and several Pizza Huts at the other large Iraqi bases and at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.  That $2 burger or slice of pizza might be a taste of home but it actually costs more like $20 when all the real expenses are factored in.

Think for a moment the role played by gasoline and other fuels in the current conflicts, three times greater than was the norm per soldier in Vietnam.  A modern US soldier requires 22 gallons of fuel per day.  American forces in Iraq alone are supplied by a fleet of 5,500 fuel trucks.  The Pentagon estimates that the cost of fuel delivered to the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq averages $45 per gallon, including all expenses but excluding legacy costs like interest on borrowing money to buy the fuel in the first place.  The fuel goes into Blackhawk helicopters which use about five gallons of aviation fuel every minute they are in the air, armored Humvees which get 8 miles per gallon, Stryker combat vehicles at 3 miles per gallon, and the new generation of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles which are being introduced into Afghanistan in large numbers to defend against roadside bombs.  The MRAPs undeniably save lives, but they are heavily armored, weighing from fourteen and up to 52 tons depending on how they are configured.  The lightest ones get only 4 miles per gallon of fuel and the heaviest less than a mile per gallon.  Because the money is borrowed to pay for the fuel, the final true cost to the US taxpayer will likely exceed $100 per gallon when the current level of war debt is finally amortized around the year 2017.

Fuel is only one aspect of the escalating costs of the wars that America has become involved in.  A total of one trillion dollars has been spent already in Iraq and in Afghanistan but legacy costs to include paying off the money that was borrowed and medical care for the many thousands of wounded soldiers and marines will drive the total cost of the war past the $5 trillion dollar mark even if the two wars were to end tomorrow.  Harvard economist Joseph Stiglitz is now suggesting that a final figure approaching $7 trillion is not inconceivable inclusive of Obama’s early 2009 surge in Afghanistan coupled with the escalating costs of supplying US forces.  If Obama adds thousands more soldiers at the request of Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, the final tab will go higher.

The numbers don’t lie.  It is a fantasy to believe that Washington will somehow obtain a simulacrum of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq that will benefit America and its people.  Apart from any other moral or practical considerations, the United States simply cannot afford to continue feeding an insatiable war machine.  Extending the conflict to Iran will likely break the bank.  Someone should speak the truth to President Obama, who is pledging to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, explaining that the best way to finish is to end the sorry debacle.  The President should make the politically difficult but necessary decision to stop the bleeding and bring our soldiers home.

[bigron]

President vs. party on troop increase

Caucus wouldn't back a costly expansion of Afghan war

By Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 26, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112500284_pf.html


President Obama will reveal his new Afghanistan war strategy in a speech Tuesday evening to cadets at West Point, but his most skeptical audience is likely to be the powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill who oppose a troop buildup.

Top Democrats have made it clear to Obama that he will not receive a friendly reception should he announce what is considered the leading option: sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The legislators have indicated that a request for more money to finance a beefed-up war effort will be met with frustration and, perhaps, a demand to raise taxes.

Even so, Obama appears ready to come close to accepting the recommendation of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, to add 40,000 more troops to the war effort. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that several NATO countries will send an additional 5,000 troops to Afghanistan. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that Obama had not yet informed members of his war council of his decision.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described what she called "serious unrest" in her caucus over the prospect of another vote to finance billions of dollars for an expanded war. It is, she said, the most difficult vote she can ask of the members of her party. "We need to know what the mission is, how this is further protecting the American people and is this the best way to do that, especially at a time when there's such serious economic issues here at home," she told bloggers on a Tuesday conference call.

Pelosi met with Obama at the White House on Tuesday and later sat next to him at the state dinner he held that evening. Both sides declined to comment Wednesday about the substance of the roughly hour-long discussion.

In June, Pelosi strong-armed anti-war Democrats into voting for a $100 billion measure to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During an interview in July, she recounted her appeal to the lawmakers: "Will you change your mind and one more time vote for war funding?" She also promised not to ask again. "This is the very last time," she told them.

Now, barely five months later, Pelosi and Obama will soon have to go back to the war well, even as they seek difficult votes from the same Democrats on health-care reform, climate change legislation and regulation of the financial industry.

Those domestic policy efforts are far from settled, but Pelosi has described them only as "heavy lifts" that were "nothing" compared with the war votes of the past three years. "You have to go to somebody who is totally, completely, entirely opposed to war funding, and you need to have them vote on it. And you don't even want to vote on it yourself," she said in the July interview.

Obama plans to brief lawmakers at the White House just hours before he leaves for West Point to deliver his speech. The House Foreign Affairs Committee scheduled a hearing on the president's Afghanistan strategy for Dec. 2, the day after the speech. Among those asked to testify: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

McChrystal and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, also are expected to testify next week.

Senior aides said the president's first task will be to seek the understanding of an uneasy nation for his new approach to a war that began eight years ago. Among the reassurances he will offer, they said, is a promise that an end is in sight.

"We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We're not going to be there another eight or nine years," Gibbs said.

But members of the party's most liberal wing, such as Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), have expressed serious doubts about the overall direction of the president's strategy.

"Devoting billions more dollars and tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan is not likely to significantly improve conditions in that country, and it will not help -- and could even hurt -- our efforts to dismantle al-Qaeda's global network with safe havens in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and elsewhere," Feingold said.

Even the Democratic Party's more hawkish lawmakers, such as Sen. Carl M. Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, have said they have deep reservations about the wisdom of a troop buildup.

Kerry has said he is "very wary of it because of past experience and because of some of the challenges that I see." Levin has insisted that more be done to train Afghan troops before sending more Americans.

"Before we commit to additional combat forces, which has a distinct negative, not only for our overstretched troops but also the footprint argument, I believe we must do these other things that are the best way to succeed," Levin said in September.

Senior Democratic aides said no decision will be made on how or when to fund the expected troop request until Obama spells out his plan. One option would be a supplemental spending bill that could be considered early next year. Another would be to add the funding to one of the appropriation bills lawmakers are trying to pass by the end of the year to fund most of the federal government for fiscal 2010.

Such a vote would require much Republican support for passage, because dozens of the most liberal Democrats might oppose the measure. Obama has so far shown little ability to court GOP votes on major legislation, although Republicans have supported almost every war-funding bill since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Because Obama has not formally announced his Afghanistan plan, Republican lawmakers have remained muted in their support for it. The GOP approach has largely been to demand that Obama accept his generals' requests.

Several key GOP lawmakers are using the Thanksgiving holiday to visit Kabul, where they are expected to talk to McChrystal in meetings that could serve as bellwethers of Republican thinking on the plan.

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.