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

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US/NATO death squads killing indiscriminately in Afghanistan

By James Cogan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64270&hd=&size=1&l=e


WSWS, March 18, 2010

The New York Times reported this week that the overall commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan is seeking to impose tighter control over the activities of special forces units, after recent operations led to more civilian deaths. General Stanley McChrystal’s concern is not the deaths, however, but the manner in which they are fuelling Afghan hatred for the US-led occupation and their occasional exposure in the international media.


On March 5, McChrystal publicly released a portion of a directive he had issued—reportedly in late January or early February—which had placed conditions on the night raids that occupation troops regularly conduct on Afghan civilian homes.


McChrystal noted in his release: "Despite their effectiveness and operational value, night raids come at a steep cost in terms of the perceptions of the Afghan people. The myths, distortions and propaganda arising out of night raids often have little to do with the reality—few Afghans have been directly affected by night raids, but nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions them as the single greatest irritant. Night raids must be conducted with even greater care, additional constraints, and standardisation throughout Afghanistan."


McChrystal’s directive stipulated new conditions, including the involvement of Afghan government forces in the raids; treating people with dignity; and informing victims as to how to get compensation for seized or damaged property. The cosmetic character of the order, along with that of an earlier directive calling for caution before launching air strikes, can be judged by the following incidents since early February:


* The London Times reported on March 13 that American special forces, accompanied by Afghan police, entered a housing compound near Gardez, in Paktia province on February 12. They killed a local police commander named Daoud, his brother and three women, two of whom were pregnant. His 15-year-old son was also shot.


According to an unpublished UN report obtained by the Times, the occupation forces broke in at 3.30 a.m. while Daoud’s extended family was celebrating the naming of a baby. The man who noticed them cried "Taliban". Daoud and his son were gunned down as they ran into the courtyard to investigate. His brother, who recognised the assailants as Americans, was shot dead as he yelled in English "don’t fire, we work for the government". The three women were killed by either a blast of gunfire that entered the house or, according to witnesses cited in a New York Times article, were gunned down as they attempted to help the men.


The UN report stated that the remaining people in the compound were "assaulted by the US and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand barefoot for several hours outside in the cold". Daoud and his 18-year-old niece allegedly died of their wounds due to lack of medical treatment. Eight men were taken away and interrogated for four days before being released.


An initial press release by the US/NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed that the three women had been "tied up, gagged and killed" before the special forces’ attack. ISAF later admitted the allegation was false and also that Daoud was not Taliban.


* On February 21, special forces in Uruzgan province called in a helicopter gunship strike on three trucks they were monitoring, killing 27 people. The occupants were all unarmed and all civilians. An anonymous NATO official told the New York Times: "What I saw on that video would not have led me to pull the trigger. It was one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while." The nationality of the troops has not identified but the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) is the most active special forces unit in Uruzgan province. It has been blamed for a number of atrocities against civilians.


* According to the London Times, American and Afghan troops in February raided the home of Rahmatullah Sediqi, a 61-year-old shopkeeper in Ghazni province who had provided shelter to Taliban fighters the night before, reportedly under threat. The Taliban were gone. The occupation forces shot dead his wife and son.


* This month, a helicopter gunship fired a missile into the guest room of a housing compound in Karakhil village in Wardak province, killing three alleged Taliban insurgents. Locals claim that a landing party of occupation troops then entered the home and shot dead its owner, 32-year-old engineer Hamidullah, his wife and his son. Another child was seriously wounded.


The publicity given to McChrystal’s directive by the New York Times has all the hallmarks of a public relations exercise, intended to give the appearance that he is "reining in" special forces’ operations to protect civilian lives.


In reality, the entire military strategy of the US occupation force in Afghanistan, drawn up by commanders McChrystal and General David Petraeus, is predicated on the use of what can only be described as death squads to terrorise the Afghan people into submission. Civilians who die in the process are regarded by the Obama White House and the Pentagon as "collateral damage".


In Iraq, McChrystal served under Petraeus as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the so-called "surge" from 2007 to 2008. The surge had two key aspects. Firstly, a concerted effort to bribe a substantial section of the anti-occupation resistance to cease fighting, and secondly, the wholesale use of JSOC-directed units to assassinate or capture insurgents who would not lay down their arms. The Iraqi government estimated that in the first months of 2008 alone, over 3,000 members of the anti-occupation Shiite Mahdi Army militia were killed, mainly by covert operations.


McChrystal was selected by Petraeus—and endorsed by Obama—to head US/NATO forces in Afghanistan because of the so-called success of the operations in Iraq. Under his command, Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan have become free fire kill zones. Jet fighters, gunships and unmanned Predator drones stalk the sky while gangs of heavily-armed and highly-trained special forces scour the ground, seeking to kill or detain anyone perceived to be organising armed resistance. In case after case, the people they slaughter are defenceless men, women and children.


As was revealed this week, a sinister, off-the-books private mercenary operation to help identify increasing numbers of targets for assassination also existed until it was shut down following CIA complaints (see: "US military created private spy and murder squad in Afghanistan").


Last year, 586 civilian deaths in Afghanistan were officially blamed on the actions of the occupation forces. According to the New York Times, Afghan and UN officials believe special forces units were responsible for the majority. The newspaper noted that the UN human rights office report stated last year: "These forces often operate with little or no accountability and exacerbate the anger and resentment felt by communities."


There is no official body count of how many alleged "Taliban" or insurgents were killed. Their deaths also intensify local hostility toward a murderous foreign occupation force.



 

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Nato’s Fire Sale: One Dead Afghan Child, $2,000

MediaLens

MediaLens , March 17, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64265&hd=&size=1&l=e

On January 11, 2010, we sent out a media alert titled, 'Were Afghan children executed by US-led forces? And why aren’t the media interested?’

The alert concerned credible reports that American-led troops had dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan on December 27 last year. Ten people were killed, including eight schoolboys from one family. We noted that the alleged atrocity had been almost wholly ignored by the corporate media, including the BBC.

Two months after these disturbing allegations surfaced, The Times correspondent Jerome Starkey sought out two local men whose children and other relatives had been killed.1 Starkey invited the men to Kabul where:

"They provided pictures of their dead sons, a sketched map of the compound and copies of the compensation claim forms signed by local officials detailing their sons’ names, relatives and positions at school. Their story was supported by Western military sources."

After its initial shameful attempts to deny culpability, Nato now asserts that the raid had been carried out on the basis of faulty intelligence and should never have been authorised: "Knowing what we know now, it would probably not have been a justifiable attack. We don’t now believe that we busted a major ring."

The Times correspondent reported the testimony of Mohammed Taleb Abdul Ajan, father of three of the boys who were killed:

'When I entered their room I saw four people lying in a heap,’ said Taleb. 'I shook them and shouted their names but they didn’t respond. Some of them were shot in the head. Some of them were shot in the chest.

'I was praying that in the next room maybe they were still alive but when I went in I saw everyone was dead. I saw blood on their necks. I became crazy. I don’t remember what I felt.’2

However, a Times editorial on the same day managed to portray the atrocity in the required context of a "just war": "The legitimacy of the cause in Afghanistan is called into question by civilian deaths. The conflict needs to be conducted with regard for the native population."3

The stated benign aims of Western governments have to be taken on trust; just as the Soviet government portrayed +its+ invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as an act of humanitarian intervention initiated at the "request of the [Afghan] government". The aim of that earlier occupation, the Soviet people were reassured, was "to prevent the establishment of… a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide", and also to provide "aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression".4

The final payoff line from The Times leader could have come from a Pravda editorial of thirty years ago:

"In order to defeat our enemies we must be seen to be better than them."

Meanwhile, the rest of the corporate media averted its gaze from the bloodied remains of dead Afghan schoolchildren.

The Malodorous Myth of BBC Balance

In December, BBC news online had posted these two brief 'balanced’ reports of the US-led killing of the Afghan schoolchildren:

'Afghanistan children killed "during Western operation",’ December 28, 2009 and 'Afghan MP accuses US troops of killing schoolchildren’, December 30, 2009.

In the first of these reports, the BBC observed:

"Nato said it had no record of operations or deaths in the area." and "The BBC’s Peter Greste in Kabul says Kunar province is remote, snowbound and dominated by the Taliban, so the investigation into Saturday’s alleged incident will be difficult."

The second report commented: "The BBC’s Peter Greste in Kabul says it is impossible to verify either account. He says it is possible that both are broadly correct — and that the victims might well have been school students, but that they helped the insurgency."

When Media Lens readers challenged the BBC’s failure to report the allegations fully and responsibly, the response from the corporation was galling:

It’s worth noting that the circumstances of the incident are disputed, unlike some previous examples of civilians killed by coalition forces. The Afghan government and the UN believe that civilians were killed as the result of the US operation in Kunar. NATO still does not accept this and strongly argues that US forces killed insurgents."5

Evidence of a massacre is even stronger now than it was then, less than a month ago. And yet we are not aware of any subsequent BBC news reports, or any corrections or apologies.

On February 27, we contacted two senior BBC editors: Helen Boaden, director of BBC news, and Steve Herrmann, who is responsible for BBC news online. We pointed out that Jerome Starkey of The Times had now been able to verify the reports that Afghan schoolchildren had been shot dead in the December raid involving US forces. We asked the BBC editors, in light of the latest Times reporting:

What will you and your colleagues be doing to follow up your previous reports?

With the resources that the BBC has available, why were you apparently unable to do what Mr Starkey has done and investigate — and now indeed verify — the initial disturbing allegations of Afghan schoolchildren being shot?

How will these latest revelations affect how you deal with Nato statements in future?

We have yet to receive any response from Helen Boaden or Steve Herrmann.

We emailed the same questions to BBC reporter Peter Greste. In an email dated March 2, he told us that he is normally based in Kenya — he had been covering Afghanistan for the Christmas and New Year period, and had left Kabul early in January. He passed on our inquiry to the BBC’s Kabul bureau editor "who will get back to you in due course." Instead, a response was then sent to us by Sean Moss, a "divisional advisor" at BBC complaints, who wrote blandly:

"As I’m sure you will appreciate, it is not feasible for the Kabul bureau to enter into a dialogue with individuals. If you would like to make a complaint, you need to do so through the webform at www.bbc.co.uk/complaints."6

As many of our readers will be all too aware, the BBC "complaints" procedure is a standard corporate tool for deflecting public challenges, ensuring that little of substance actually changes.

Concluding Remarks

Meanwhile, the killing, and the propaganda campaign, continue. Last week, Starkey reported that another night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen this month led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials – an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up.7

The family were offered "American compensation" — $2,000 for each of the victims. "There’s no value on human life," said Bibi Sabsparie, mother of two of the dead. "They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won’t bring our family back."

This latest horror has again been buried by the UK media, along with its victims.

BBC staff employed to manage complaints from the public are adept at robotically indicating where the latest Western crime has been 'impartially’ reported – BBC radio bulletins, a paragraph or short online report, or perhaps a snippet on the BBC News Channel or the World Service. But the glaring omission is of any in-depth, headline coverage on the main BBC television news watched by millions. Nothing must question the state ideology that, while "mistakes" might happen, the aims of the government are benevolent.

'Nato admits that deaths of 8 boys were a mistake’, The Times, February 25, 2010. [↩]
'Assault force killed family by mistake in raid, claims Afghan father’, The Times, February 25, 2010. [↩]
Editorial, 'Just War’, The Times, February 25, 2010. [↩]
Nikolai Lanine and Media Lens, 'Invasion: A Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance’, November 20, 2007. [↩]
Email from BBC complaints to Media Lens reader, February 19, 2010. [↩]
Email, March 15, 2010. [↩]
'Nato "covered up" botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five’, The Times, March 13, 2010. [↩]

 

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Gen. McChrystal: Kandahar Invasion Already Started

Predicts Months of Escalation Ahead

by Jason Ditz, March 17, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/17/gen-mcchrystal-kandahar-invasion-already-started/

Officials had previously talked of the NATO invasion of Kandahar Province as something happening in late spring or early summer. Using the Marjah offensive as a guide, a massive number of US and allied troops would invade Kandahar city and the surrounding region.

But something changed at some point, and according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal that plan has been shelved in favor of a steady escalation over “the weeks and months ahead.” Beyond that, he says, the offensive has already begun.

In part this may be the result of increased Taliban aggressiveness in Kandahar, with weekend blasts in the city killing at least 35 people and injuring another 57. The Taliban has said the attacks are a warning to NATO.

The blasts have led President Karzai to conclude that he needs to send additional security forces to Kandahar. Though the Taliban seemed contented to let the threatened offensive against the sparsely populated farming community of Marjah just happen, Kandahar’s size and importance likely means they are unwilling to just sit idly by while NATO masses troops.

But with months of escalation ahead, McChrystal was unwilling to project when the pledged conquest of Kandahar would be complete. In the meantime it seems the residents of one of Afghanistan’s most populous cities will be living in the midst of an ever-growing military offensive.

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Soaring IED attacks in Afghanistan stymie U.S. counteroffensive

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 2010; A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031703649_pf.html


Taliban fighters more than doubled the number of homemade bombs they used against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last year, relying on explosives that are often far more primitive than the ones used in Iraq.

The embrace of a low-tech approach by Taliban-trained bombmakers -- they are building improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, out of fertilizer and diesel fuel -- has stymied a $17 billion U.S. counteroffensive against the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, military officials say. Electronic scanners or jammers, which were commonly deployed in Iraq, can detect only bombs with metal parts or circuitry.

"Technology is not going to solve this problem," said Army Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, director of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. "I don't think you can defeat the IED as a weapon system. It is too easy to use."

U.S. military officials said they expected the number of IED attacks to climb further this year as 40,000 U.S. and NATO reinforcements pour into Afghanistan.

Oates said technological advances have enabled the military to save lives by providing better armor and other forms of protection for troops. But he said the high-tech approach -- despite billions of dollars in research -- has failed to produce an effective way to detect IEDs in the field. About four-fifths of the devices that are found before they explode are detected the old-fashioned way: by troops who notice telltale signs, such as a recently disturbed patch of dirt that might be covering up a bomb.

Despite the insurgents' crude approach, the explosive power of their IEDs is growing. Each bombing in Afghanistan, on average, causes 50 percent more casualties than it did three years ago, Oates said Wednesday at a House committee hearing. U.S. officials say even armored troop-transport vehicles that were designed to protect against roadside bombs are now vulnerable.

All told, the U.S. military recorded 8,159 IED incidents in Afghanistan in 2009, compared with 3,867 in 2008 and 2,677 the year before.

Last month, 721 IEDs blew up or were defused in Afghanistan, slowing a major Marine-led offensive in Helmand province and killing 28 U.S. and allied troops. These bombs are the leading cause of U.S. casualties by a large margin.

The number of IED attacks in Iraq, meanwhile, has plummeted, mirroring the overall decrease in violence in that country. At their peak, in 2007, Iraqi insurgents employed 23,000 IEDs. Last year, that number fell to about 3,000, according to U.S. military figures.

Oates credited U.S. countermeasures -- such as interrupting the flow of military-grade explosives and detonators from Iran -- for some of the decrease. Other military officials said a bigger factor was the overall reduction in the intensity of the insurgency; as sectarian fighting faded, people simply stopped planting bombs.

Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the head of U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan, has said that the most effective way to combat the flood of IEDs is to embrace an overall counterinsurgency strategy. If U.S. and NATO forces can win the support of the local population, the thinking goes, the bombings will stop.

But with the number of IED attacks soaring in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates created a task force in November to devise more short-term solutions for responding to the threat. He gave the group six months to come up with recommendations.

"There's no doubt the urgency has picked up," said Oates, who took over as director of JIEDDO in January and sits on the task force. "We don't have years to wait to start changing the momentum in Afghanistan."

JIEDDO, which has a staff of about 3,500, was created in 2006 after U.S. commanders in Iraq said they needed a major research effort to come up with ways to fight IEDs. Some military officials likened the campaign to a modern-day Manhattan Project, the code name for the secret program that developed the first atomic bomb.

Congress has spent nearly $17 billion on IED research and training programs, not including money allocated for armored vehicles and other equipment to protect troops.

In Iraq, in addition to using electronic jammers, the U.S. military employed a range of tactics to detect IEDs. Unmanned aircraft and blimps armed with cameras roamed the skies to look for insurgents as they placed bombs along roadsides and under bridges.

But experts said those tactics are only marginally useful in Afghanistan. Because of the country's mountainous terrain, surveillance drones have a harder time spotting bombers at work. Unlike in Iraq, most of the roads are unpaved, making it more difficult to detect bombs buried in the dirt.

"It's just a tough environment," said Command Sgt. Maj. Todd M. Burnett, who oversees training programs for JIEDDO. "It's the harshest conditions imaginable for a soldier."

Kenneth Comer, JIEDDO's deputy director of intelligence, said insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq were constantly adapting their bombmaking tactics to stay a step ahead of U.S. technological advances. He said that it was unlikely that the U.S. military would ever catch up but that it needed to keep trying until broader counterinsurgency efforts take root. The alternative, he said, would result in higher U.S. casualties and more momentum for enemy forces.

"We will never win in that space," he said. "But we can lose in that space."

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Thursday, March 18, 2010
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/18/taliban-retaliates-to-counter-us-in-afghanistan/



Taliban retaliates to counter U.S. in Afghanistan

Uses murder, threats in effort to keep Afghans subjugated

by Heidi Vogt ASSOCIATED PRESS

MARJAH, Afghanistan | A month after losing control of its southern base in Marjah, the Taliban has begun to fight back, launching a campaign of assassination and intimidation to frighten people from supporting the U.S. and its Afghan allies.

At least one apparent government sympathizer has been beheaded. There are rumors that others have been killed. Afghans in the town that U.S., Afghan and NATO troops captured in a three-week assault that began Feb. 13 awake to letters posted on their doors warning against helping the troops.

Winning public support in this former Taliban stronghold in Helmand province 360 miles southwest of Kabul is considered essential to preventing insurgents from returning.

The Marjah operation will serve as a model for campaigns elsewhere, including one expected by summer to secure villages around Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual birthplace and the largest city in the south.

Military commanders believe the Taliban campaign is achieving some success because of questions raised at town meetings: Do the U.S. forces want to shut down the mosques and ban prayer? Will they use lookout posts on their bases to ogle women? Are they going to take farmers' land away?

"Dislocating the insurgents physically was easy. Dislocating them socially — proving that we're here to stay and to help — is a lot harder," said Lt. Col. Jeff Rule, the head of operations for Marines in Helmand.

There are no firm figures on how many Taliban fighters are left in Marjah. Marine and Afghan military officials say they believe most of those still here are from the area and the foreign fighters have fled.

Regardless of Taliban numbers, its influence is still felt.

New cell-phone towers brought phone service to Marjah a little more than a week ago. But the service doesn't work at night because the Taliban threatens or bribes tower operators to shut off the network, presumably to prevent people from alerting troops and police as militants plant bombs after dark.

Some of the workers on canal-clearing projects have been threatened or have been beaten by insurgents.

At least one canal worker who received threats returned and said he will keep working despite the risk, said Maj. David Fennell, who oversees about 15 civil affairs troops working to win over the population.

"That's when you know that you fought the Taliban and you won," Maj. Fennell said. "I tell my team time and time again: 'What did we just do today? We hit the Taliban in the mouth.' "

The Marines are trying to win partly through diplomacy and partly through getting development and infrastructure projects running as quickly as possible to show that the Afghan government is serious this time.

U.S. troops are having success with offering to improve mosques — repairing structures or installing loudspeakers to try to win over influential mullahs while creating an unattractive target for Taliban militants who won't want to attack mosques.

This may overestimate the restraint of the Taliban. The beheaded man was a mosque leader, said Capt. Iqbal Khan of the Afghan army, whose 91 soldiers are embedded with a Marine company in central Marjah.

Even so, projects of all types move ahead. Three medical clinics are open, staffed by doctors from Kabul and locals who ran private clinics under the Taliban, Maj. Fennell said. Two interim schools have started, staffed by locals and with more than 100 students.

Marjah's administrative chief, Abdul Zahir, said he and his advisers have decided they must show they have the upper hand in town by the end of the month.

But he acknowledged that the task is difficult. Homemade bombs still appear every night on roads traveled by the military. Gunfire can be heard many evenings in the center of town. Earlier this week, a Marine foot patrol tripped a bomb planted near the district center, seriously wounding several of them.

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Kyrgyzstan unveils US military training base plan

Kyrgyzstan says US planning military base to train Kyrgyz soldiers in Central Asian nation

Staff
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/03/17/kyrgyzstan-unveils-us-military-training-base-plan-2/

Mar 17, 2010 15:18 EDT

Officials in the impoverished Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan say the United States plans to build a $5 million military base for training local troops to assist in the fight against international terrorism.

Kyrgyzstan already hosts a U.S. military base in Manas, outside the capital Bishkek, used by Washington as a regional hub for the U.S.-led war in nearby Afghanistan.

A Kyrgyz Defense Ministry statement released Wednesday says the training base — complete with barracks, dining hall, classrooms and an assault course — will be constructed near the southern town of Batken.

No timeframe was mentioned.

The Kyrgyz government last year backed off a threat to evict U.S. forces from Manas after Washington offered to increase the rent it pays threefold.

Source: AP News

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AFGHANISTAN: Marjah residents take stock after offensive
 
16 Mar 2010 11:20:50 GMT
Source: IRIN
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/e254a5321e40103f1caa3bf7d1013286.htm

Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.


 KABUL, 16 March 2010 (IRIN) - With the exception of small pockets of resistance, Taliban fighters have been driven out of Marjah town in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, but many local people are struggling to return to some kind of normality and are fearful of the future.

A rapid assessment by the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) said the conflict in Marjah had left 35 civilians dead, 37 injured, and 55 houses destroyed.

The assessment does not specify which side killed how many civilians.

"It is impossible to measure every war-related misery and impact but we have tried to collect some basic figures about casualties and destruction," Ahmadullah Ahmadi, director of the ARCS office in Helmand, told IRIN.

Before and during the military operation, Marjah residents were promised rapid aid, but some three weeks after the end of the offensive local people say they have yet to receive any meaningful assistance.

"A government assessment team will investigate the damage in Marjah and compensation will be given to the affected people," said Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand. The process is expected to start in a few days but it is unclear when it might be completed.

People who lost their houses, shops and other property in the fighting urgently need shelter and want to resume normal life quickly.

"We provide compensation to those who suffer property damage and other losses due to military activity, including within the farming community. We do this as quickly and comprehensively as possible, in consultation with community members," Paul Scott, a UK military public affairs officer, told IRIN. The UK has thousands of troops in Helmand Province.

Quick cash-for-work projects have been launched in Marjah to employ local men and help "clean-up and refurbish" local bazaars, Scott said.

However, efforts to normalize the situation in Marjah have been impeded by fears of improvised explosives which have killed and wounded dozens of people over the past few weeks, according to NATO and government officials.

Opium deal?

During their two-year rule in Marjah, Taliban insurgents banned schools, TV and beard-shaving, and allowed farmers to grow opium.

Afghanistan is the world's top opium-producing country and Helmand Province accounted for over 50 percent of the 6,900 tons of opium produced there in 2009, according to a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Taliban insurgents make hefty profits from the drugs trade, says UNODC.

The government has vowed to reopen schools, restore civil liberties and enforce the ban on poppy cultivation: "We will eradicate all poppy fields in Marjah because opium cultivation is illegal," Zalmai Afzali, a spokesman of the Counter-Narcotics Ministry (MCN), told IRIN.

But farmers are pleading for a stay of execution: "We ask the government not to eradicate our current poppy fields; in return we promise not to cultivate poppy next year," said local farmer Abdul Ghani.

The farmers say destroying their poppy fields could ruin them, and that the conflict has damaged their livelihoods.

A senior government official, who preferred anonymity, told IRIN the government had unofficially agreed to allow farmers to harvest poppy this year because eradication was deemed too risky. "The government does not say this publicly because it is illegal but no eradication will be conducted in Marjah this season," he said.

"Very skeptical population"

Over 4,000 families were displaced by the conflict in Nad Ali District (which includes Marjah) in February. Most have returned to their homes over the past three weeks, according to aid agencies, but there is uncertainty about the future; some are unsure how long NATO and Afghan forces will hold the area.

"We've got a very skeptical population here," said Lawrence Nicholson, a US army general, adding that people were unsure what NATO and the Afghan government would be able to do for them.

"We are in competition every day for the confidence and support of the population. We're in competition with the Taliban," Nicholson was quoted in a 5 March press release as saying.

Pockets of resistance

Meanwhile, the Taliban are not completely defeated in Marjah, according to the provincial authorities.

"The enemy is still present in some pockets," said Helmand spokesman Ahmadi, adding that pro-government forces were working to defeat them completely.

NATO said coalition forces are trying "to take the oxygen away from the insurgents" by separating them from the population - no easy task, according to a NATO statement.

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© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis: http://www.IRINnews.org

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Taliban fight in Afghan town with fear campaign

Taliban fight back in Afghan town with campaign of fear, intimidation

HEIDI VOGT
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/03/17/taliban-fight-in-afghan-town-with-fear-campaign-2/

Mar 17, 2010 13:01 EDT

A month after losing control of their southern base in Marjah, the Taliban have begun to fight back, launching a campaign of assassination and intimidation to frighten people from supporting the U.S. and its Afghan allies.

At least one alleged government sympathizer has been beheaded. There are rumors that others have been killed. Afghans in the town that U.S., Afghan and NATO troops captured in a three-week assault that began Feb. 13 awake to letters posted on their doors warning against helping the troops.

Winning public support in this former Taliban stronghold in Helmand province 360 miles southwest of Kabul is considered essential to preventing insurgents from returning.

The Marjah operation will serve as a model for campaigns elsewhere, including one expected by summer to secure villages around Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual birthplace and the largest city in the south.

Military commanders believe the Taliban campaign is achieving some success because of questions raised at town meetings: Do the U.S. forces want to shut down the mosques and ban prayer? Will they will use lookout posts on their bases to ogle women? Are they going to take farmers' land away?

"Dislocating the insurgents physically was easy. Dislocating them socially — proving that we're here to stay and to help — is a lot harder," said Lt. Col. Jeff Rule, the head of operations for Marines in Helmand.

There are no firm figures on how many Taliban are left in Marjah. Marine and Afghan military officials say they believe most of those still here are from the area and the foreign fighters have fled.

Regardless of Taliban numbers, their influence is still felt.

New cell phone towers brought phone service to Marjah a little over a week ago. But the service doesn't work at night because the Taliban threaten or bribe tower operators to shut off the network, presumably to prevent people from alerting troops and police as they plant bombs after dark.

Some of the workers on canal-clearing projects have been threatened or have been beaten up by insurgents.

At least one canal worker who received threats returned and said he will keep working despite the risk, said Maj. David Fennell, who oversees about 15 civil affairs troops working to win over the population.

"That's when you know that you fought the Taliban and you won," Fennell said. "I tell my team time and time again: 'What did we just do today? We hit the Taliban in the mouth.'"

This is the struggle for Marjah now: winning people over with a job or a vaccination for a child. The victories are small because the Taliban already proved it can make good on its promises by enforcing harsh justice while in power.

"My sense is that the Taliban will reinfiltrate in due course as the Afghan government fails to live up to the modest expectations NATO has of it," says Mervyn Patterson, a former U.N. political affairs expert in Afghanistan. "I do not think that the Taliban have been weakened in Helmand by the loss of Marjah. They have been having ups and downs, and this was a modest down, but not something that is significant, in and of itself. I expect they will gradually return to Marjah."

Many of the estimated 80,000 people here share the same fears, even though there are about 4,000 NATO and Afghan troops in and around Marjah, including two Marine battalions in the town. Some say they're afraid to take money from the military because if the Taliban find them with the cash, they'll be punished.

"I can't take any money because I'm afraid for my life," said Borjan, a rough-skinned farmer who owns a house that has been taken over by a Marine platoon until they can build their own outpost. He seems to want compensation: he lists equipment and field supplies that have been damaged but refuses to discuss how much it is worth. He just wants them out of the house, which is occupied by a son.

Lt. Shawn Miller said he believes Borjan really is scared. But the elders who accompanied Borjan to help him lodge his complaint are more indifferent. They just want to be left alone to farm. The Taliban mostly left them alone.

The Marines are trying to win partly through diplomacy and partly through getting development and infrastructure projects running as quickly as possible to show that the Afghan government is serious this time.

U.S. troops are having success with offering to improve mosques — repairing structures or installing loudspeakers to try to win over influential mullahs while creating an unattractive target for Taliban militants who won't want to attack mosques.

This may overestimate the restraint of the Taliban. The beheaded man was a mosque leader, said Capt. Iqbal Khan of the Afghan army, whose 91 soldiers are embedded with a Marine company in central Marjah.

Even so, projects of all types push ahead. Three medical clinics are open, staffed by doctors from Kabul and locals who ran private clinics under the Taliban, Fennell said. Two interim schools have started, staffed by locals and with more than 100 students.

The canal-cleaning project has grown from 40 workers to about 800, Fennell said. But it took weeks of cajoling — taking first the teenagers who showed up, then eventually recruiting a few men of military age, then turning the older men into contractors in charge of getting fighting-age men to clean whole sections of the canal.

Marjah's administrative chief, Abdul Zahir, said he and his advisers have decided that they need to show they have the upper hand in town by the end of the month.

"We have about two weeks to prove ourselves," Zahir told The Associated Press in an interview at his temporary headquarters — a concrete structure in a dirt compound outfitted by the U.S. with a few tents for holding meetings and sleeping cots.

But he acknowledged that the task is difficult. Homemade bombs still appear every night on roads traveled by the military. Gunfire can be heard many evenings in the center of town. Earlier this week, a Marine foot patrol hit a bomb planted near the district center, seriously wounding several of them.

"We have to prove there is security so that people take part in projects," Zahir said. While the Afghan government and its NATO allies have far greater force, the Taliban are locals and a proven threat.

"They are part of the community down here, so it is very easy for them to influence people," Zahir said.

The Marines refuse to give precise time frames, saying they'll be here as long as they're needed. But commanders and Afghan officials also acknowledge that they only have a short time to win over the population.

"If this takes six to seven months, that gives a big enough window to the Taliban," said Lt. Col. Calvert Worth Jr., commander of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment operating in central Marjah.

He spoke as he toured a dusty market where merchants sought money for battle damage. Some demands are minor: broken locks on shops. Some are exaggerated: a man wanted $100,000 for oil stolen either by the Taliban or the allies in the offensive.

Three days a week, residents line up to lodge complaints or requests with Zahir. One middle-aged man said he was there to collect restitution for his 10-year-old brother who was injured in the fighting. He carried a paper from medics who treated his brother as proof.

Gul Sahed said his neighborhood is still not safe. There is fighting nearly every day and the Taliban say they'll be beaten if they leave their homes at night. He considered not coming to the district center because the Taliban might see him. But he decided that he needed the money, and took the risk.

___

Associated Press writer Kathy Gannon contributed to this story from Laskar Gah, Afghanistan.

Source: AP News

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Taliban harness power of the web

By Dawood Azami
BBC Pashto, Kabul

The internet is also a weapon of choice for many Taliban

The Taliban banned the internet when they were in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 declaring it immoral and un-Islamic.

But eight years after the fall of the Taliban regime, the internet has become one of the main platforms for insurgents in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan.

As military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan intensify, the Taliban are increasingly using the internet to generate popular support and undermine local governments and their international partners.

The Taliban use the internet very successfully and they have established "virtual" sanctuaries.

Their multi-lingual websites (in Arabic, English, Dari, Pashto and Urdu), "al-Emarah" and "Shahamat", are regularly updated with battlefield reports.

The websites also offer readers interviews with Taliban leaders, propaganda videos, commentaries and official statements.


“ The internet is certainly an important part of Taliban strategy and it is growing ”
Vikram Singh, adviser to US Afghan envoy
It seems that they are trying to become less dependent on other local and international media.

The Taliban also send their material to a number of other "independent" websites in an effort to make their actions seem more acceptable to audiences.

E-mails are used to issue press releases, to inform local and foreign journalists of their activities in the field and to give their own version of events.

Online race

In fact, the Taliban are generally faster than the Afghan government and its foreign allies to circulate information about a particular incident.


A season of reports exploring the extraordinary power of the internet, including:

Digital giants - top thinkers in the business on the future of the web

''The important usage of the internet by the Taliban is they are sending the messages through e-mails to the media'', says Masoom Stanekzai, home security adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

''This way, they are quoted in daily news and news analysis. And that is why they seem to be very sophisticated in using the internet.''

The main target of the Taliban's internet activity is the educated elite who have access to the internet and more influence in the community.

''I think they have gone from using the internet first for really western audience or audiences outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan to try to do fundraising and recruitment and other things'', says Vikram Singh, a senior adviser on communications to Richard Holbrooke, the special US representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

''It [the internet] is certainly an important part of the Taliban strategy and it is growing.''

The Afghan government says they will get the necessary equipment to begin internet censorship by the end of May.

"Websites which promote terrorism, glorify violence, contain pornography or encourage gambling would be blocked," say Abdul Qadir Qalatwal, spokesman for the ministry of communication and technology.

Hearts and minds


“ Actually the Taliban do very well with the internet ”
Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton
The Afghan government and its foreign allies have mainly focused on radio and television to counteract Taliban propaganda.

But the internet is growing fast in Afghanistan and authorities say that 50% of Afghanistan's population will have access to the internet within the next three years.

"The internet is a classic example where in this modern world, in the cyber net environment, you can make positive use of the capabilities as well as threaten the use to your opponents," says Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, Chief of the United Kingdom Air Staff.

''So actually they [Taliban] do very well with it.''

Both the insurgents and those fighting the insurgency are preparing for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Meanwhile, the second front in the war - the battle for winning hearts and minds - is intensifying.

Both sides are trying to dominate the air waves and the internet to post the quickest response and to challenge what is seen as misinformation.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8570742.stm

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Kandahar campaign already underway, general says

Reuters

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64280&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 17, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Preliminary U.S. efforts to gradually retake full control of the Taliban's birthplace Kandahar are already underway, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan said on Wednesday, offering few details.

The campaign in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, is seen as a crucial test of President Barack Obama's strategy to reverse Taliban momentum after more than eight years of war.

General Stanley McChrystal says he envisions gradual operations to deliver security and governance, as opposed to one big military assault. That has raised questions about how to identify the new campaign in Kandahar and its surroundings, where NATO already has thousands of forces.

"Kandahar is already being shaped," McChrystal said, briefing reporters in Washington via teleconference, adding that efforts will "ramp up" in the coming weeks and months.

"What you are going to see in the months ahead, without giving too much detail, is a number of activities to shape the political relationships in and around Kandahar," he said.

McChrystal said there would also be a "series of activities" to boost security, like more partnering with Afghan police inside Kandahar city and boosting troop levels in the surrounding areas.

"If you control the environs around Kandahar, you go a long way to controlling Kandahar," he said.

McChrystal has not given a timeline for the operation but told reporters last week in Kabul that troops would be at full force for Kandahar operations by the early summer.

Kandahar served as the spiritual seat of power for reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar before the militants were ousted from Afghanistan by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001. Militants have since made substantial gains in the area.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart, Adam Entous and Caren Bohan, editing by Vicki Allen)





 

[bigron]

US attacks brewing in north Afghanistan

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:48:56 GMT
http://presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=121134&sectionid=351020403

 
 
US Marines of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, on the perimeter of their combat outpost recently set up in Marjah, Helmand province.


The US-led forces are to take northern Afghanistan under major attacks as similar offensives are taking their toll on the south-based civilians.

"There will definitely be an operation up there in Kunduz (province)," General Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff in the US-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, told the German ARD public radio on Thursday, AFP reported.

Under the codename "Operation Moshtarak," around 15,000 US and NATO troops launched in February the so-called counterinsurgency raids on Helmand's Marjah and Nad-e Ali areas.

Civilians are, however, said to be suffering the brunt of the operation, as they have been forced to flee their homes in pursuit of basic necessities, despite roadside bombs planted by the militants.

Kasdorf said the pending operation is to be "similar" in scale to Operation Moshtarak.

Afghanistan is grappling with unprecedented violence despite the presence of some 120,000 American and other foreign troops.

HN/AKM

[bigron]

Thursday, March 18, 2010
21:32 Mecca time, 18:32 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/2010318152734763348.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Major Afghan offensive 'under way' 
 

McChrystal said efforts to gradually retake control of Kandahar will "ramp up" in coming weeks [Reuters]
 
The US has said a new offensive to drive the Taliban from the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar is under way and will steadily "ramp up" in the months ahead.

The military and political efforts against the Taliban around Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city, are the next step in the US-led strategy to end a war now in its ninth year.

General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, said the offensive had begun with initial military and political efforts, including operations to secure key roads and districts.

"Kandahar is already being shaped," McChrystal said on Thursday, adding that efforts will "ramp up" in the coming weeks and months ahead, lasting "a significant time".

A major offensive in Kandahar, once a Taliban stronghold, would follow the current military operation in neighbouring Helmand province,which appears to have largely pushed back the Taliban and given the government a chance to take control.

'Reversing momentum'

"What you are going to see in the months ahead, without giving too much detail, is a number of activities to shape the political relationships in and around Kandahar," he said.

McChrystal said there would also be a "series of activities" to boost security, like more partnering with Afghan police inside Kandahar city and boosting troop levels in the surrounding areas.

"If you control the environs around Kandahar, you go a long way to controlling Kandahar," he said.


In depth

  Videos
-  Civilians flee Marjah fighting
-  Afghanistan's influential elders
-  Taliban second in command captured
-  Forces 'positive' on Afghan assault
-  Holbrooke on 'Operation Moshtarak'
   
  Blogs
-  Human shields in Afghanistan
-  Police 'key to stability'
   
  Timeline
-  Afghanistan in Crisis
-  Operation Moshtarak at a glance
   
  Focus
-  To win over Afghans, US must listen  
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/2010318152734763348.html


McChrystal has not given a timeline for the operation but said last week in Kabul that troops would be at full force for Kandahar operations by the early summer.

Kandahar is the next target in major military operations to eradicate the Taliban from areas they have controlled, in many cases in tandem with drug cartels, over the years since their regime was overthrown in 2001.

Operation Moshtarak- "together" in Dari and Pashto - is the first major test of the strategy of Barack Obama, the US president, to take on the Taliban and end the eight-year conflict with one of the biggest offensives since the 2001 US-led invasion.

It is designed to clear Taliban fighters from the Marjah region of the southern province and hold it so that the civilian administration can establish itself.

The strategy comprises military, political and civilian approaches in four stages dubbed "shape, take, hold and build" and aims to ensure that once eradicated, the Taliban threat does not re-emerge.

Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Kabul, the Afghan capital, said: "These are the very early stages of the Kandahar offensive.

"We are at the 'shape' phase of the operation, however, there are military offensives being carried out around the city of Kandahar to facilitate a larger offensive in the coming weeks."

The campaign in Kandahar is seen as a crucial test of Obama's strategy to reverse Taliban momentum after more than eight years of war.

Initial stages of the strategy aimed at speeding up the war's end began in Kandahar province around November, a Western official told the AFP news agency, on condition of anonymity.

"The emphasis increased last November, and most of it is invisible because it is aimed at understanding the situation on the ground, the political landscape and the human terrain," he said.

"We all understand how important and iconic Kandahar is for the Taliban - it was their first foothold."

Taliban stronghold

Zalmai Ayobi, a spokesman for Kandahar governor Turyalai Wisa, said consultations had begun with tribal elders and community leaders as the long-term goal was to "expand good governance to all districts and villages".

Kandahar city, is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul and the birthplace of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their overthrow in the 2001 US-led invasion.


Suicide attacks are frequently carried out in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold [Reuters]

The Taliban claimed responsibility for a multiple suicide bomb attack on the city last Saturday that killed 35 people,saying it was intended to sabotage the planned offensive.

Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff at the International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) said there would "definitely" be an operation in the northern province of Kunduz, where most of Germany's 4,300 troops in Afghanistan are based.

He declined to give details but Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kaemmerer, an Isaf spokesman, said it would be similar in "type not the scale" to Moshtarak.

The number of foreign troops under US and Nato command is set to rise to 150,000 by August, with most of the new deployment heading to the south.

The 15,000 US, Nato and Afghan troops currently deployed to Helmand's Marjah and Nad Ali areas for Operation Moshtarak will remain in the province for other offensives there, the spokesman said.

Newly arrived troops would be sent to Kandahar, he said, adding that foreign troops would remain in both provinces to ensure security was maintained and the Taliban did not re-emerge.

But in the battle to win the support of local people, perceptions that Kandahar's leaders are corrupt could be an obstacle to long-term success, military officials have said.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the elected leader of Kandahar's provincial council, has long denied allegations that he has ties to the three-billion-dollar-a-year illicit drug trade.
 
 

[bigron]

Friday, March 19, 2010
14:21 Mecca time, 11:21 GMT  
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/201031910391309228.html
  
CENTRAL/S.ASIA  
 
Putting a price on Afghan life  
 

What is the price of a human life?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LexrCzX0l4k&feature=player_embedded

In Afghanistan, if foreign troops kill an innocent civilian by accident, families may receive compensations of around $2,500.

But there is no fixed system for compensation - something that Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is now calling for.

However, many bereaved families aren't convinced that money will heal deep wounds.

Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid reports from Kabul - where civilian casualties are rising.
 
 

[bigron]

Taliban controlling Marjah by night

by Tom Mellen

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64315&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 18 2010

Militants are regaining control of Marjah, residents have reported, less than a month after Western military officials claimed to have seized the Afghan town from the Taliban.

Marjah is now home to an occupation force numbering more than one Nato soldier or Afghan police officer for every eight residents.

But militants are stepping up an underground campaign against officials loyal to the Western-backed Karzai regime.

Walid Jan Sabir, who represents Marjah and the surrounding Nad Ali District in the Afghan parliament, said that he had heard reports from Marjah elders visiting his office in Kabul this week of two beheadings of pro-government elders, both members of the government's Community Development Council.

And a tribal elder living in Marjah said that, after dark, "it is like the kingdom of the Taliban - the government and foreign forces cannot defend anyone even one kilometre from their bases."

New governor of Marjah Haji Abdul Zahir acknowledged that guerillas "still have a lot of sympathy among the people."

Mr Zahir said that militants are now holding meetings in randomly selected homes roughly every other night, gathering residents together and demanding that they turn over the names of anyone co-operating with the authorities.

The Taliban regularly issued "night letters" posted at mosques or on utility poles warning against collaboration, added the governor. They often intimidated residents into providing them with shelter and food, even in densely populated neighbourhoods of the city.

He said that it was difficult for the authorities to counter the Taliban's campaign because the militants were mostly moving around without guns.

"If they are detained, they claim they are just ordinary citizens," Mr Zahir said.

US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Rule said: "Dislocating the insurgents physically was easy - dislocating them socially is a lot harder."

Mervyn Patterson, a former UN political affairs expert in Afghanistan, predicted that the Taliban would "reinfiltrate in due course as the Afghan government fails to live up to the modest expectations Nato has of it.

"I do not think that the Taliban have been weakened in Helmand by the loss of Marjah - they will gradually return."

Journalists are still barred from visiting Marjah unless they are "embedded" with the US military.





 

[bigron]

Former Bin Laden Hunter Calls Afghanistan Success 'Transitory'


by KATHY GANNON | 03/19/10 04:31 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/19/former-bin-laden-hunter-c_n_506213.html



LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — In the capital of Afghanistan's Helmand province, Taliban roam the streets freely. Barely a mile (a kilometer) outside Lashkar Gah, they wield more control than the government, according to residents.

Last month 10,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan forces wrested control of Marjah, a Helmand farming community about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Lashkar Gah, after years of Taliban rule. The Marjah offensive was the first test of NATO's new counterinsurgency strategy to turn ordinary Afghans away from the Taliban with good governance and development.

But the battle for Helmand is far from over. Even in Marjah, Taliban fighters still plant bombs under cover of darkness. NATO efforts to win over the population with public services and aid have barely begun.

On Wednesday, would-be suicide attackers targeted the offices of a charity in Lashkar Gah but were killed by security guards before they could detonate their explosives-laden vests. One foreign employee was wounded in the attack on the office of International Relief and Development.

According to residents, the Taliban presence in Helmand province remains formidable, even with the loss of their base in Marjah.

"Look over there at that TV tower," said Abdul Latif, an English teacher in Lashkar Gah who wore a scarf over his face because he didn't want to be identified in the company of foreigners. "After that tower, the rest is all Taliban. The Taliban are all over the city. They leave their guns at home and come into the city."

Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal acknowledges that the Taliban have outright control of three of the province's 13 districts. In most other districts, the only areas where the government has control are the district capitals, according to residents and some government officials.

Mangal's appointee as chief of Baghran district, Abdul Razik, hasn't been able to take up the job because the Taliban won't let him enter the area. Instead, he works out of an office in Lashkar Gah, telephoning elders in Baghran to try to persuade them to switch sides.

"How can I go there by myself if they are in control?" Razik asked. "We don't have enough soldiers or police to go with me. I can't go alone."

Story continues below 
In Musa Qala district, the government controls the main town but the Taliban hold weekly court sessions in the rest of the district to settle property and other disputes.

The new counterinsurgency strategy pushed by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal requires NATO to not just take an area but to hold it. Yet the Taliban's strength in Helmand underscores how fragile NATO's hold is not only on Marjah – an 80-square mile (200-square kilometer) district composed of farming villages – but also on other communities.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA point man in the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, cautioned against overstating Marjah's success, which he called "transitory."

"As long as we have 10,000 folks on the ground and open the spigot of greenbacks the success will continue," he said. "The U.S.-NATO-Karzai team will also get a boost from the large part of the media ... who will take a transitory local success and extrapolate it into a nationwide, permanent turning of the tide. How many times did we see that in Vietnam and in Iraq? How many times did the Soviets trumpet the same kind of victory in Afghanistan?"

In an interview on the banks of the Helmand River, Mangal, the governor, likened Marjah to a pilot project in good governance. If it succeeds, the expectation is that it will turn ordinary Afghans against the Taliban, and win over Taliban fighters with a promise of development and good governance.

But people are skeptical, some pointing to the appointment of Abdul Zahir as Marjah's new district leader. Zahir was convicted and jailed in Germany on attempted manslaughter charges, according to German court documents. Zahir has denied ever spending time in a German jail. Afghan officials have not rushed to oust him, but are reviewing the case.

Former Helmand Gov. Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, who supported the assault on Marjah, warned that widespread corruption will turn the Marjah victory into defeat.

"The Taliban are not gone. They have only gone to the other districts of Grishk and Sangin," said Akhundzada, whose family has ruled the province for much of the past two decades.

"The administration of Helmand is generally corrupt and nothing is changing in Marjah, no signs of reform with the latest appointment," Akhundzada said. "It doesn't matter if you have thousands and thousands of NATO troops, you will still have Taliban in Helmand."

Scheuer said it was dangerous to suggest that Marjah was a big setback for the Taliban or a major win for the Afghan government and international forces.

"Is it crippling or even hurtful (to the Taliban) over the long term? No," Scheuer said, citing multiple attacks in Kabul on Feb. 28, a day after the provincial government hoisted its flag in Marjah's town center, that underscored the Taliban's ability to strike throughout the country.

"I think the U.S. and NATO can make inroads and win tactical victories with conventional forces in Kandahar or most any other place they want to go in Afghanistan with big forces, but so what?" Scheuer said. "We do not have a tenth of the forces necessary to be everywhere at once and apply a nationwide strategy – even if we had one."

[bigron]

UN report criticises covert troops who committed Afghan killings

by Jerome Starkey
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64327&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

Child relatives at the gravesite of five people killed, including three women, during a joint US-Afghan night raid in Paktia province


March 16, 2010

Covert troops who killed two pregnant women and a teenage girl in eastern Afghanistan went on to inflict "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" on the survivors of a botched night raid, a report by the UN said.

The family of the victims in Paktiya province have accused Nato of trying to cover up the atrocity after an investigation by The Times revealed that two men, who were also killed, were not the intended targets of the raid. One was a police commander and his brother was a district-attorney.

The unpublished UN report, which was acquired by The Times, contradicts Nato’s version of events. Rear-Admiral Greg Smith, Nato’s communications director, had said that the women had been dead for several hours when US and Afghan gunmen started shooting into the family home.

The report, written in the aftermath of the February 12 attack, states: "As a result of the operation, five people were killed, two men and three women, all belonging to the same family." There were about 25 guests and three musicians at the house on the night of the raid. They had gathered to celebrate the naming of a newborn child. It was only when a musician stepped outside to go to the lavatory at about 3.30am, that someone flashed a light in his eyes and he ran back inside shouting "Taleban".

Witnesses said that Commander Dawood, the policeman, was shot with his son, Sediqullah, 15, when they ran across a courtyard. His brother, Saranwal Zahir, was shot trying to protest the family’s innocence. The three women were caught in a volley of fire behind him.

The UN report said that guests and injured relatives were then "assaulted by US and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand barefeet for several hours outside in the cold".

"Further allegations were also raised that US and Afghan forces refused to provide adequate and timely medical support to two people who sustained bullet injuries, resulting in their deaths hours later," the report added.

The family insist that Commander Dawood and his niece Gulalai, 18, who was engaged to be married this summer, might have survived if they had been taken to hospital sooner.

Waheedullah, 22, one of the guests at the party who works as an ambulance driver in Gardez, said that he was dragged across the compound by his hair. "The Afghans said put up your hands. I stood up and I don’t know who was behind me. I was kicked from behind and fell over," he added.

He saw a gunman with blond hair and a fair beard. "They were American special forces," he said. The Afghan troops were using American rifles and wore patches on their sleeves with the local phrase for Nato’s International Security Assistance Force. The Americans were wearing "wood yellow" clothes, he said, which were different from the regular army’s green uniforms.

The report also sheds light on the identity of the killers. Local US troops, who are part of the conventional US Army, denied any knowledge of the raid. "According to local authorities, the night raid was conducted by US Special Forces from Bagram, which arrived in Gardez days prior to the operation," the report states.





 

[bigron]

March 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/world/asia/20kabul.html?hpw

U.S. Frees Detainees, but Afghans’ Anger Persists

By ALISSA J. RUBIN


KABUL, Afghanistan — The tribal elders had traveled many hours to reach a windswept Afghan military base on the capital’s outskirts to sign their names to a piece of paper allowing them to bring their countrymen home from American detention.

As an Afghan general read the document aloud, Cmdr. Dawood Zazai, a towering Pashtun tribal leader from Paktia Province who fought the Soviets, thumped his crutch for attention. Along with other elders, he did not like a clause in the document that said the detainees had been reasonably held based on intelligence.

“I cannot sign this,” Commander Zazai said, thumping his crutch again. “I don’t know what that intelligence said; we did not see that intelligence. It is right that we are illiterate, but we are not blind.

“Who proved that these men were guilty?”

No one answered because Commander Zazai had just touched on the crux of the legal debate that has raged for nearly a decade in the United States: Does the United States have the legal right to hold, indefinitely without charge or trial, people captured on the battlefield? His question also exposed a fundamental disagreement between the Afghans and the American military about whether people had been fairly detained.

This is the latest chapter in America’s tortuous effort to repair the damage done over the last nine years by a troubled, overcrowded detention system that often produced more insurgents rather than reforming them. The problems were similar in the huge sweeps of suspected insurgents in Iraq.

Now, in Afghanistan, detainees who are deemed not to be a threat are handed over to local elders on the understanding that it is the community’s responsibility to ensure that they stay on the right side of the law.

The releases that took place at a recent ceremony at the 201st Afghan Army Corps headquarters, as well as the release or assignment to Afghan detention of 70 to 80 detainees earlier this year, are part of a new effort to free detainees who are no longer thought to be an imminent threat to the government of Afghanistan or the international forces.

Under the program, recently overhauled by Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward and Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, a Harvard-trained lawyer with the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, there is now an automatic administrative review devised to speed the release process, and for the first time it allows detainees to make a case for their release.

Once the review board has approved a release, the Afghan military, in conjunction with the Americans, asks the detainee to sign a pledge to stay away from the insurgency, from the Taliban and from Al Qaeda. The elders are asked to sign a similar pledge that they will help them. Similar programs have been used with considerable success in Iraq, and the new one in Afghanistan builds on that experience.

There are now about 800 detainees at the American-run Detention Facility in Parwan, the new detention center that opened at the end of 2009 to replace the notorious holding facility at Bagram Air Base, which is associated with abuses that resulted in the deaths of at least two detainees. The vast majority of detainees are Afghans, but about 32 are foreigners, according to a senior American officer.

The American plan is to hand control of the detention center to the Afghan Ministry of Defense by January 2011, but Americans will still be deeply involved in the detention operations. In the coming months, the Americans hope to use the review process to release as many detainees as possible if they are deemed no longer a threat and to transfer to Afghan custody those who can be tried for crimes under Afghan law.

But as the recent ceremony showed, beyond the cake and fruit and formal speeches lies a reservoir of resentment about how the United States has handled detentions since 2001.

In interviews, former detainees and their families said the Americans were routinely misled by informants who either had personal grudges against them or were paid by others to give information to the Americans that would put the person in jail.

In addition, many Afghans have experienced the detentions as humiliating, and found almost unbearable the depths of poverty borne by their families during their internment.

“The information you had about these men was wrong in the first place,” said Hajji Azizullah, 54, a leader of the Andar tribe in Ghazni, who had come to sign for two detainees. “We are confident they were not involved with insurgents. If they were, we wouldn’t be here to sign for them.”

One detainee, Pacha Khan, 29, an illiterate bread baker from Kunar Province, said he was still puzzled about why he had been detained in the first place, let alone held for three years. “I was innocent,” he insisted. “Spies took money and sold me to the Americans. The Americans treated us very well, but as you know, jail is a big thing — to be away from your family, your relatives.”

His brother, Gul Ahmed Dindar, was less forgiving. He had to support his brother’s family of eight children and a wife on the meager salary of a local police officer. “They were about to sell their children,” he said. “They had very little to live on. They sold their one goat, their one sheep and their cow. Then they sold the furniture — it was not much. They have had a very tough life.”

Admiral Harward insisted that the American intelligence was good and that these were insurgents, but on hearing the elders’ protests about signing a document that made it sound as if the tribal leaders agreed with the American view, he offered to change the language to say that in the eyes of American forces these detainees were insurgents. The elders nodded their assent. The new language will be used on future sponsor forms. “We learn something every time we do this,” Admiral Harward said.

The Afghan military made its own effort to solve the problem when it heard the elders’ protests, by simply writing in the word “no” in front of the phrase saying the detainee had a “link to the insurgency.” The version the elders signed said the detainee had “no link.”

In the shifting shadows of this often invisible war, where no one is sure who is lying and who is telling the truth, it seemed a reasonable way to resolve the day’s discord.

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Northern Afghanistan Another New Front for NATO Troops

US Mulls Escalation as Taliban Attacks Rise

by Jason Ditz, March 19, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/19/northern-afghanistan-another-new-front-for-nato-troops/


NATO’s war in Afghanistan is a war on a number of fronts. The west, the south, the area in and around the capital city of Kabul have all been hotbeds of Taliban activity. The comparatively calm northeast portion of the nation, home to the “Northern Alliance” rebels before the 2001 US invasion, is fast becoming another front.

Taliban strikes are on the rise, and despite much being made of the capture of the province’s “shadow governor” in Pakistan, it seems to be having little effect on the insurgents’ ability to shutter schools, collect taxes from locals, and interrupting NATO’s fuel shipments through neighboring Uzbekistan.

With attacks in the south forever on the rise, shipping through Pakistan has become less reliable and NATO has become increasingly dependent on Uzbekistan as an alternative source of fuel. The 4,000+ German soldiers in the province have struggled to protect the shipments, most notably ordering a September air strike on a village which left over 100 people dead.

NATO is looking to eventually launch an offensive in the region, on a similar scale to the one in Helmand Province earlier this year. But that will likely have to wait until the massive offensive in Kandahar is finished, presumably later this year.

In the interim, US officials are reportedly considering sending some 2,500 additional troops to the north. This will likely only be the tip of the iceberg for the region, as NATO struggles to cope with another front in the ever-growing war.

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Karzai’s Brother a ‘Challenge’ for NATO Invasion of Kandahar

Afghan President's Half Brother Harms Credibility

by Jason Ditz, March 19, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/19/wali-karzai-a-challenge-for-nato-invasion-of-kandahar/


With the news earlier this week that the Kandahar offensive has already begun and the pledges to seize absolute control over the city with a military invasion, one would think NATO’s confidence in fighting over Southern Afghanistan’s major city was relatively high. This seems not to be the case, however.



 Wali Karzai

Instead, Pentagon war planners are seeing a major problem with winning the “hearts and minds” in the restive city. That problem comes, as so many other problems have, in the form of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s notorious half-brother Wali.

Wali Karzai, who has held various government positions in Kandahar since the 2001 US invasion, has been accused of many things over the years. With charges of vote rigging, drug dealing, accepting bribes, and being on the CIA payroll for various “services” it is no wonder that the younger Karzai has often been put forth as the posterchild for Afghanistan’s corrupt, non-credible government.

At the same time, officials say that Wali’s intelligence gathering abilities will be vital to the invasion of the province, and his power in the provincial government is so pervasive that it would be all but impossible to cut him out. But when that military conquest moves from “clear” to “hold,” the dirty dealing that has been the centerpiece of governance in the region will quickly become a major liability, and one for which the military doesn’t seem to have an answer.

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Weekend Edition
March 19 - 21, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid03192010.html

Why the Surge is Likely to Fail

Will the Taliban Reclaim Control of Afghanistan?
 
By M. SHAHID ALAM

More than eight years after dismantling the Taliban, the United States is still mired in Afghanistan. Indeed, last October it launched a much-hyped ‘surge’ to prevent a second Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, not imminent yet, but eminently possible.

The first dismantling of the Taliban was a cakewalk.

In 2001, the United States quickly and decisively defeated the Taliban, killed, captured or scattered their fighters, and handed over the running of Afghanistan to their rivals, mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks from the Northern Alliance.

Unaware of Pashtoon history, American commentators were pleased at the smashing victory of their military, convinced that they had consigned the Taliban to history’s graveyard.

Instead, the Taliban came back from the dead. Within months of their near-total destruction, they had regained morale, regrouped, organized, trained, and returned to fight what they saw as a foreign occupation of their country. Slowly, tenaciously they continued to build on their gains, and by 2008 they were dreaming of taking back the country they had lost in 2001.

Could this really happen? That only time will tell, but prospects for the Taliban today look better than at any time since November 2001.

In 2001, the United States had captured Afghanistan with the loss of only twelve of its own troops. Last year it lost 316 soldiers, and the British lost another 108. The numbers speak for themselves.

The United States had occupied Afghanistan with 9000 troops. When Obama took office in January 2009, these numbers had climbed to 30,000. In October, US troop strength in Afghanistan had more than doubled. This does not include tens of thousands of foreign contractors and some 200,000 Afghan troops armed and trained by the Americans.

Yet, NATO could not deter the Taliban advance.

That is when President Obama ordered a troop surge. US troop strength will soon reach 100,000. At the same time, the United States is inviting Taliban fighters to defect in return for bribes. In tandem, President Karzai – for the umpteenth time – is offering amnesty to defecting Taliban fighters. So far, there have been no high-ranking defections.

Can the United States defeat these men - returned from the dead - it calls terrorists? It is a vital question. It should be, since the United States claims that if the Taliban come back, Afghanistan will again become a haven for Al-Qaida, their training ground and launching pad for future attacks against Western targets.

How did the Taliban stage this comeback?

Simply, the answer is: by finding strength in their handicaps. If you had compared the defeated Taliban in December 2001 to the Mujahidin in 1980, you would conclude that history had closed its books on them irrevocably.

The Mujahedeen brought several advantages to their fight. All Afghan ethnicities opposed the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. They had financial, military and political support from all the Western powers. President Reagan honored them as freedom-fighters. They also had support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign fighters would join the Afghan mujahidin.

In comparison, Taliban prospects looked quite dismal after their rout in November 2001. Nearly all the factors that favored the Mujahidin worked against the Taliban. Taliban support was confined mostly to one Afghan ethnicity, the Pashtoons. In the United States and its European allies, they faced a more formidable opponent than the Mujahidin did in the Soviet Union.

There was not a single Muslim country that could support the return of the Taliban: the US forbad it. Worst of all, the Pakistani military, partly for lucre and partly under US pressure, threw its forces against the Taliban. Under the circumstances, few Muslim fighters from outside Pakistan have joined the Taliban.

Their goose was cooked: or so it seemed.

Nevertheless, the Taliban defied these odds, and now, some eight years later, they have taken positions in nearly every Afghan province, with shadow governments in most of them. Is it possible to reverse the gains that Taliban have made in the face of nearly impossible odds?

What can the US do to weaken the Taliban? They have few vulnerabilities because the United States has been so effective in denying them any help from external sources. They have built their gains almost exclusively on their own strengths: and these are harder to take away.

What then are some of these strengths? Unlike the Mujahidin, the Afghan resistance against the United States is less fractious. The Taliban make up the bulk of the resistance. Other groups – led by Haqqani and Hekmatyaar – are much smaller. The Afghan resistance has a central leadership that the Mujahidin never had.

Unlike the Mujahidin, the Taliban do not have the technology to knock out the helicopters, drones or jets that attack them from the air. On the ground, however, they have technology the Mujahidin did not have. They have acquired suicide vests and, more importantly, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) developed by the resistance in Iraq. Indeed, the Taliban claim to have improved upon the IEDs they acquired from Iraq.

Notwithstanding their apparent lack of sophistication, the Taliban leadership have proved to be savvy in their use of videos, CDs, FM radio stations, and the internet to publicize their gains, build morale, and mobilize recruits.

 Despite the satellites, drones, spies on the ground, and prize money for their capture, much of the Taliban leadership has evaded capture. In particular, Mulla Omar remains a ghost. He has not been seen or interviewed since 2001. Yet he remains in touch with his commanders through human couriers.

Afghanistan’s corrupt government is another Taliban asset. They have spawned a tiny class of Afghan nouveau riche battened by drug money, government contracts and cronyism. President Karzai implicates the US occupation in the blatant corruption of his own government.

It appears that there is little that the United States can do to neutralize these elusive advantages. Instead, it tries to blame and shift the burden of the war on Pakistan. It continues to pressure and bribe Pakistan’s rulers to mount full-scale military operations against the Taliban support network in Pakistan.

More and more, Pakistan’s military leaders have been caving under these pressures, escalating their wars against their own population. This has provoked a backlash. A new faction of the Taliban has emerged to launch deadly attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan. These attacks are destabilizing Pakistan. In turn, the US uses these attacks to push Pakistani rulers into greater capitulation to its demands.

In addition, President Obama has dramatically escalated drone attacks against the Taliban support network in Pakistan. In tandem, Pakistan too has been launching more massive air and ground attacks against their hideouts. However, none of this has deterred the escalating Taliban attacks against NATO and Afghan forces.

No one suggests that the Taliban can match the credentials of America’s freedom fighters in the late eighteenth century. The latter were committed to the proposition that all men are created equal, barring a few rarely mentioned exceptions. The Taliban are zealots and misogynists, but only a tad more so than the Mujahidin whom the West embraced as freedom fighters.

The West celebrated the Mujahidin’s victory over the Soviets. The same people, fighting under a different name, have now pushed the United States into a costly stalemate. Will the US prolong this stalemate, and push Pakistan too over the brink? Or will it accept the fait accompli the Taliban have created for them, accept its losses, and save itself from greater embarrassment in the future?

Once or twice, the United States has retreated from unwinnable wars and survived. It is likely that the ‘surge’ is primarily a political move to try to pass off the retreat from Afghanistan as another ‘mission accomplished.’  Let’s hope that this stratagem works somehow, because the alternative is likely to be much worse for all parties involved in this unwinnable war.

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Macmillan, November 2009). Contact me at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

 

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Afghanistan Enacts Law That Gives War Criminals Blanket Immunity




By Jason Leopold
 
Global Research, March 19, 2010
Truthout - 2010-03-16
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18216

A law that provides blanket immunity and pardons former members of Afghanistan’s armed factions for war crimes and human rights abuses committed prior to December 2001 was quietly enacted three years ago by parliament, despite previous assurances by President Hamid Karzai that he would not sign it or allow it to take effect.

 

According to Waheed Omer, Karzai’s spokesman, the amnesty law was enacted because it was approved by two-thirds of parliament and therefore did not need Karzai’s signature. Parliament is made up largely of former warlords who were accused by Afghans and human rights groups of war crimes.

 

"This law was passed with a two-thirds majority in our parliament, and according to our constitution, when a law is passed with a two-thirds majority, it does not require the president to sign it," Omer said during a briefing Tuesday, publicly acknowledging for the first time the blanket immunity provision is now law. Omer’s comments were first reported by Reuters.

 

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an organization founded in 2001 that assists countries in their pursuit of accountability for mass atrocities or human rights abuses, said "blanket amnesties promote impunity and are currently deemed unlawful under international law."

 

Human rights groups learned that the law was enacted after it was published in Afghanistan’s official gazette.

 

“It is not clear when this happened, as the date on the gazetted law is December 2008, while some sources say it was not published until January 2010, when printed copies of the law were received by organizations that monitor the gazette,” according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which condemned the law and demanded that it be repealed.

 

According to Aunohita Mojumdar, a reporter based in Kabul, "in Afghanistan’s legislative process, a draft law must be ratified by parliament, signed by the president, and then published in an official gazette before it takes effect."

 

"The actual process is sometimes far murkier," Mojumdar wrote in areport published Tuesday on Eurasianet.org. "Parliament passed a controversial amnesty law - offering immunity to all those involved in past, present and future hostilities, including war crimes or crimes against humanity - in 2007. But the initiative generated considerable opposition from Karzai’s international allies and human rights groups who saw it as an attempt by former commanders-turned-MPs to give themselves immunity. Thus, the Reconciliation and General Amnesty Law was not immediately published.


"In January of this year, however, news spread that the law had been quietly printed in December of 2008. With the international community now behind Karzai’s reconciliation strategy, the government is now apparently hoping that the amnesty law will be accepted without creating too much of a stir."


When it passed in early 2007, the National Reconciliation, General Amnesty and National Stability Law said anyone engaged in armed conflict before the formation of the Interim Administration in Afghanistan shall “enjoy all their legal rights and not be prosecuted.”

 

The law provides amnesty to “all political factions and hostile parties who were involved in a way or another in hostilities before establishing of the interim administration [in December 2001]," including "those individuals and groups who are still in opposition to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and cease enmity after the enforcement of this resolution and join the process of national reconciliation and respect the constitution and other laws and abide them."

 

HRW said last week that the amnesty law “was passed at a time when Afghan public opinion was beginning to mobilize against warlords and impunity.”

 

"An opinion survey published by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in 2005 indicated that large majorities favored prosecutions," according to HRW, which documented some of the widespread human rights abuses that took place between 1992 and 1993 in a report, "Blood Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan's Legacy of Impunity." “The Afghan government, the United Nations, the Commission, donor governments and others were involved in discussions about addressing past abuses through the government's 'Transitional Justice Action Plan.'"

 

"In 2006 the government launched the Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation and Justice in Afghanistan, which makes clear commitments to: 1) acknowledge the suffering of the Afghan people; 2) ensure credible and accountable state institutions and purge human rights violators and criminals from the state institutions; 3) undertake truth-seeking and documentation; 4) promote reconciliation and improvement of national unity; and (5) establish a task force to recommend an additional accountability mechanism," according to HRW.

 

Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director, whose organization called on the Karzai government to repeal the law, said, "Afghans have been losing hope in their government because so many alleged war criminals and human rights abusers remain in positions of power.”

 

"The amnesty law was passed to protect these people from prosecution, sending a message to Afghans that not only are these rights abusers here to stay, but more might soon be welcomed in," Adams said.

 

In a statement, The Transitional Justice Coordination Group (TJCG), which is made up of a coalition of 24 civil society organizations, called upon Karzai’s government to immediately suspend the law "with a view to its eventual abolishment."

 

"The TJCG contends that rather than promote reconciliation and stability, by granting a blanket amnesty this law promotes impunity and prevents genuine reconciliation," the group said. "Accountability, not amnesia, for past and present crimes is a prerequisite for genuine reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan. All Afghans will suffer as a result of implementation of this law, which undermines justice and the rule of law."

 

"The government of Afghanistan does not have the right to usurp the rights of victims. Only the victims have the right to forgive perpetrators," the group added. “But the state has a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations such as disappearances, torture and extra judicial killings."

 

Although a provision in the amnesty law allows victims of atrocities to file individual claims against alleged perpetrators, TJCG said it “places an unfair burden upon victims, who have already suffered so much and would put themselves at risk of reprisals given the impunity that prevails in Afghanistan today."

 

“This provision is particularly impractical so far as it concerns women and the many victims of sexual violence, who already face considerable barriers to obtaining justice,” TJCG said. “Provision for the granting of amnesty in respect of future crimes further undermines the legitimacy of the law and serves as an open invitation for the continued commission of abuses with impunity."

 

War Criminals in Karzai's Cabinet

 

Karzai’s government includes high-level officials who were accused of war crimes. According to Reuters, both of Karzai’s vice presidents “are former leaders of armed groups whose factions squabbled for control of Kabul in the 1990s, when thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands fled their homes.”

 

The amnesty law absolves them of their past crimes.

 

Moreover, Karzai approved the re-appointment in January of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dotsum, an ex-militia chief, to a high-level military position, which was harshly criticized by civil rights groups.

 

"Washington and other capitals have accused Dostum of 'massive war crimes,' including the death of some 2,000 Taliban fighters who suffocated in cargo containers in which they were being held after surrendering to Dostum in 2001," Reuters reported.

 

His style of governing has been harshly criticized by US officials, including Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who warned President Obama in two top-secret cables last year against sending additional troops to the country until Karzai began to take steps to root out corruption in his government.

 

Reuters noted that this isn't the first time Karzai has has "ushered through a law after promising not to pass it, or pledging to make changes to the law before signing it only to revoke those changes later."


"In 2009, Karzai pushed through a controversial law for Shi'ite Muslims criticised by rights groups and Western leaders, after some articles were seen to greatly infringe on women's rights and even legalise marital rape."


So far, neither the Obama administration, United Nations officials or others in the international community have discussed the amnesty law. On Monday evening, Obama and Karzai spoke for more than an hour via a video teleconference about the US commitment to the region. But the amnesty law did not come up during their conversation.
 

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Published on Monday, March 22, 2010 by TomDispatch.com


Policing Afghanistan: How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck


by Pratap Chatterjee

The Pentagon faces a tough choice: Should it award a new contract to Xe (formerly Blackwater), a company made infamous [1] when its employees killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007, or to DynCorp, a company made infamous [2] in Bosnia in 1999 when some of its employees were caught trafficking young girls for sex?

This billion-dollar contract will be the linchpin of a training program for the Afghan National Police, who are theoretically to be drilled in counterinsurgency tactics that will help defeat the Taliban and bring security to impoverished, war-torn Afghanistan. The program is also considered a crucial component of the Obama administration's plan for turning the war around. Ironically, Xe was poised [3] to win the contract until a successful appeal [4] by DynCorp last week threw the field wide open.

Some people in the U.S. government (and many outside it) believe that this task should not be assigned to private contractors in the first place. Meanwhile, many police experts are certain that it hardly matters which company gets the contract.  Like so many before it, the latest training program is doomed from the outset, they believe, because its focus will be on defeating the Taliban rather than fostering community-oriented policing.

The Obama administration is in a fix: it believes that, if it can't put at least 100,000 trained police officers on Afghan streets and into the scattered hamlets that make up the bulk of the country, it won't be able to begin a drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.

"The Obama administration's strategy for the Afghan police is to increase numbers, enlarge the ‘train and equip' program, and engage the police in the fight against the Taliban," says [5] Robert Perito, an expert on police training at the United States Institute of Peace and the author of a new book, The Police in War [6]. "This approach has not worked in the past, and doing more of the same will not achieve success."

When it comes to police training, the use of private contractors is not unusual -- and neither is failure. North Carolina-based Xe has, in fact, been training [7] the Afghan border police for more than two years, and Virginia-based DynCorp has been doing the same [8] for the Afghan uniformed police for more than seven years now. Nonetheless, the mismanagement of the $7 billion spent on police training over the last eight years, partly attributed to lax [9] U.S. State Department oversight, has left the country of 33 million people with a strikingly ineffective and remarkably corrupt police force.  Its terrible habits and reputation have led the inhabitants of many Afghan communities to turn to the Taliban for security.

 [10]Of the training programs run by the NATO Training Mission [11] out of Camp Eggers in Kabul, the Afghan capital, only DynCorp's component is even fully staffed. The company supplies 782 former American police officers to dozens of training centers and military bases scattered around the country to work with the U.S. military and with European Union police mentors. Altogether there are supposed to be 4,000 of these trainers, but NATO estimates that it has only half of the staffers it needs.

In a desperate attempt to offset this shortage of trainers, Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar has proposed [12] the dispatching of 3,000 police officers annually to Jordan and Turkey for nine months of instruction abroad.

Too-Fast-Track Training

In May 2009, I visited several training sites for the Afghan security forces in and around Kabul. Major Joey Schneider of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan escorted me around a recruitment center at the Kabul Central Police Command.  There, dozens of raw recruits from Afghan villages were being tested for ever-present drugs before induction into a fast-track program to double the 5,000 police officers in Kabul before the August elections.

"After three weeks in the Kabul Security Acceleration Program, these men will get a badge, uniform, and gun and be sent out to patrol," Schneider explained. Asked if that was really sufficient, he assured me that the new police officers would be given an additional five weeks of intensive post-election training by DynCorp contractors and international military mentors.

Three months later, a report for the European Commission written by Scott Chilton and Tim Bremmers, two police experts, in collaboration with Eckart Schiewek, a senior United Nations official, concluded that this approach was a disaster-in-the-making.  It was, they claimed, causing an "absolute irresponsible downgrading" of the police force. "Our view is that the spiraling increase in police deaths and wounding will further increase with quick-fix recruiting, poor training, and equipping."

Absurd as it may sound, this program is considered better conceived than many of the older training programs the Afghan government launched with U.S. funding. For example, a 2006 attempt to induct 11,000 villagers into a new organization dubbed the Afghan National Auxiliary Police -- with only 10 days of training from DynCorp and international military mentors -- was a complete and abysmal failure. One-third of the trainees in certain southern provinces, given a gun and a uniform, were never seen again. Two years later, in September 2008, the project was terminated.

A 2008 report [13] by the well-respected International Crisis Group pointed out that such rapid-induction programs had the perverse effect of actually lowering the average literacy rate and effectiveness of the Afghan police force -- and that's without even considering the security problems created by those drop-outs with guns.

Eight Years of Failures

Until recently, Afghanistan has never really had a national police force, though before the Soviet invasion of 1979 there was a conscription system that produced rank-and-file cops working under a trained officer corps.  In 2002, in the wake of the Taliban's defeat, the Germans set up [14] a police academy in Kabul that offered a five-year training program aimed at bringing back the officer corps.  In 2003, the U.S. awarded a small contract to DynCorp to run a train-the-trainers program in Kabul, based on prior work it had done in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.

Yet no one spent much time worrying about beat-cop training, least of all the Bush administration, which was already immersed in planning the invasion of Iraq and preferred to operate in Afghanistan with what it liked to call a "light footprint."

By 2005, security in Kabul was deteriorating sharply. At the same time, the spectacular failure of the U.S. effort to create a brand new police force in Iraq had helped spark a bloody, devastating civil war in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Somewhere in this period, Bush administration officials started to wake up to the possibility that Afghanistan might be heading in the same direction. A series of new contracts were then issued to DynCorp by the State Department's [15] Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs -- $1.6 billion in training work scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009. (The contracts have since been extended to June 2010.)

State Department planners seem to have taken an inordinately long time to wake up to the basic problems that Afghanistan faced in creating a viable police force. With salaries pegged at $16 a month for a beat cop in 2002, the police were particularly vulnerable to corruption in the form of extorted bribes, and to the Taliban who offered much higher wages to their fighters.  Making the situation worse, the force was remarkably top-heavy.  More than 20,000 officers and non-commissioned officers oversaw only 36,000 patrolmen. It was regularly alleged that they made their beat cops shake down citizens for bribes. In fact, a 2007 study [16] by the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan that reviewed the records of 2,464 police officers found claims of drug trafficking, corruption, or assaults against more than one-third of them.

"There are some parts of Afghanistan where the last thing people want to see is the police showing up," Brigadier General Gary O'Brien, former deputy commander of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, told [17] the Canadian Press news agency in March 2007. "They are part of the problem. They do not provide security for the people -- they are the robbers of the people."

Salaries are not the only budget shortfall. Afghanistan simply has no money to pay for equipment like guns and police vehicles, or even to build police stations. Instead, for the last eight years the Afghan police have received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of donated weapons and other equipment, much of which turned out to be broken or incompatible with the equipment the force already had.  Typical was a batch [18] of thousands of Czech VZ58 rifles that look like the AK-47s Afghan policemen traditionally carry but require completely different maintenance procedures.

In another glaring example [19] of what a lack of resources has led to, Hazeb Emerging Business, an Afghan company hired to maintain the force's weapons, used hammers and nails to "repair" grenade launchers, because they had no idea how to fix donated weapons. In perhaps the most widely reported mishap, AEY Inc., based in Florida, and described [20] by the New York Times as "a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur," dispatched to the Afghan security forces 100 million Chinese cartridges, some 40 years old and in "decomposing packaging," under a $10 million Pentagon contract.

In a country where the official literacy rate is pegged at an optimistic 30% -- some estimates put the rate among police recruits at closer to 5%, or even less -- most of any Western-style training curriculum proves strikingly irrelevant. To make things worse, one in five volunteers for police training is a drug-abuser, a statistic that rises to 60% in southern provinces like Helmand, which produces a significant part of the opium crop for the world's leading narco-state.

Not surprisingly, then, capability assessments of the Afghan police have been less than encouraging. At a June 2008 discussion at the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Congressman John Tierney summed up [21] findings on the 433 Afghan National Police units of that moment this way: "Zero are fully capable, three percent are capable with coalition support, four percent are only partially capable, 77 percent are not capable at all, and 68 percent are not formed or not reporting."

A new plan was drawn up under which dramatic changes were made, including the raising of police salaries to $180 a month in 2010 (and in high-risk areas up to $240).  In addition, increasing numbers of police salaries are now paid directly and electronically to bank accounts or cell phones, which means it's harder for officers to dip into the meager pay of their underlings.

The officer corps has also been slashed dramatically [22], thanks to a new requirement that all high-level staff complete a difficult exam.  By 2010, the 340 generals had been reduced to 117, the 2,450 colonels to 301, and the 1,824 lieutenant colonels to 467.  (Afghan police ranks have military titles.)

Perhaps most significantly, a new, intensive training program called Focused District Development (FDD) was launched [23] in late 2007 under which every police officer in specific districts would be removed en masse for eight weeks of training in another part of the country.  In the meantime, the country's elite police unit, the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), was to temporarily take over local policing duties. When the original force returned, a mentorship team of 14 internationals accompanied them to provide advice and -- at least theoretically -- to root out corruption.

By early 2009, FDD was claiming success. [16]  Almost one in five police districts which completed the program was now considered "independently capable."  (Before 2008, that number was zero.) Unfortunately, only one-quarter of the police districts in Afghanistan have completed the FDD program to date and only 5% of the country's police units are considered capable of operating on their own. Even this may be an illusion as an estimated 25% of police recruits quit every year -- and that's not just among the bad performers. The drop-out rate [24] for the 2,500 strong elite ANCOP is an astronomical 65%, making any training efforts a Sisyphean undertaking.

One year after Obama promised to revamp the Afghan police aid effort by sending in more trainers and civilian experts, no one is hailing the results as an outstanding success; few even consider them a half-decent start. "Operationally, the effort is broken. Assets are misdirected, poorly managed and misused," wrote [25] Robert A. Wehrle, a U.S. advisor to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, in February 2010 after returning from a 15-month stint in Kabul. "Graft and corruption in the Afghan forces are endemic, and coalition forces unwittingly enable that corruption."

Assigning Blame

Who, then, is responsible for this dismal state of affairs? Many have pointed fingers at the State Department. A joint report from the inspectors general of the Pentagon and the State Department claims [9] that the DynCorp contract was particularly badly managed. "The current [contract does] not provide any specific information regarding what type of training is required or any measurement of acceptability... Additionally, the current contract does not include any measurement of contractor performance."

Indeed, DynCorp's police trainers, who tend to hail from small American towns, are often remarkably ignorant about life in a war zone. A DynCorp trainer from Texas, who asked not to be named, typically told this reporter about his first encounter with mortars in eastern Afghanistan: "I was mesmerized by what looked like a fireworks display." Angry U.S. soldiers yelled at him to hit the ground.

Naturally, DynCorp disputes this. "[N]either our military nor European National police were formed or trained to teach basic law enforcement skills," Don Ryder, the DynCorp program manager, told [26] the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a congressionally mandated body established [27] to offer an independent assessment of contracting practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. "At DynCorp International we do not build satellites. We do not design aircraft. We do training and mentoring. That is our core competency -- and this competency is represented in the DNA of our 30,000 employees worldwide."

Most experts disagree. "DynCorp and [the] State [Department] had too few people, too few resources, and too little experience building a police force in the midst of an insurgency," Seth Jones, a political scientist with the RAND Corporation who spent most of 2009 traveling with Army Special Forces teams in Afghanistan, told [28] the commission. "While it may be necessary to utilize [private] contractors to help execute some security programs -- including helping U.S. military or other government officials conduct some police training -- contractors should not be the lead entity, as they were from 2003 to 2005."

Not the least of the problem with Dyncorp (or Xe, if it gets the new training contract) is the cost of hiring such contractors to train police. Each expatriate police officer makes a six-figure U.S. salary, at least 50 times more than an Afghan police officer and three times as much as military mentors.

Alternative Police Programs

Mentoring programs "are based on the assumption that international mentors are the more knowledgeable actors, whose job it is to impart their wisdom and expertise to their Afghan junior partners," observed Andrew Wilder, the former director of the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul, in his 2007 report on the Afghan police, "Cops or Robbers?" [22] "In reality, however, this is often not the case. The internationals may know much more about the technical aspects of policing in the West, but the Afghans know much more about the culture and politics of policing in Afghanistan."

Wilder proposes a radical solution: to dramatically scale back the plans for an Afghan police force. He notes that the historical role of police in Afghanistan, especially in rural areas, was limited to protecting government buildings. "Most civil disputes and criminal matters, however, were not referred to the police or courts -- which were perceived to be corrupt, costly, and slow to take decisions -- but were resolved using customary law and institutions."  Wilder believes any counterinsurgency efforts to fight terrorist attacks should be limited to the Afghan army and possibly a "separate paramilitary force, or gendarmerie."

"A prevalent view, even among some international police, is that Afghanistan is unready for civilian policing and holds that the police must remain a military force while insecurity lasts," writes Tonita Murray, a former director general of the Canadian Police College, who worked as an advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Interior in 2005. "If such a view were to prevail, only military solutions for security sector reform would be considered, and Afghanistan would be caught in a vicious circle of using force against force without employing other approaches to secure stability and peace."

According to Robert Perito, who worked with the U.S. Department of Justice's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program training police in international peace operations from 1995 to 2001, the U.S. government should rethink its entire approach. It should, he says [29], pull back from using contractors to run its police-training program, turning instead to a strong U.S. federal workforce that is qualified to undertake police training abroad.

A New Direction?

Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, admitted [12] that police training has been a train wreck since the toppling of the Taliban almost nine years ago. "We weren't doing it right. The most important thing is to recruit and then train police [before deployment]. It is still beyond my comprehension that we weren't doing that."

The realization that giving illiterate, drug-prone young men a uniform, badge, and gun (as well as very little money and no training) was a recipe for corruption and disaster is certainly a first step. But how to withdraw the 95% of the Afghan police force that is still incapable of basic policing for months of desperately needed training in a country with no prior history of such things?  That turns out to be a conundrum, even for President Obama.

On March 12th, the president devoted much of the monthly video conference call between his Washington national security team and his senior commanders in Afghanistan to questions about how the problem should be tackled. "The President has gone through and looked at monthly recruitment and retention goals because... we're not going to be there forever," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters [30] that day. "Not only are we going to need improved governance, but we're going to need a police force that can keep the peace."

If the Pentagon does not dramatically alter the current training scheme, it doesn't look good for either governance or peace in Afghanistan. Yet the likelihood remains low indeed that Pentagon officials will take the advice of a chorus of police experts offering critical commentary on the mess that is the police training program there. Instead, it's likely to be more of the same, which means more private contracting of police training and further disaster. Bizarrely enough, the Pentagon has given the Space and Missile Defense Command Contracting Office in Huntsville, Alabama, the task of deciding between DynCorp and Xe for that new billion-dollar training contract. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

© 2010 Pratap Chatterjee
Pratap Chatterjee is the author [31] of Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War [32]. He is the former executive director of CorpWatch and a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR.


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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/22-3

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Afghanistan's Boy Sex Slaves

by Michael Mechanic

March 21, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64393&hd=&size=1&l=e

Say what you will about the Taliban. They're small-minded, repressive, religious zealots who exert their power through fear and intimidation. But certain aspects of Afghan society can make the black turbans look downright righteous. Consider the ancient tradition of Bacha Bazi, which means "boy play." Banned by the Taliban, this illicit activity is on the upswing across Afghanistan. The Guardian reported on it last fall, and on April 20, Frontline is airing a special report with the same title: The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan.

Here's how the Frontline producers describe it:

Hundreds of boys, some as young as eleven, street orphans or boys bought from poor families by former warlords and powerful businessmen, are dressed in woman's clothes, taught to sing and dance for the entertainment of male audiences, and then sold to the highest bidder or traded among the men for sex.

With remarkable access inside a Bacha Bazi ring operating in Northern Afghanistan, Najibullah Quraishi, an Afghan journalist, investigates this practice, still illegal under Afghan law, talking with the boys, their families, and their masters, exposing the sexual abuse and even murders of the boys, and documenting how Afghan authorities responsible for stopping these crimes are sometimes themselves complicit in the practice.

This brings to mind the rights of Afghan women, something American officials rarely talk about anymore—probably because they came to realize that the Taliban were Johnny-come-latelys when it came to sexual oppression. "Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal—almost medieval," Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, told me last year. "The way that people saw the Taliban treating women, unfortunately, is the way women have been treated in many parts of the country going back centuries. Kabul has always been sort of a cultural island."

In our conversation, Hosseini was ambivalent as to whether America should—or even could—make an issue of women's rights. As he put it:

Throughout the last century there were multiple attempts at giving women more autonomy, to change marriage laws, to abolish the practice of bride price and child marriage, and to enforce women to be involved in school. Every time, the reaction from the traditionalists was one of contempt and scorn and at times outright rebellion. At one point they called jihad on one of the Afghan kings. So we do have to be careful. I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. Otherwise, I think we're back to suffering the same consequences that the communists in Afghanistan did in the '80s, or the king earlier in the 20th century.

He's probably right. All the same, some of these so-called traditions are enough to make you wonder just what it is we're fighting for in Afghanistan—and for whom.

(The Frontline image above depicts an illegal dancing-boy party in Takhar, northern Afghanistan. The dancer, Abdullah, 13, is "owned" by a local businessman.)

 

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U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan are committing atrocities, lying, and getting away with it


By Jerome Starkey

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64406&hd=&size=1&l=e
 

Abdul Ghafar mourns at the grave of a family member killed in a NATO night raid on Feb. 12. (photo: The Times)


March 22, 2010

Jerome Starkey recently reported for The Times of London about a night raid on Feb. 12 in which U.S. and Afghan gunmen opened fire on two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials -- an atrocity which NATO’s Afghanistan headquarters then tried to cover up. Now, in a blistering indictment of both NATO and his own profession, Starkey writes for Nieman Watchdog that the international forces led by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal are rarely called to account because most reporters are too dependent on access, security and the 'embed culture' to venture out and see what's happening for themselves.

By Jerome Starkey
jeromestarkey@gmail.com

In Kabul
 
"Tied up, gagged and killed" was how NATO described the "gruesome discovery" of three women’s bodies during a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which several alleged militants were shot dead on Feb. 12.
 
Hours later they revised the number of women "bound and gagged" to two and announced an enquiry. For more than a month they said nothing more on the matter.
 
The implication was clear: The dead militants were probably also guilty of the cold-blooded slaughter of helpless women prisoners. NATO said their intelligence had "confirmed militant activity". As if to reinforce the point, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a Canadian, talked in that second press release of "criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians".
 
Only that’s not what happened, at all.
 
The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials.  The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.
 
The only way I found out NATO had lied -- deliberately or otherwise -- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.
 
NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged.
 
This particular raid, in the early hours of Feb 12, piqued my interest. I contacted some of the relatives by phone, established it was probably safe enough to visit, and I finally made it to the scene almost a month after unidentified gunmen stormed the remnants of an all-night family party.
 
It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.
 
There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are "cowards," NATO attacks on civilians are "tragic accidents," intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.
 
Some journalists in Kabul are hamstrung by security rules set in Europe or America, which often reflect the least permissive times in Baghdad rather than any realistic threats in Afghanistan. These reporters can’t leave their compounds without convoys of armed guards. They couldn’t dream of driving around rural Paktia, dressed up in local clothes and squashed into the back of an old Toyota Corolla, to interview the survivors of a night raid.
 
Ultra risk-averse organizations go even further and rely almost entirely on video footage and still images gifted by the entirely partial combat-camera teams or the coalition’s dedicated NATO TV unit, staffed by civilian ex-journalists who churn out good news b-roll. Others lap up this material because it’s cheaper and easier than having their own correspondents in a war zone.
 
This self-censorship is compounded by the "embed culture," which encourages journalists to visit the frontlines with NATO soldiers, who provide them food, shelter, security and ultimately with stories. British troops will only accept journalists who let military censors approve their stories before they are filed. Ostensibly, this is to stop sensitive information reaching the insurgents. In my three and a half years in Afghanistan, the British invariably use it as an opportunity to editorialize.
 
In Helmand, in August 2008, a British censor attached to the Parachute Regiment threatened to ban me from ever embedding again if I filed footage of a paratrooper firing his heavy machine gun without wearing body armor. This had nothing to do with operational security and everything to do with health and safety, domestic UK politics (reference kit shortages and soldiers’ well-being), and ultimately "arse-covering" within the military.
 
To my eternal shame, I backed down. Embeds were my livelihood. I swapped the clip for something a combat camera team provided. But I was blacklisted for more than a year all the same -- for arguing.
 
The Americans are just as subtle.  I was thrown off a trip with the Marines Special Operations Command troops (MarSOC) last year when they realized I had written a story many months earlier linking their colleagues to three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents.
 
The platoon commander boasted that his Special Forces were "a fusion of weapons and intelligence". Two hours later he asked me what my name was. Then he booked me on the next flight out. At least we know the weapons work.
 
As a freelance reporter, as I was then, the NATO blacklist was a daunting prospect. Many journalists I know here still prefer access to truth. Looking back, for me, it was the best thing that could have happened.
 
I have traveled from the north east corner of Afghanistan to the capital of Helmand province, and every major city in between, independently. I plan hard and take local security advice, and I am lucky that my newspaper supports me.
 
NATO however, is continuing to fight back. Challenge them and they will challenge you. They have admitted that the dead women were not bound and gagged, but rather had been wrapped in ritual preparation for burial. But NATO still insits the women were killed before, not during, the firefight. They have also admitted the two dead men were not the intended target of the raid. But they have also tried hard to discredit me, personally, for bringing this to the world’s attention. In an unprecedented response to my original story about the Gardez night raid they named me individually, twice, in their denial of the cover up.
 
They claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record. When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said, do not exist.
 
Since then the United Nations and the New York Times have both corroborated my findings. The New York Times repeated the accusation of a cover-up. I take solace from the more experienced and intrepid of my colleagues who have been through all this before. NATO lies and unless we check them, they get away with it. If we check them, they attack us. It's unpleasant but important. There’s no doubt in my mind that we must continue to question what the soldiers want us to know.
 

 
 Jerome Starkey, (jeromestarkey.com) is the Afghanistan correspondent for the Times of London. He’s also on YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. br> E-mail: jeromestarkey@gmail.com

 
 

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Afghan resistance statement

Response of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
regarding the Remarks of UN former Envoy to Afghanistan



Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64415&hd=&size=1&l=e

22 March 2010

Last Friday, Kie Ide, former UN envoy to Afghanistan, told media during his remarks that he had held secret meeting with some high- ranking members of the Islamic Emirate in order to proceed with the peace process.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, while believing in fruitful and result-oriented efforts for establishment of a true peace in the country, aimed at ending the illegitimate war imposed on Afghanistan, meanwhile categorically refutes the irresponsible remarks of Kei Eide and elucidates its stance as follows:

1.The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has declared Jihad against the invading foreign forces in order to defend the sovereignty of Afghanistan and establish an Islamic system on the basis of the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan. This Jihad will continue against the Americans and their Allies until the unconditional withdrawal of their invading forces from Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate has put forward this unambiguous demand before UN and other circles involved in the Afghan issue and will continue to do so.

The Islamic of Emirate of Afghanistan does not believe in any political surreptitious contacts nor has it had such contacts.

2.Some baseless propaganda is underway, claiming that a delegation of the Islamic Emirate had participated in meeting held in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Maldives and now as per their claim, have met Kei Eide. The Islamic Emirate refutes these allegations and clearly declares that delegations of the Islamic Emirate have not participated in these meetings. Similarly, the propaganda launched against the esteemed deputy Amir of the Islamic Emirate, Mullah Bradar Akhund, allegedly involving him in these meeting has no basis. No one can produce evidence to indicate his participation. This is an enemy effort to create mistrust among Mujahideen. If some irresponsible persons presumably participated in the said meeting in the name of the Islamic Emirate, they can't be considered as representatives of the Islamic Emirate but it might have happened that some opportunists cashed in on the moribund condition of the enemy.

3. The Americans are striving to resort to various measures aimed at thwarting this legitimate Jihad; they have not spared to use the World Body of the United Nations in this regard, even they have utilized the universal caliber of the World Body against the Islamic Emirate for political and propaganda purposes from the day one.

4. Kei Eide had faced failure during his tenure as envoy of the United Nations because of his partial standing and was ultimately forced to leave his job. His recent remarks are ostensibly efforts to hide his failures and his claims being baseless and unfounded.

5. In view of the Islamic Emirate, the irresponsible remarks of Kei Eide are part of the massive propaganda campaign launched by the White House recently to ensure success of the Obama military strategy. But practically, the strategy has faced fiasco. Now efforts are underway to portray it as successful only through propaganda drives.

6. The Islamic Emirate closely watches all American conspiracies and efforts against the Mujahid people of Afghanistan and have contemplated certain measures and actions to foil these conspiracies with the help of Allah (Swt) and our Muslim nation.

7. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan reminds the rulers of the White House to accept the demands of the Islamic Emirate instead of resorting to meaningless efforts and pull their invading forces out of Afghanistan unconditionally.

You have tried in the past eight years to experiment some failed strategies, now try out this strategy (of exit), it will bring in positive results for you and the entire region.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

22. March 2010




 

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Karzai in Peace Talks with Taliban Rival

by Jason Ditz

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64425&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 22, 2010

Is Hezb-e Islami Rapprochement a Key to Peace, or a Recipe for Division?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai spent today in face to face talks with the insurgent wing of the Hezb-e Islami organization, and the group is said to have presented a 15 point peace plan, which Karzai is studying.

Among those demands are the formation of an "interim" government and a specific timeline for the withdrawal of all the international forces from the nation. The group has spent decades as an insurgent group, though a portion of the group is also active as a significant opposition party in the Afghan parliament.

But despite providing good publicity for President Karzai’s peace plan, it is unclear how much affect a rapprochement with the Hezb-e Islami would actually have, and for that matter how much of the insurgency the group is even responsible for.

Making matters even more complicated, the Hezb-e Islami has never been on good terms with the Taliban, and the two groups have engaged in public clashes in recent weeks, largely over the question of the peace talks. Far from stabilizing Afghanistan, a Karzai alliance with Hezb-e Islami could make a prospective deal with the Taliban all the harder to reach.



 

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Afghan resistance statement

Who Controls Marjah Now?

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64428&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 22, 2010

Marjah was the first test ground for Obama's new military strategy in Afghanistan. Since February 13, when the invading coalition and American troops launched operation " together" against Marjah, no day or night has passed without Mujahideen's inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy. In Every 24 y hours, the enemy loses 3- 10 military tanks and armed vehicles on average. If we count the crews of the tanks killed by IEDs. mines and armed clashes, the enemy casualties reach tens of soldiers each day. General Azimi, a spokesman of the ministry of defense of the Kabul puppet regime admits that they face 3-4 attacks of Mujahideen in Marjah every 24 hours. The enemy is herded up in a government building in the center of the town. They have no writ beyond that point. Western media outlets themselves acknowledge that Mujahideen rule the whole Marjah during the night. Every one, including the operators of the mobile towers has to obey the Mujahideen instructions.

. For the past eight years, the White House rulers have been propagating that Taliban were foreign elements that had no roots among the people. But now they have come around that Taliban are part and parcel of the Afghan society and could not be isolated socially. Richard Holdbrooke, US Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan admits there is a Talib in every Afghan family. It is a fact , Taliban, in the other word, the Mujahideen, have deep roots in the society. They represent the aspirations of the people and are protectors of their religious and national values. It is why, the enemy is not able to overcome over the Mujahideen despite huge military preparations and operations, being unprecedented in terms of massiveness since World War II. Marjah is a good example of invaders' inability to achieve their colonialist objectives in face of the people's stiff resistance.

Ironically, Washington acts as an evil empire under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Hundred of infants have been born deformed in Pashto-speaking areas because of the use of depleted uranium by the American invading troops. They launch night raids on civilian houses, blow up gates of residential houses with explosives and start firing pointblank and indiscrimately which frequently result in the killing of innocent residents in rural areas.

We have many examples in every part of the country. Recently during a similar case, three women were killed near Gardez, the provincial capital of Paktya province, where the abhorrent black water agents with support of special force's soldiers raided a house. A baby-naming ceremony was going on in the house when the brutal agents gatecrashed. Simialrly, since 13 February when the enemy launched attacks against Marjah, 36 civilians have been killed by enemy bombardment, missile strikes and night raids. More than 40 civilians received injury and hundreds of houses of people have been destroyed by the enemy. But the brutalities of the enemy to terrorize the people, have not granted them any gain on ground. Marjah is still in the hands of Mujahideen. The enemy is besieged and limited to some government buildings in the heart of the town.

The enemy has appointed an Afghan-German national, Abdul Zahir, as governor of Marjah who has remained out of touch with his community for the last decade and is not able to perceive their needs. He panders more to the demands of the invaders rather than meeting the requirements of the common Afghans.

As long as the invaders do not succumb to the demands of the people i.e. independence of Afghanistan, establishment of Islamic government, reconstruction and development of the country participated by all Afghans, the enemy will never have chance to go to sleep with peaceful mind. Military showdown and operations will not buy them peace . But realization of values and natural rights of the Afghan people is the way, leading to peaceful solution of the issue. However, ironically, these fundamental principles are not found in the book of colonialism and imperialism which have occupied Afghanistan.



 

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Taliban say not involved in Kabul peace talks


DAWN

March 23, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64436&hd=&size=1&l=e

KABUL: The Taliban are not involved in peace talks between an insurgent faction and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and will not agree to talks until Western troops are withdrawn from the country, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

Karzai's office said on Monday he had held his first direct talks in Kabul with a senior delegation from Hezb-i-Islami, one of the three main insurgent groups in the country and rivals to the Taliban.

The meeting was an unprecedented success in Karzai's efforts to reach out to insurgents this year, a crucial time when Washington is sending a "surge" of extra combat troops before planning to start withdrawing next year.

Although the talks appeared to be preliminary, the publicly acknowledged face-to-face meeting was a significant milestone: previous contacts with insurgents have been furtive and conducted through mediators, mostly overseas.

The Hezb-i-Islami team, which included the son-in-law of the group's fugitive leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, brought a 15-point peace plan including a call for all foreign troops to withdraw this year, though a spokesman said the demands were negotiable.

A separate peace with Hezb-i-Islami could markedly change the balance of power on the ground in the east and northeast of the country where the group is mostly active.

But the main prize would be talks with the Taliban themselves, more powerful than at any time since they were driven from Kabul in 2001 by US-backed Afghan militia.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said his movement, which refers to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the country's name when it ruled from 1996-2001, had not altered its position: that no talks could be held until troops withdraw.

"The Islamic Emirate has a clear position. We have said this many, many times. There will be no talks when there are foreign troops on Afghanistan's soil killing innocent Afghans on daily basis," Mujahid said.

"If the representatives from Hezb-i-Islami are in Kabul for talks, it's their choice," he added.

Taliban encroach on Hezb-i-Islami turf

The Taliban, the biggest insurgent group, have their bases in the south, but operate throughout much of the country and have encroached on Hezb-i-Islmai turf in the northeast and east in recent months.

Taliban fighters clashed with Hezb-i-Islami militants in the north of the country two weeks ago, which the government said led some Hezb-i-Islami guerrillas to seek its protection.

Although direct contacts between the government and senior Taliban officials have been denied by both sides, Western officials say they believe indirect and lower-level contacts have taken place throughout eight years of war.

The outgoing UN mission chief in Kabul, Kai Eide, said last week he had held meetings with Taliban representatives over the past year, which ended abruptly this year when Pakistan arrested the number two Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

Some Afghan officials have said the government had made contact with Baradar, and blame Islamabad for arresting him to ensure that it has leverage over any future talks.

Karzai's spokesman has said the government had no "direct" contacts with Baradar, but declined to comment on whether it had had "indirect" contacts.





 

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Afghan censors to target Taliban's website because it published an article by an Afghan researcher about depleted uranium


From Aljazeera.net

FOR ARTICLE AND VIDEO :  http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64441&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Taleban seize Shah Karez, home of the British-backed Mullah Abdul Salaam

BY Jerome Starkey and Tom Coghlan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64452&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 23, 2010

The Taleban have seized the home village of the British-backed Governor of Musa Qala after several days of fighting, Afghan and Nato officials in Helmand told The Times.

Ministry of Defence officials said that Nato forces helped to evacuate the village of Shah Karez, ten miles (16km) east of Musa Qala.

The village is the home of Mullah Abdul Salaam, who defected from the Taleban in December 2007, bringing a private army with him.

More than 50 Afghan policemen, all former members of Mullah Salaam’s militia, were forced to abandon Shah Karez after 5 of their comrades were killed and 16 were injured in a series of what local people claimed were co-ordinated Taleban attacks.

"The police held out as long as they could," Mullah Salaam told The Times. "There have been 50 or 60 police in Shah Karez for two years," he said. "The Taleban attacked many times and I always asked the Government for more troops but they never came."

Members of the Household Cavalry Battlegroup have been holding Musa Qala and British and Afghan troops have been trying to expand a "security bubble" north and south of the town centre in recent months. However, in line with Nato strategy, they have largely ignored other areas where there is little population.

The MoD suggested that the fighting was a local dispute and not a clear-cut Taleban attack.

"The Afghan Army and Police, supported by ISAF forces, recently assisted the safe evacuation of local civilians when fighting broke out between local groups in the area of Shah Karez, some way to the east of Musa Qala district centre. The village is not within the parts of the district that are secured by ISAF and ANSF forces."

Michael Semple, a former British diplomat based in Harvard, said: "It looks like this is a calculated blow versus Mullah Salaam and a bid to tax the local opium."




 

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Reporter:   NATO covering up, lying about civilian killings

By Daniel Tencer

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64453&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 23, 2010



A British reporter who reported on an apparent cover-up of the killing of an Afghan family says the NATO-led forces in that country habitually lie about innocent civilians' deaths.

Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan correspondent for the Times of London, says the "embed culture" of reporting in war zones results in military censorship and self-censorship that allows military commanders to get away with falsehoods about civilian deaths.

In an article for Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Starkey explained he never would have discovered that locals in Paktia agree it was US and Afghan forces who killed two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local government officials during a February night-time raid.

Starkey reported earlier this month at the Times of London:

The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled "Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery", Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies "tied up, gagged and killed" in a room.

A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown.

"The only way I found out NATO had lied -- deliberately or otherwise -- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors," Starkey writes at the Nieman Web site. "In Afghanistan that is quite unusual. ... NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged."

Starkey says there is overwhelming military influence exerted on reporters in Afghanistan.

Some journalists in Kabul are hamstrung by security rules set in Europe or America ... These reporters can’t leave their compounds without convoys of armed guards. They couldn’t dream of driving around rural Paktia, dressed up in local clothes and squashed into the back of an old Toyota Corolla, to interview the survivors of a night raid.

Ultra risk-averse organizations go even further and rely almost entirely on video footage and still images gifted by the entirely partial combat-camera teams or the coalition’s dedicated NATO TV unit, staffed by civilian ex-journalists who churn out good news b-roll. Others lap up this material because it’s cheaper and easier than having their own correspondents in a war zone.

Starkey says the problem is exacerbated by the practice of "embedding" journalists with the military, which -- though it may help keep the journalist death toll down -- compromises reporting.

"British troops will only accept journalists who let military censors approve their stories before they are filed," he writes. "Ostensibly, this is to stop sensitive information reaching the insurgents. In my three and a half years in Afghanistan, the British invariably use it as an opportunity to editorialize."

Starkey notes that, despite the fact the UN corroborated his story about the killings in Paktia province, he continues to be the target of a NATO campaign to discredit him.

But he says it's important that his sort of work continue. "NATO lies and unless we check them, they get away with it. If we check them, they attack us. It's unpleasant but important. There’s no doubt in my mind that we must continue to question what the soldiers want us to know."



 

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$6 Billion Later, Afghan Cops Aren't Ready to Serve

Since 2002, the U.S. has spent $6 billion in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force -- but the program has been a disaster.


By T. Christian Miller, ProPublica
Posted on March 23, 2010, Printed on March 24, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146144/

Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. "We are still at zero," says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. "They don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen."

Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they've heard fighting.

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's top representative in the region, has publicly called the Afghan police "an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption." During the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan policy last year, "this issue received more attention than any other except for the question of U.S. troop levels," Holbrooke later told NEWSWEEK. "We drilled down deep into this."

The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.

The public's distrust of the cops is palpable in the former insurgent stronghold of Marja. Village elders welcomed the U.S. Marines who recently drove out the Taliban, but told the Americans flatly they don't want the ANP to return. "The people of Marja will tell you that one of their greatest fears was the police coming back," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program to expand and improve Afghanistan's security forces. "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban." The success of America's counterinsurgency strategy depends on the cops, who have greater contact with local communities than the Army does. "This is not about seizing land or holding terrain; it's about the people," says Caldwell. "You have to have a police force that the people accept, believe in, and trust."



More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.

Efforts to build a post-Taliban police force have been plagued from the start by unrealistic goals, poor oversight, and slapdash hiring. Patrolmen were recruited locally, issued weapons, and placed on the beat with little or no formal training. Most of their techniques have been picked up on the job—including plenty of ugly habits. Even now, Caldwell says, barely a quarter of the 98,000-member force has received any formal instruction. The people who oversaw much of the training that did take place were contractors—many of them former American cops or sheriffs. They themselves had little proper direction, and the government officials overseeing their activities did not bother to examine most expenses under $3,000, leaving room for abuse. Amazingly, no single agency or individual ever had control of the training program for long, so lines of accountability were blurred.

Coalition efforts to build an Afghan police force were painfully slow at first. By 2003 the U.S. State Department decided to speed things up by deploying the Virginia-based defense contractor DynCorp International, which had held previous contracts to train police officers in Kosovo and Haiti. The company began setting up a string of training centers across the country. After the Defense Department took a role in overseeing that work in 2005, it squabbled constantly with State over whether the training should emphasize police work or counterinsurgency.

Neither the State Department nor DynCorp was prepared for the job they faced. Most of the recruits are rural villagers who have never been inside a classroom. Roughly 15 percent test positive for drugs, primarily hashish. Few know how to use a toothbrush or drive, and nearly 90 percent are illiterate. In 2005 DynCorp opened a new police academy on the outskirts of Jalalabad, and within a few months the academy's drains backed up. Maintenance workers discovered that the septic tanks were full of smooth stones—a toilet-paper substitute used by many rural Afghans. DynCorp had to bring in backhoes to repair the problem, and the company had to add two days of classes in basic hygiene.



The ANP still takes just about anyone who applies. "Our recruits are unemployed youth with no education and no prospects," says Police Col. Mohammad Hashim Babakarkhil, deputy commander of Kabul's central police-training center. Since January 2007, upwards of 2,000 police have been killed in action—more than twice the figure for Afghan Army soldiers. U.S. officers say as many as half the police casualties were a result of firearms accidents and traffic collisions.

It's practically impossible to produce competent police officers in a program of only eight weeks, says a former senior DynCorp executive, requesting anonymity because he continues to work in the industry. But that was the time frame State and Defense set for the course. "They were not going to be trained police officers. We knew that. They knew that," the former executive says. "It was a numbers game." In fact, the course has now been cut from eight weeks to six in order to squeeze in more trainees. ("We believe the training is appropriate under the circumstances," says Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson. DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner says the basic-training course is part of a more extensive 40-week program, and is supported by further "field monitoring, mentoring, and advising." Training hours have been extended to make up for the lost weeks, he says. DynCorp does "not make the policies, recruit the police candidates, or design the program," he adds, saying the company has "fully met" its objective of providing highly qualified police trainers.)

Whether or not recruits have mastered their subjects, almost everyone graduates. Even if they fail the firearms test, they're issued a weapon and put on the street. Only the Interior Ministry can flunk a candidate, and that rarely happens. "There were a lot of Afghans who seemed to have some patriotism and wanted to make their country better," recalls Tracy Jeansonne, a former deputy sheriff from Louisiana who worked for DynCorp from May 2006 to June 2008. "But a lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions."

A former midlevel DynCorp official calls the program "dysfunctional." Requesting anonymity because he doesn't want problems with his former employer, he displays dozens of weekly reports sent to State and military officials; almost all include some mention of an Afghan police officer or commander as "corrupt." Yet of the 170,000 or so Afghans trained under the program since its inception, only about 30,000 remain on the force, according to State and Defense officials. "In terms of retention and attrition, we can say there's a problem," says Steve Kraft, who oversees the program for the State Department. The cops' base salary and hazardous-duty pay were recently raised to match Afghan Army levels, but no one knows if those changes are really helping. "Once they leave the training center, we currently don't know whether they stay with the force or quit," Kraft says. "The bottom line is, we just don't know."



And what has become of all the billions of dollars this program has cost America? Government investigators aren't entirely sure. Fundamental questions are raised in an audit of the Afghan police-training program released in February by the State and Defense departments' inspectors general. When State finally sent an "invoice-reconciliation team" to review expense receipts submitted under one particular contract, it discovered that $322 million in invoices had been "approved even though they were not allowable, allocable, or reasonable." What's more, the auditors said, half those invoices included errors.

The lapses don't stop there. The audit says State Department officials "did not conduct adequate surveillance for two task orders in excess of $1 billion." According to the auditors, State's contract supervisors didn't adequately oversee the use of government-owned property, failed to maintain contract files properly, and sometimes neglected to "match goods to receiving reports"—meaning, evidently, that they didn't verify that the U.S. government had actually received the goods it had paid for. (DynCorp's Ebner responds: "We are fully engaged with the Department of State to ensure complete and thorough reconciliation of all invoices, and recognize and welcome the emphasis on sufficient oversight personnel to complete this process.")

Those failures should have been no surprise. The audit also found that State routinely short-staffed its contract-monitoring office in Afghanistan. At one point, only three contract officers were on the ground overseeing DynCorp's $1.7 billion training contract. A former DynCorp official who worked in Afghanistan, asking not to be named because he remains in the government contracting business, says he asked the State Department repeatedly for concrete goals for the police contract but never got firm answers. "I'd ask them: 'Please explain to me what a successful training program was. What are the standards you want us to apply?' There was no vision for the future." (Assistant Secretary Johnson says, "From the start, our training program was based on a clear, professionally developed curriculum ... A simple head count of the number of individuals on the ground ignores the substantial back-office support our contract oversight personnel had from Washington.")

A new set of difficulties arose last summer. Caldwell's predecessor, Gen. Richard Formica, decided that Defense should take direct control of the training contract. To avoid a lengthy bidding competition, he suggested folding the police-training mission into an existing anti-drug and counterterrorism program overseen by the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. Bids were limited to companies already under contract to the missile command, effectively shutting out DynCorp. In the end, only two firms wound up bidding: Northrop Grumman and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

DynCorp fought back. In December the company filed a formal protest to block the Defense Department from seizing control of the contract. Last week the Government Accountability Office upheld DynCorp's complaint and suggested that the competition be open to all comers, including DynCorp as well as Xe and Northrop. DynCorp's CEO, William Ballhaus, recently told investors that the company's contract had been extended until July in any case; now it seems the new bidding process will take much longer.



At Kabul's police training center, a team of 35 Italian carabinieri recently arrived to supplement DynCorp's efforts. Before the Italians showed up at the end of January for a one-year tour, the recruits were posting miserable scores on the firing range. But the Italians soon discovered that poor marksmanship wasn't the only reason: the sights of the AK-47 and M-16 rifles the recruits were using were badly out of line. "We zeroed all their weapons," says Lt. Rolando Tommasini. "It's a very important thing, but no one had done this in the past. I don't know why."

The Italians also had a different way of teaching the recruits to shoot. DynCorp's instructors started their firearms training with 20-round clips at 50 meters; the recruits couldn't be sure at first if they were even hitting the target. Instead the carabinieri started them off with just three bullets each and a target only seven meters away. The recruits would shoot, check the target, and be issued three more rounds. When they began gaining confidence, the distance was gradually increased to 15, then 30, and then 50 meters. On a recent day on the firing range only one of 73 recruits failed the shooting test. The Italians say that's a huge improvement. (DynCorp says its civilian police advisers are "highly qualified"; the average trainer has more than a decade of law-enforcement experience.)

Caldwell also says it's just easier to work with paramilitary police units, such as the Italians and the French gendarmerie, than with contractors. Active-duty police units have a coherent and disciplined chain of command, Caldwell says. "When I bring in a contractor unit I'm getting a different group of folks," he says. "It may be someone who was a state patrolman, a local sheriff, or a policeman from New York City, each operating under different standards and with different backgrounds." Everything has to be negotiated. "If I say to my contractor that I want to make a change, he may say, 'Well, I'm not sure if that's really the best way,' " says Caldwell. "But if I can bring in a gendarmerie force, they're ready to go ... and take instructions well."

By the end of October, Caldwell hopes to build the force to 109,000 members, including an "elite unit" that so far has roughly 4,900 members. That outfit is called the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP). It'll be used for particularly sensitive assignments like Marja. ANCOP members get 16 weeks of training, and they're required to have at least a third-grade proficiency in reading and writing. So far, reviews from Marja are mixed. "The new police are more organized, committed, responsible, and helpful than the previous police, who were more like a criminal gang," Assadullah, a school principal, tells Newsweek. (Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.) Local shopkeeper Hajji Noruddin Khan disagrees. "We are as disappointed with the new police as we were with the old police," he complains.

Quality matters. "In the rush to increase the number of trained police officers, we must remember that the end goal is a civilian police force capable of promoting good government, not a paramilitary adjunct for the counterinsurgency fight," warns Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the top U.S. Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, puts it more succinctly: "I'd rather have one well-trained cop than 10 untrained." Besides, the fact is that no one is quite sure how many Afghan police there really are. The Americans are only now in the process of trying to create a database that will positively identify and track recruits. Without such data, it's more than difficult to catch "ghost" troops who exist only as names on the payroll, not to mention possible Taliban infiltrators.

But the buildup continues, and so does the training. On the firing range just outside Kabul, one of the few decent marksmen is Khair Mohammad, an illiterate 24-year-old from northern Afghanistan. "I've already had a lot of practice shooting at the Taliban," he says. He's been a cop for two years, serving one year in Kandahar and another on checkpoints just outside Marja. "I lost a lot of friends in the fighting," he says. Now he's getting his first taste of formal training, and hoping to join ANCOP. He figures he'd earn about double the $180 a month (including combat pay) he's been getting. His trainers are doing their best to make him worth the extra salary. "One thing the police don't know is good relations with the people," says Carabinieri Lt. Col. Massimo Deiana. "We're trying to train them to respect and relate to people." If such a skill is teachable at all, it could be far more important in the long run than knowing how to shoot straight.

With Sami Yousafzai in Kabul

Listen to reporter T. Christian Miller on Newsweek's On Air podcast



© 2010 ProPublica All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146144/

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The Afghan Ant Hole:The New US-NATO Offensive will run into Trouble



by Eric Walberg

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64456&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 23, 2010

NATO plans for Afghanistan this year are shaping up nicely: negotiate with the Taliban, but at the same time kill them in Kandahar and Kunduz.

A joint operation involving several thousand troops was launched in Kandahar last week, the second one this year after Operation Mushtarak in Helmand province. Kandahar has been the bailiwick of 2,500 contingent of Canadian troops who have suffered heavy losses in this mountainous home of the Taliban. It is ruled by a Canadian national, Governor Tooryalai Wesa, a close friend of President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, chairman of the Kandahar provincial council, infamous for his involvement in the drug trade.

Already, there are strong indications from Marja, that the new offensive will run into trouble. The Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing there two weeks ago that killed 35. Though Marja now has one coalition soldier or policeman for every eight residents, after dark the city is like "the kingdom of the Taliban", said a tribal elder in Marja. "The government and international forces cannot defend anyone even one kilometre from their bases."

The new governor of Marja, Haji Abdul Zahir, like Wesa, a foreign national (German) parachuted in by the occupation forces, said the militants post "night letters" at mosques and on utility poles and hold meetings in randomly selected homes, demanding that residents turn over the names of collaborators. The Taliban "still have a lot of sympathy among the people." Zahir has no idea how many Taliban are still in Marja. "It’s like an ant hole. When you look into an ant hole, who knows how many ants there are?"

Marja district MP Walid Jan Sabir scoffed at Zahir’s denial that the Taliban were beheading collaborators. "He is not from the area and he is only staying in his office, so he doesn’t know what is happening." He predicts the situation will deteriorate and return to "chaos" as "the Taliban and Marja residents all have beards and turbans so it’s impossible to distinguish them."

Will these campaigns in Marja, Kandahar and Kunduz subdue the Taliban and bring them to the negotiating table, the newly professed strategy of the occupiers? It should not be forgotten that Karzai himself was a member of the Taliban government from 1995-98, before Unicol hired him as an insider to try to clinch an oil pipeline deal. His effortless transition to US protege suggests he was probably already on the US payroll, along with his less reputable colleague Osama bin Laden. Though Karzai sees negotiations as the only way out, comments by other ex-Taliban officials who have cast their lot with the occupiers, however reluctantly, are not encouraging.

The leading coopted Taliban, Abdul Salam Zaeef, holds no hope whatsoever. Zaeef was the Taliban’s minister of transportation until he became ambassador to Pakistan. His post-911 news conferences, where he condemned the attacks, insisted Osama bin Laden was not responsible, and offered to send him to a third country for trial, are now the stuff of legend. Despite his diplomatic immunity, he was arrested, held at Bagram and Guantanamo, and, according to his hot-off-the-Columbia-University-press My Life with the Taliban, tortured.

He was released in 2005 and returned to Afghanistan, where he was installed in an upscale home around the corner from ex-Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil and lives more-or-less under house arrest. In 2007 he called for a unity government and negotiations with the Taliban, no doubt at the prompting of his beleaguered former comrade-in-arms Karzai. However, in a recent interview, he gave no hope for the reconciliation process, as the US is "a monster" that is "selfish, reckless and cruel", and the "reintegration process will further strengthen the Taliban."

Hakim Mujahed, a former Taliban ambassador to the United Nations, reconciled with Karzai several years ago, and is currently the head of a Taliban splinter group Jamiat-i-Khuddamul Furqan, which still has not been incorporated into the US-controlled Afghan political process. He told the US-funded Radio Free Afghanistan that reconciling with the Taliban through a traditional Loya Jirga will not work "as long as the foreign powers – the United States and Britain in particular – don’t agree with this. The first important thing is to lift the sanctions on the leaders of the armed opposition. They are blacklisted and multimillion-dollar rewards are offered for them." He wants Saudi Arabia to mediate. Clearly with Zaeef in mind, he argues that if a Taliban were to attend a Loya Jirga, "he might get captured the next day and end up in Guantanamo Bay. Our president has no authority to even release somebody from Bagram."

Mulla Salam defected to the government three years ago in Helmand and was made district administrator of his native Musa Qala district as a reward. He sees the British occupation as a blatant act of revenge for their defeats in Afghanistan in the 19th century and regrets his decision, like Mujahed calling Karzai a powerless president. "We are still slaves. Foreign advisers are sitting in the offices." He complains that no Afghan minister can even visit Helmand without the permission of British military commanders. The British troops "haven’t served our people and have yet to build schools or mosques in Musa Qala." Poor Salam’s days are numbered as he has barely survived several assassination attempts. There will be no "reconciliation" for the likes of him.

Then there is Abdul Ghani Baradar – second in command only to Taliban leader Mohammed Omar – whose recent capture in Karachi was hailed by the US as a sign that Pakistan was getting serious at last. His arrest appears to have backfired big time. Not only has Pakistan refused to extradict him, but Karzai is apparently furious over the capture, as he was supposedly negotiating with Baradar to split the Taliban and coopt moderates.

Former UN special representative to Afghanistan Kai Eide, who stepped down this month (in disgust?), asserted last week that the arrest was a huge mistake, stopping a secret ongoing channel of communications with the UN, and revealed that he had been holding talks with senior Taliban figures for the past year in Dubai and other locations. He suggested Pakistan was deliberately trying to undermine the negotiations, as it ultimately wants to control the political landscape in Afghanistan, however rocky and dangerous for its own stability. "I don’t believe these people were arrested by coincidence. The [Pakistanis] must have known who they were, what kind of role they were playing," adding it would now take a long time before there was enough confidence between both sides to really move forward.

"I see no evidence to support that theory," immediately harrumphed US envoy to AfPak Richard Holbrooke, insisting that the US had no involvement in any of Eide’s talks, and knew of them only in a "general way". In line with the Washington line, he heaped praise on Pakistan for the capture. At the same time, he welcomed "reconciliation of all Afghans", whatever that could possibly mean. Of course, Pakistan protests its innocence, understandably preferring the American version of events. It just happens to have presented Washington with a multi-billion dollar bill for its selfless battle in the "war on terror". Publically at least, Karzai is all smiles, calling (ominously?) Pakistan a "twin" during a visit to Islamabad last week.

A bizarre theory about the capture promoted by McChrystal is that Baradar, deemed more pragmatic than other top Taliban leaders, was "detained" to split him from fellow insurgents. McChrystal said recently that it was plausible that Baradar’s arrest followed an internal purge among Taliban leaders, that Omar himself, angry about Baradar’s negotiations with Karzai or the UN or whoever, squealed on him and tipped off Pakistani intelligence officials. But both McChrystal and Holbrooke are so out-of-touch with reality that we can probably safely assume that the opposite of what they say about anything.

During his trip to Afghanistan last week, Defence Secretary Robert Gates – the guy who in fact calls the shots – made the real US policy clear. He said it was premature to expect senior members of the Taliban to reconcile with the government, that until the insurgents believe they can’t win the war, they won’t come to the table. Said Heritage Institute researcher Lisa Curtis ghoulishly, "The military surge should be given time to bear fruit."

The purpose of undermining the feeble attempts by Karzai or Pakistan or the UN or Bob’s-your-uncle to undermine the resistance is hard to fathom, considering that negotiations are now part of US policy. At the pompous London conference on Afghanistan in January, US advisers even came up with the very American idea of simply bribing them with a cool half billion greenbacks, a strategy that Russian officials (tongue-in-cheek?) also have urged on the Americans.

A key US protege in the Pakistan military with close contacts with the Taliban in Pakistan, Colonel Imam, said the idea of paying members of the Taliban to change sides would not work and only bogus figures would come forward. "It is shameful for a superpower to bribe." He seconds Zaeef’s conclusion that negotiations, like Lisa’s strategy of mass murder, are fruitless. The Taliban cannot be defeated and they will not be weakened by the recent capture of even senior commanders such as Baradar.

"The movement is so devolved that commanders on the ground make most of their own decisions and can raise money and arrange for weapons supplies themselves. The Taliban cannot be forced out, you cannot subjugate them," he said. "But they can tire the Americans." Obama is "doing what you should never do in military strategy, reinforcing the error. They will have more convoys, more planes, more supply convoys, and the insurgents will have a bigger target. The insurgents are very happy." Of all the thousands of men he trained, he said, religious students like Mullah Omar were the most "formidable" opponents because of their commitment.

Hamid Gul, a former director of the Pakistani intelligence service, says the insurgents want three things from the US before talks could begin – a clearer timetable on the withdrawal of troops, an end to labelling them terrorists, and the release of all Taliban militants imprisoned in Pakistan and Afghanistan. What could be more obvious?

So Mr Obama, even if you ignore your own loyal opposition in Congress, where a motion to withdraw immediately garnered both Democratic and Republican support 10 March, even if you ignore the thousands of loyal Americans who marched on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq 20 March, calling for the same, please listen to these voices of reason.


Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/

 

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Taleban seize Helmand town after days of fierce fighting

By Jerome Starkey

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64464&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 24, 2010

A VILLAGE in northern Helmand has been captured by the Taleban after more than three days of heavy fighting, Afghan and Nato officials have told The Scotsman.
More than 50 Afghan policemen were forced to abandon Shah Karez, around nine miles (15km) east of Musa Qala, after five of their comrades were killed and 16 others injured in co-ordinated Taleban attacks. British and Nato forces were not involved.

Local elders said hundreds of Taleban surrounded the village, which has been under government control since late 2007.

"The police held out as long as they could," said Mullah Abdul Salaam, the district governor, whose family comes from Shah Karez. "Then suddenly they left, because there were too many Taleban. There were Afghan Taleban, Pakistani Taleban and Baluch."

Many of the dead and wounded were brought to Musa Qala's town centre. "I myself saw seven dead bodies," said Haji Amir Mohammed Akhundzada. "The Taleban now control Shah Karez."

Helmand's provincial police chief Assadullah Sherzad claimed 40 insurgents had been killed. He said the police retreated to avoid civilian casualties although he insisted they plan a counter attack.

Taleban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said just two insurgents had been killed in five days of fighting. He said the Taleban captured Shah Karez late on Saturday – seizing abandoned guns and pick-up trucks.

British troops were first deployed to Musa Qala in summer 2006 but were forced to abandon the town centre under the terms of a controversial peace deal with local elders, which backfired.

The town was retaken during a massive US, British and Afghan offensive, Operation Snakebite, in December 2007. Mullah Salaam – a former Taleban commander who swapped sides – was installed as the district governor. British and Afghan troops have been trying to expand a "security bubble" north and south of the town ever since. Nonetheless, Mullah Salaam's hometown to the east is largely beyond their reach and his relationship with British troops remains fractious, at best.

"There have been 50 or 60 police in Shah Karez for two years," he told The Scotsman in a satellite phone call. "The Taleban attacked many times and I always asked the government for more troops, but they never came."

Most of the policemen in Shah Karez were drawn from Mullah Salaam's private militia. While they occasionally wear uniforms and technically answer to the interior ministry, they have been accused of various abuses in the past and rarely enjoy support from Musa Qala's rival power broker, police chief Commander Koka.

British forces in Musa Qala have started handing over to US marines, to focus on targets in the centre of the province. Earlier Mullah Salaam blamed the British for failing to support him.





 

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South Asia
Mar 26, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC26Df03.html 
 
ATOL SPECIAL REPORT

War and peace: A Taliban view

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - After an often stormy relationship with the United States over the past 63 years since its independence, Pakistan is in the process of forging an all-embracing strategic relationship with Washington.

A delegation led by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi is in Washington for meetings at the State Department with a team led by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss matters ranging from the situation in Afghanistan to a civil nuclear deal to commerce and agriculture.

The American military command also specially invited a military contingent, including army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani and the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha. High on their agenda are the recent arrests in Pakistan of senior Taliban officials, including that of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy of Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Washington and Islamabad will have their own interpretation of their emerging deeper relationship as well as the significance of the arrests: that they will lead to a peace process in which Mullah Omar and al-Qaeda will be isolated and the US will reconcile with moderate Taliban cadre through Pakistan's mediation.

The Taliban, too, have their viewpoint on these unfolding developments. A senior Taliban official contacted Asia Times Online to put their side of the story. The man cannot be identified because the Taliban, since the arrests, are very cautious. For the purposes of this report, the Talib will be called Abdullah.

Rendezvous with the Taliban
The traffic moves slowly on the main arteries of the southern port city of Karachi on weekend evenings as people search out roadside restaurants; their parked cars line the streets, clogging byways that are already overflowing with bustling pedestrians.

All the same, I make it to my appointed meeting place at 9pm. Within a minute a brand-new silver-grey imported Japanese car draws to a halt in front of me. I immediately recognize the man in the front passenger's seat; I interviewed him several years ago. He had a senior position in the Taliban government until it was forced out by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Abdullah is about 50 years old, but looks much older.

I slip into the back seat behind Abdullah and exchange greetings.

"Against all the odds, given the arrests, we have come to see you," the driver and interlocutor of our meeting tells me. "But we have to follow new arrangements. You will not quote his [Abdullah's] name as since the arrest of Mullah Baradar there have been strict instructions from the ameerul momineen [commander of the faithful - a title the Taliban use for Mullah Omar] to avoid media interviews," the driver says. I have no option but to accept the condition.

The car makes its way through busy roads towards a main northern exit of the city.

"What is your take on the recent arrests of Taliban leaders and commanders?" I say, breaking a heavy silence. We are now cruising past trucks laden with goods destined for northern Pakistan.

"What arrests are you talking about?" Abdullah responds.

"Several people, like Moulvi Abdul Kabir [a former Taliban governor of Nagarhar province in Afghanistan], Mullah Abdul Salam, Mullah Mir Muhammad, Syed Tayyab Agha [Mullah Omar's secretary] and Mullah Mustasim Jan Agha," I say.

"I assure you, 300%, neither Moulvi Abdul Kabir nor Syed Tayyab Agha has been arrested. It was false reporting. Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Muhammad were arrested at least a month before Mullah Baradar, but their arrest was shown after Mullah Baradar's. I have not been in direct contact with Mullah Mustasim Jan Agha so I cannot claim with surety about his status, but I was told by his friends that he was not arrested," Abdullah says.

"There are so many conspiracy theories surrounding Mullah Baradar's arrest, what is your understanding. Why was he arrested by Pakistan?"

"Pakistan's compulsions ... the compulsions that are now rising day-by-day," he replies mildly.

By now we were speeding along a main highway, with the city lights fast receding. All of a sudden the driver slows down and turns onto a muddy track. After a short while he draws up at an open-air restaurant frequented mostly by truck drivers. At this time it is not busy and we order a meal of chicken Karahi, a famous Pashtun dish, yogurt, fresh green salad and nan (bread).

"Mullah Baradar's arrest has opened up a Pandora's box of conspiracy theories," I venture. "Some people say he was abandoned by Mullah Omar. Some say he had been talking with the Afghan government and the United Nations and that's why he was disliked by the ISI and was arrested. There is also a theory that through his arrest Pakistan wanted to open communication with the Taliban. What do the Taliban think?"

"Mullah Baradar was part of the Taliban and there was no trust deficit between him and Mullah Omar. However, it is entirely false that he was part of any reconciliation process or that he held any talks with anybody. At the same time, keep in mind that it is a Taliban policy that the minute one of their men is arrested, they abandon all links with him so there is no chance of any communication through him or any other detained leader," Abdullah says.

I interject: "I heard from the Punjabi camp [non-Pashtun militants] as well as from al-Qaeda that Mullah Omar was communicating through Mullah Baradar with [Saudi intelligence chief] Prince Muqrin, who then passed on messages to Washington and the Afghan government. Arsala Rahmani [a former Taliban minister now part of the political process in Kabul] also told me that those talks collapsed only because the Barack Obama administration pushed for a troop surge in Afghanistan."

"There is not a shred of truth in this statement. Neither the Punjabis nor al-Qaeda could know about the Taliban's internal affairs. It is all gossip or their speculation - like the speculation that there were talks in Dubai between Mullah Baradar and Abdul Qayyum [Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother]. People speculate like this because Karzai and Baradar come from the same tribe [Popalzai Durrani], but it is all speculation. And people like Arsala Rahmani could not be aware of the situation. Whether it is Arsala Rahmani or Abdul Wakeel Mutawakil [a former Taliban minister recently taken off a United Nations list that had banned him from traveling and frozen his assets], the Taliban don't want to keep any contact with them. The Taliban do not even have anything to do with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef [the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan]," says Abdullah.

His comment on Zaeef surprises me. Zaeef was arrested by Pakistan and handed over to the US soon after the Taliban's defeat in Afghanistan in 2001. He spent many years at the US's Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba before being released. He now lives in Kabul but under tight security; officially, he cannot leave the city without informing the local administration. He is widely believed to be an important go-between for the Taliban and the Afghan government. He publicly says he is still loyal to the Taliban.

Abdullah disagrees. "He moves to Saudi Arabia. He goes to Dubai frequently, and you call him a detainee? Mullah Omar sent him a message, telling him to run away and join the resistance. He turned down the order, which means he defied Mullah Omar. We are fully knowledgeable that he is in a position to dodge his security and he could have come to us, but he refused and now he is issuing statements as if he is still a Talib. He is not a Talib. We have nothing to do with him, and neither are we responsible for any of his statements," Abdullah says.

I move the conversation on, asking about supposed talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

"I will tell you exactly what happened. You know that the Taliban had close ties with Saudi Arabia, so we received a message from there. Ameerul Momineen [Mullah Omar] sent Syed Tayyab Agha to Saudi Arabia as he is in charge of political affairs. Tayyab Agha met with Prince Muqrin, but you could not call it dialogue for reconciliation," explains Abdullah.

"Prince Muqrin emphasized that there should be a dialogue process between the Afghan government and the Taliban so that foreign forces could leave Afghanistan. Tayyab, on behalf of Mullah Omar, asked Muqrin why Saudi Arabia was interested in such dialogue. Was it because of Osama bin Laden? Muqrin said this was not the case. Then Tayyab asked him whether Saudi Arabia had any particular agenda. He denied this too. Tayyab returned from Saudi Arabia and briefed Mullah Omar. Later, Mullah Omar sent a message to Muqrin, saying that it appeared Saudi Arabia only wanted dialogue with the Taliban on somebody else's behalf. The Taliban do not want to hold such dialogue, so that was the end of the communication," Abdullah says.

"When did Tayyab go to Saudi Arabia?"

"About four to five months ago."

"And nobody spotted Tayyab traveling to Saudi Arabia?"

"Has anybody traced me moving here and there? It is the same with Tayyab."

"But no pictures of you are available. Tayyab's pictures and video footage are available in abundance, especially in the Western media as after 9/11 he delivered dozens of media conferences in Kandahar as the Taliban's spokesperson," I argue.

Abdullah smiles, "While he was in Iran he made a significant change to his appearance. He is completely different from how he appeared in the video footage. He is completely unidentifiable."

"Now you are telling me that Mullah Omar's secretary was in Iran. Did he live there in hiding or was he given shelter by the Iranian government?"

"He was given refuge by the Iranian government in 2002, he lived there for about a year. Even in the past years he has visited Iran occasionally."

"Why did he not go to Pakistan?"

"He feared being arrested because he was close to al-Qaeda."

We fall silent for a while as we enjoy our dinner.

"Do you appreciate that al-Qaeda and the Punjabis carried out attacks on Pakistan's security forces after the arrest of Mullah Baradar?" I ask.

"Saleem! You need to understand that Pakistan arrested Mullah Baradar under compulsion and we have a compulsion as well, that no matter how Pakistan jacks up its actions against us we cannot sanction attacks on Pakistan, or for that matter against any Muslim country. Mullah Omar has many times ordered these people who call themselves the Pakistani Taliban [Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan] or al-Qaeda to stop the attacks in Pakistan and make their focus fighting against NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Afghanistan], but these people don't listen," Abdullah says.

"But don't you think that such attacks put pressure on the Pakistani military apparatus and force them to stay neutral?"

"I will put the situation in a different way. Suppose from tomorrow we made our entire focus to attack the Karzai administration and gave up our resistance against foreign troops. What would you think of us? Would the Muslim world consider us a legitimate resistance? These Punjabis and al-Qaeda are obsessed with targeting the Pakistani security forces and their contribution to fighting against NATO is limited."

"But there are several big Punjabi commanders, like Ilyas Kashmiri, in the al-Qaeda camp. Do you question their wisdom as well?"

"There is a weird situation in North Waziristan [tribal area in Pakistan]. If you spend just 20 days there you will talk the way they talk and you will start declaring certain Muslims as heretic and issue decrees of murder and assassination. This is not the Islamic way. The Taliban cannot accept that."

"They have pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar, even Osama bin Laden and [his deputy] Ayman al-Zawahiri have, then why don't they listen to you?" I ask.

"Neither Osama bin Laden nor Ayman are on the surface. The only person who seems to be in command is Sheikh Saeed [alias Abu Mustafa al-Yazid], but people under him do not listen to him. Al-Qaeda is not a very disciplined body. Unlike the Taliban, where Mullah Omar's order is followed by all, in al-Qaeda and among Punjabis everybody has their own policies. Now in defiance of Mullah Omar they have started taking the baith [pledge of allegiance] to different people. We are not in a position to constantly stay in touch with them and talk to them on all those affairs," Abdullah says.

I switch topics. "Do you think the conflict in Afghanistan will just go on, and that there is no point in talks?"

The Taliban leader looks into my eyes for a while before answering.

"This all comes from real intentions. They want our defeat, not reconciliation. This talks issue is not a new one. The Taliban talked to the Americans, the Saudis and to the Pakistanis even before 9/11. The Taliban wanted to avoid the war [on Afghanistan in 2001] but we felt that the Americans were bent on a war and wanted to dislodge the Taliban government, and they were looking for some excuse.

"They made an issue of Osama bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan and tightened the noose around the Taliban government. We said that Osama bin Laden was just an individual. For argument's sake, say that tomorrow he died. Would the Taliban government then be acceptable to you? The Americans responded with other issues, women's rights and human rights in Afghanistan, as well as education.

"We replied, 'OK, we will work on mechanisms under which we will take steps for women's education and the improvement of human rights.' What then? The Americans raised another issue, about holding elections. At this point we realized the Americans were only concerned about waging war on Afghanistan for whatever reason. Had 9/11 not happened, they would have found any old excuse to wage war," says Abdullah.

He continues, "Even now, if you go through all their arguments concerning talks with the Taliban, their bottom line is 'surrender arms first and then sit at the table for talks'. This is a non-starter. It does not show any serious American intention of talks. Why should we surrender? Recently, they attacked Marjah [in Helmand province in Afghanistan], but within days the Taliban took back control of some areas of Marjah and Nad-e-Ali. There is no intention on their part to initiate talks, so there is no reason for us to start [talks]."

"Not even through Pakistan?"

"If you mean [President] Asif [Ali] Zardari's government. It is impossible that we would talk to it."

"What if the army offers dialogue?"

"So far we have not received any signal that the army wants any dialogue with the Taliban."

I add my observation, "What I gather is that Washington aims through Pakistan to arrest top Taliban leaders and commanders, isolate Mullah Omar and then either force the commanders to change their path or create a situation for Mullah Omar to sit down for talks."

"Those who hatched this plan do not understand the Taliban or Mullah Omar. Whoever among the Taliban is arrested becomes zero. No Talib would listen to his [a captured person's] advice. You know Mullah Omar only interacts with a very few select people. In the last eight years he has not seen his wife or his children or any relative, except if they happen to be a Taliban commander and he meets them in that capacity.

"Once he asked Mullah Baradar to meet him, but Baradar replied that he operated in the field and might one day be arrested, and that would compromise Mullah Omar's position. Remember, nobody can isolate Mullah Omar. Everything in the Taliban starts and ends with Mullah Omar's orders," Abdullah says.

This ends the interview of several hours. I am dropped off on the outskirts of Karachi, left alone at the roadside as the car speeds off into the night to an unknown destination.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

 
 
 

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South Asia
Mar 26, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC26Df01.html 
 
Taliban cry foul over press curbs

By Abubakar Siddique

An unlikely voice has joined the chorus of criticism directed against the Afghan government's commitment to civil liberties - the Taliban.

In a statement issued this month, the Taliban said it considered the Afghan government's decision to ban live war coverage, on the basis that militants were using it to their tactical advantage on the battlefield, "a flagrant violation of the recognized principle of freedom of speech".

"The monopolization of activities of independent mass media outlets by the Kabul puppet administration is a clear-cut violation of norms and regulation of neutrality, independence and liberty of speech and has no justification in the light of national and international laws," the statement continued.

In releasing the statement, the group renowned for its oppressive rule over Afghanistan, added its own unique take to the upbraiding and expressions of concern Kabul has received from media watchdogs and foreign officials.

It also put itself in direct competition with Kabul's efforts to regulate the media, lauding "the courageous efforts of the fact-finding and investigative journalists, reporters, and photographers who continue their duty to reflect the ground realities of the Afghan issue despite threats and obstacles that they are facing in their way."

Farida Nekzad, editor of the Kabul-based Wakht News Agency, was among the representatives of Afghan media outlets summoned this week to the headquarters of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS).

In what she described as a "friendly" atmosphere, Nekzad was informed by a senior intelligence official that she and her fellow journalists in the country would be working under severe restrictions when it came to reporting on the ongoing insurgency. "He said that the electronic media should be very careful while covering suicide attacks, or the type of attack we recently witnessed," she says.

Nekzad adds that she was told that the media should not provide live coverage of insurgent attacks "because it raises concerns among people, [and that] insurgents or terrorists can benefit from such coverage."

In officially announcing the decision during a press conference later that day, presidential spokesman Wahid Omar addressed rapidly increasing criticism of the move at home and abroad by saying the new guidelines had not yet been drawn up, and promising they would not amount to "censorship".

But many among the Afghan media remain unconvinced, and suggestions abound that ulterior motives are at play.

There are suggestions that the Afghan government wants to have an upper hand in the propaganda war against insurgents, and is increasingly unnerved by the coverage and criticism of Afghanistan's mushrooming media outlets.

'Concerns'
There is also the argument that the ban, which comes just weeks after President Hamid Karzai took control of an Afghan electoral watchdog, shows that he now seeks to tame a media whose rapid expansion has meant it has outgrown the government's control.

The argument goes that Karzai, still struggling to gain parliamentary approval for his cabinet, might be particularly concerned about protecting his government's image with parliamentary elections slated for this autumn.

Editor Nekzad, who is also vice president of the South Asia Media Commission - a regional body that promotes press freedom - says that the situation in Afghanistan is fragile. "These kinds of signals raise concerns," she tells RFE/RL.

"I think these are the restrictions that begin with requests and suggestions but eventually might have very serious consequences for the journalists. I don't see a good year ahead for the journalists."

During a March 2 press conference, presidential spokesman Omar said the ban was necessitated by the discovery that militants have been using televised coverage of battles to their tactical advantage, "and this has caused serious threat to everybody."

Coordinated suicide attacks in Kabul that targeted guests’ houses frequented by foreigners is cited as the leading example of insurgents using live coverage of the attacks to alter their tactics on the ground. Sixteen people, including nine Indians, an Italian diplomat and a French filmmaker were killed in the course of the attacks and ensuing gun battles.

Saeed Ansari, a spokesman for the NDS, claims that live footage from the nearly two-hour long carnage provided insurgents a window into the counter-measures being taken by Afghan security forces. "Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan," he says.

Ansari says that from now, on journalists will only be allowed to film the aftermath of attacks after securing permission from the NDS. Afghan authorities have conveyed to journalists that it might invoke a national security law to detain journalists or seize the equipment of journalists who violate the ban.

This has led to worries within the Afghan media that the ban will deprive people of up-to-date information about security while the attacks are underway, particularly in large sprawling cities like the capital Kabul, where a lack of timely information will only add to the chaos.

International media watchdogs agree. "It is for news organizations to determine whether it is safe for their staff to report," Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement on March 2. "The Afghan authorities should allow reporters to work freely and clarify whether it is considering restrictions on broadcast coverage."

Washington has indicated that it will raise the issue with Kabul. Talking to journalists this month, US President Barack Obama's special envoy Richard Holbrooke said that they "don’t like restrictions" on the press. "I and the [US] Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] are concerned and we will make our support of free access by the press clear to the [Afghan] government," he said.

Kabul is already sending signs that it might soften the ban, leading some observers to see an avenue for the government and the media to work out an arrangement similar to that in neighboring Pakistan. Last November, eight major television news networks in that country agreed to adhere to a voluntary code of conduct on how to cover terrorism.

Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

 
 
 

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Civil War Certain as "Afghan National Army" Now Over 60% Tajik


by Craig Murray

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64479&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 24, 2010

There are any number of "Big lies" put forward by the USA in Afghanistan and slavishly repeated by our politicians and media. Here are a few of the "Big lies":

- The Karzai government is democratically elected
- The Afghan anti-occupation fighters are all Taliban supporters
- Most opium is produced in Taliban controlled areas
- Women's rights are now respected in Afghanistan

But I want today to tackle this particular "Big lie":

- The Afghan National Army is ethnically balanced.

There has been a consistent parroting by the Western media of the line that NATO troops operate "in support of" the Afghan National Army, and that this is a genuine force reflecting the whole nation. This propaganda has gone as far as releasing falsified figures of the ethnic composition of the Afghan National Army. These false figures have reflected the "Eikenberry Rule" set out by the Americans.

Under General Karl Eikenberry's rule, the Afghan army should be 38 percent Pashtun, 25 percent Tajik, 19 percent Hazara and eight percent Uzbek. That would bring it much closer to reflecting the nation's ethnic composition.

But a very concerned serving British officer of some seniority has just leaked to me that the truth is that the Afghan National Army is now over 60% Tajik, and that figure is increasing. The Pashtun figure is hovering below 20% and may have been overtaken by the Uzbeks.

In other words the "Afghan National Army" is just the Northern Alliance in very expensive NATO provided uniforms.

By carrying the northern alliance with our troops into the solid Pashtun tribal areas as an alien occupying force, we are stoking still further the ferocity of a future civil war. Karzai of course will be safe in Switzerland counting his looted cash by then.

Don't expect to see this in the mainstream media any time soon. Instead you will hear the "Eikenberry rule" figures repeated as if they were reality rather than a spectacularly failed target.




 

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Published on Thursday, March 25, 2010 by The St. Petersburg Times (Fla.)

Afghanistan Experts at USF Symposium Agree on One Thing: Things Don't Look Good


by Susan Taylor Martin

TAMPA - Almost nine years into the war in Afghanistan, there's still no guarantee of success or even much agreement on how to achieve it.

Graffiti is printed on a demolished building as a police vehicle drives on the road in Kabul March 25, 2010. (REUTERS/Ahmad Masood)

That was the often gloomy take of experts meeting Wednesday at the start of a three-day symposium on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the University of South Florida.

"I'm a pessimist about where we are now, where we've been and where we're going," said Thomas Johnson, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "In April, Afghanistan will replace Vietnam as the longest U.S. conflict, and there's still debate about what the desired end state is."

In the keynote speech, Ronald Neumann, former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, said the "simplest definition" of success in Afghanistan would be a government that had popular support and could sustain itself without dependence on foreign troops.

But that goal could be in jeopardy, he warned, if the Obama administration pushes too fast for social and political changes and sticks to the idea of starting troop withdrawals in just 18 months.

"The lack of realism in the U.S. is leading to demands in Afghanistan that are not only unrealistic but may be dangerous," said Neumann, who served from 2005 to 2007 under the Bush administration.

"To expect that the fourth-poorest nation on earth, with high illiteracy and an education system being rebuilt from near total destruction will produce an effective and efficient government in another year or two is wishful thinking."

Organizers stressed that the conference has particular relevance to the Tampa Bay area because the area is home to U.S. Central Command, which has been directing the war in Afghanistan since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Some 121,000 American and NATO forces are now in the country. A St. Petersburg Marine was among the most recent to be killed there, as monthly death totals routinely exceed those in Iraq.

A major reason the war has dragged on so long is that the Taliban, though ousted from power in 2001 and disliked by 94 percent of Afghans, have stepped into the vacuum left by a weak, corrupt central government headed by President Hamid Karzai.

In Marja, a town in southern Helmand Province, "the local population was used to no contact with President Karzai's government, and the Taliban had emerged as a provider of at least some services even though some of their methods are barbaric," said Kevin McGurgan, former deputy head of NATO's provincial reconstruction team in Helmand.

"The Taliban need to be out-governed - not just outgunned," he said.

This winter, U.S. forces launched a major offensive to rout the Taliban from Marja, resulting in an Afghan flag flying over the town for the first time in years. But an even bigger challenge may be holding cleared areas.

To help tamp down the insurgency, Karzai has pushed for "reconciliation" with some Taliban leaders. It's a strategy unlikely to succeed, said Johnson, of the Naval College.

"It's a mistake to think of the Taliban as just insurgents - I think that the ones that really matter are jihadists," he said. "Much more so than is recognized in the (Washington) Beltway, is that people are joining the Taliban for ideological reasons."

As foreign troops start to pull out, Afghans will bear a bigger responsibility for protecting themselves. But the experts disagreed on whether to expand the national army to 260,000 troops - as President Barack Obama has proposed at a cost of $20 billion - or get local tribal groups to help provide security.

"There's never going to be enough Afghan army, and who's going to pay for the Afghan army?" asked Arturo Munoz, a former CIA analyst and now a political scientist at the RAND Corp. "NATO and the U.S. are not going to be there forever but you know who's going to be there forever? The tribes."

However, Neumann, the former ambassador, said the army already enjoys considerable respect and has performed "reasonably well." Tribal groups, on the other hand, have historically fought among themselves, contributing to the instability and chaos that have plagued Afghanistan for decades.

"I think we're building on sand if we're trying to build a major security situation on local forces," Neumann warned.

The most sobering presentation was by Larry Goodson, a professor at the U.S. Army War College. He noted the many parallels between what the Soviets were doing eight years into their occupation of Afghanistan - notorious as the "graveyard of empires" - and what the United States and its allies are doing today.

In the late '80s, the Soviets were trying to strike at cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan, pursue reconciliation with insurgents, strengthen Afghan security forces and control population centers.

"It was a good strategy," Goodson said, "and the Soviets lost. I think we're losing in Afghanistan."

© 2010 St. Petersburg Times

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/25-5

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Published on Thursday, March 25, 2010 by the McClatchy Newspapers

Top U.S. General in Afghanistan Gives Order: Close TGI Friday's

by Dion Nissenbaum

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — By American standards, the boardwalk at Kandahar Airfield isn't much to write home about.
There's no roller coaster, mirror maze or carousel with unicorns. There's no cotton candy to buy, no candied apples, and no annoying mimes trying to get out of imaginary boxes.

The most recent addition to the Kandahar boardwalk is a TGI Friday's, complete with the Americana kitsch, Rihanna videos playing on the flat screen behind the bar (which serves no alcohol), fried mozzarella sticks, and a life-size Yoda action figure with a light saber looking down on patrons from on high.

But this little square of Western culture in the Taliban heartland has served for years as a rare oasis for international forces embroiled in the ongoing Afghan war.

The Kandahar boardwalk now has a Burger King, Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Stone Creamery, Oakley sunglasses outlet, hockey rink (thanks to the Canadians, of course), basketball court, and tiny stage where members of Bachman-Turner Overdrive (the 70s band that brought the world "Takin' Care of Business" and "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") recently performed on a cool southern Afghanistan evening.

The most recent addition is a TGI Friday's, complete with the Americana kitsch, Rihanna videos playing on the flat screen behind the bar (which serves no alcohol), fried mozzarella sticks, and a life-size Yoda action figure with a light saber looking down on patrons from on high.

"The intent, it seems, is to create a surreal slice of Western material comfort where inhabitants can momentarily forget that they are living in one of the world's most benighted countries," Julius Cavendish recently wrote in The Independent.

Well, now's the time to say goodbye to all that.

By order of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, ISAF is shutting down most of these reminders of home.

"This is a war zone — not an amusement park," Command Sgt. Major Michael T. Hall recently wrote on the ISAF blog.

The decision is likely to prove unpopular with ISAF forces working and living in southern Afghanistan.

Where else will they pick up their "Taliban Hunting Club" T-shirts?

"Some will say the decision to do away with these amenities is meant only to make things harder for deployed service members, but nothing could be farther from the truth," Hall wrote. "Closing these facilities will free up much-needed storage facilities at both Bagram and Kandahar, space which is critical as 30,000 additional American and up to 7,000 international troops flow into Afghanistan over the next several months."

That's all well-and-good, but where are soldiers supposed to get their hand painted, $280 Afghanistan U.S. v. Taliban chess sets featuring (for the Americans) Bush as king, the Twin Towers as rooks, and the Statue of Liberty as the queen v. (for the Taliban/insurgents) Osama bin Laden as king, a woman in a burqa as queen and suicide bombers as bishops?

Privately, some ISAF officials say the closure is as much about perception as logistics.

Rock concerts, hockey games and Americana kitsch in the Taliban heartland might not create the impression McChrystal is trying to convey that the U.S. has no intentions of transforming Afghanistan into the U.S.

But not all is lost. The new order exempts the Green Beans coffee house, AT&T phone stores, fitness centers, some Afghan-run stalls and a few other essentials for ISAF forces.

"We have an important mission here in Afghanistan, and its one the world is watching and paying attention to," Hall wrote. "We have a responsibility to outfit our troops with everything they need to be successful. Efficiently providing troops what they need to accomplish the mission is the right thing to do."

© McClatchy Newspapers 2010

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/25-4

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Obama and the age of permanent war


by John Pilger

March 25, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64503&hd=&size=1&l=e

America has emerged from the era of outright aggression on the rest of the world and into the age of nuanced terror.

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence", Robert Gates, complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war, they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marjah" from the Taliban's "command-and-control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
Silent witness

"War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is shown to have no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by comparing the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) to the public reckoning today of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of well-known writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them has spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, Unicef noted, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Partners in crime

Norman Mailer once said he believed the US, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent".

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced, perhaps, but the results are unambiguous. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior UN officials in Iraq during the US- and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.