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

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U.S. Military Confidence Sinks on Winning Afghan War, Poll Finds

Posted: 04/13/10
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/04/13/u-s-military-confidence-sinks-on-winning-afghan-war-poll-finds

The military's confidence that it will win the Afghan war is declining, according to a new tracking poll showing only 60 percent of active-duty military personnel believe the U.S. can triumph.

The poll, conducted by the Military Times newspapers, which are not affiliated with the Defense Department, showed the percentage of respondents who believe the United States is likely to win in Afghanistan has dropped from 77 in 2008 to 68 in 2009 to 60 percent in late January and early February of this year.

The poll findings come as casualties are rising and as President Obama is boosting combat forces there.
"It seems like our efforts are not going anywhere,'' the Times quoted an anonymous Marine as saying. The Times said the Marine had helped build a school in Afghanistan in 2008 that was partially destroyed by insurgents. "It seems like we're going in a big circle,'' he said.

Military Times, a subsidiary of Gannett, publisher of USA Today, publishes weekly newspapers that cover each of the military services. The poll was an online survey of subscribers, including some 1,800 active-duty military members. More than 200 responded while deployed in or near a war zone, the Times said, mostly officers and non-commissioned officers.

The Times emphasized that the survey is not necessarily representative of the military as a whole.
About 40 percent of respondents said it will take up to five years before Afghan military and police forces are ready to take over from U.S. and allied troops in the fight against Islamist insurgents.

The soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen taking part in the survey gave overwhelming support to President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But only 36 percent said they approve of the way Obama is handling the war.

Obama's support is higher among the general population, according to recent polls that say more than half of those surveyed approve.

The respondents gave high marks to their own experiences in military service, with 85 percent saying they would recommend a military career to others and 76 percent saying they would support a son or daughter joining the military.

The Times said 72 percent said they would re-enlist or extend their commitment to military service if they had to decide today, with "job security'' being the number one reason, followed by retirement benefits and patriotism, the Times reported.

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Published on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Feingold, McGovern, Jones Introduce Legislation to Require Timetable for Deploying US Troops from Afghanistan

Lawmakers say, Open-Ended Military Presence in Afghanistan is Counterproductive to our National Security Goals

Statement Released by Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep. Jim McGovern, and Rep. Walter Jones

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and U.S. Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Walter Jones (R-NC) announced they are introducing legislation requiring the president to develop a flexible timetable to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan, in order to enhance our national security and reduce the burden on our armed forces and on taxpayers.  The bipartisan, bicameral legislation would require the president to provide a plan for drawing down our forces in Afghanistan.  The legislation also increases oversight by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) over work done by private contractors with records of waste, fraud and abuse in order to safeguard U.S. taxpayer dollars.

“At the listening sessions I have held throughout Wisconsin over the last several months, people across the political spectrum have asked why we continue to have a massive military presence in Afghanistan,” said Senator Feingold.  “A large, open-ended presence in Afghanistan is counterproductive to our global fight against al Qaeda.  Rather than pour resources into a nation-building strategy in a country that isn’t even al Qaeda’s base, we should develop a timetable to end our massive presence in Afghanistan, so we are better able to go after al Qaeda’s global network.  We need to be as agile as al Qaeda and we can’t do that if we are bogged down in Afghanistan.”

“After 8 long years, hundreds of billions of dollars and – most importantly – thousands of our brave soldiers killed or wounded, it is past time to re-examine this strategy.  Instead of nation-building in Afghanistan, I believe we should be doing some more nation-building here at home.  The American people deserve accountability – in terms of how and when our troops will be returned to their families and in terms of how taxpayer dollars are being spent,” said Representative McGovern.

“I believe the war on terror needs to be thought of in a different way.  I believe there are other strategies that could be used, as I have discussed with several former generals.  As recent as yesterday I visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Bethesda Naval Academy.  Being there and seeing the true cost of war only strengthens my belief that it is time to change our strategy and reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan.  It is time to put an end to the tremendous stress we are placing on our military and their families,” said Representative Jones.

Feingold, McGovern and Jones recently wrote [1] to President Obama outlining their concerns that the military strategy for Afghanistan is “not in our best national security interest and makes us dependent upon an unreliable partner in the Afghan government.”  In the letter urging the president to set forth a timetable, the legislators wrote, “The attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day serves as a reminder that we have not been adequately prioritizing the need to track down al Qaeda, especially in emerging safe havens such as Yemen.  Rather than investing a disproportionate amount of our resources in Afghanistan, we need to shift resources to pursuing al Qaeda’s global network.”

The legislation:

•Would require the president to provide a plan and timetable for drawing down our forces in Afghanistan and identify any variables that could require changes to that timetable. 
•Would safeguard U.S. taxpayer dollars by ensuring all U.S. activity in Afghanistan be overseen by an Inspector General.
•Does not set a specific date for withdrawal.

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/14-8

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US forces leave Afghan risky valley
 
 
15/04/2010 09:19:13 AM GMT     
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/US-forces-leave-Afghan-risky-valley.html

 
US troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan's Korengal Valley ending nearly nine years of NATO presence and intense fighting there.

The isolated mountainous region of caves and canyons on the eastern border with Pakistan has been the scene of near daily exchanges of fire between NATO and Taliban militants that use the area as a route for infiltrating weapons and fighters into Afghanistan.

Korengal, in eastern Kunar province, has a reputation of being one of most dangerous areas in the country, with a rugged mountainous terrain that turns it into a perfect insurgent hunting ground.

The pullout, conducted by helicopter and carried out in secret over the past week, frees up about 120 soldiers who had been largely confined to hilltop battlements consisting of plywood, sandbags and stones.

More than 40 US troops have been killed and scores more wounded in helicopter crashes, machine-gun attacks and grenade blasts in the Valley. The Afghan death toll there has been reported as far higher.

HSH/SC/MB


Source: Press TV
 

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South Asia
Apr 16, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD16Df03.html 
 
Taliban defiant following Marjah operation


By Hewad

KABUL - Recent operations by foreign and Afghan government forces in Helmand province had little impact on Taliban capabilities ahead of the summer fighting season, an insurgent commander has claimed.

Despite February's assault by 15,000 troops on the Taliban stronghold of Marjah, its ranks are unhurt, uncowed and poised to retaliate, Abu Hamza, who claims to command 300 rebel fighters operating in southern Afghanistan, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in a telephone interview.

"We will inflict heavy casualties on the foreigners this year," Abu Hamza, who is well known in the region, said. "We have not been defeated in Helmand ... The foreigners are now surrounded in Marjah. We have only withdrawn tactically from some areas."

Marjah was a key focus of Operation Moshtarak (Dari for "Together"), which began in February as an assault on insurgent strongholds with the declared aim of re-establishing Afghan government control of the area.

Western forces say vehicle traffic, an indication of the extent to which free movement is established, has been growing in Marjah and Nad Ali.

Marjah itself had been a major center of opium poppy growing and refining. A scheme to distribute wheat seed to persuade farmers to move away from poppy is due to begin in Marjah - the registration process began on April 4.

Abu Hamza's remarks reflected Western media reports quoting United States military officials as saying the Taliban are again encroaching on Marjah from all sides, so far mainly scaring local people from participating in development projects.

Abu Hamza said Taliban casualties during the fighting were ten killed. The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, put the number of confirmed enemy dead at six, compared to 21 troops killed mainly by improvised explosive devices, IEDs.

A total of 29 civilians were listed as killed during the Marjah fighting, although local people say the number was around 40.

According to Abu Hamza, the low insurgent death tally resulted from avoidance of direct engagements with troops and widespread use of IEDs, which to April 4 this year accounted for 79 of 134 combat deaths of foreign soldiers across Afghanistan.

"We have inflicted heavy casualties with these weapons," claimed Abu Hamza, who gave his age as 35 and said he'd fought for the Taliban in various provinces since the Islamic militia was toppled from power by US-led forces in 2001.

He said senior Taliban commanders ordered units to intensify use of roadside bombs and also attacks on specific targets in cities, like the February assault by gunmen and suicide bombers on guest houses and businesses frequented by foreigners in the capital.

"I believe that instead of face-to-face fighting, attacks like this one are a more successful tactic," Abu Hamza said.

Asked whether civilian casualties inflicted by such actions constituted terrorism, he replied, "Is it not terrorism when the Americans bombard and fire rockets at people's houses, funeral and other traditional ceremonies, and kill innocents under the pretext of fighting the Taliban or al-Qaeda?

"We have warned all Muslim people to avoid areas where foreigners congregate, therefore responsibility lies with the people, not the Taliban."

Concerning the location of insurgent forces after the seizure of Marjah, Hamza said, "You should put that question to the Americans because they have modern equipment and say that they can see everything from the air, so they should be able to say where we are.

"I will say only that the Taliban have tactically withdrawn and are active in their areas. We never flee."

Reports from Marjah indicate that insurgent fighters have largely blended in with the local population, and in many cases are locals themselves, also benefiting from US cash payments for human and property damage incurred in the fighting.

Their supply of arms and ammunition here and elsewhere is steady and comes in part from countries that also oppose the US, the commander claimed, while noting that weaponry alone is no guarantee of victory.

"The Americans have very modern weapons ... We have the weapon of belief [in Islam] while they do not," he said.

Lack of cultural awareness, he went on, would also disastrously undermine foreign forces deployed in the country.

"They have no information about the Afghans' history, culture and traditions. Our strength is [boosted] by their actions, such as breaking into people's homes, bombarding them, disrespecting Islamic values, and so on, things which weaken them and strengthen us."

On the ultimate goal of the resistance, Abu Hamza reiterated the line of the Taliban leadership that all foreign forces must be withdrawn from Afghanistan and sharia law established.

"The Afghan government has no authority in the presence of the foreigners, who control of everything. We will hold no negotiations with the government unless the foreigners leave," he said.

Hewad is an IWPR trainee in Kabul.

(This article originally appeared in Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Used with permission.) 
 
 

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South Asia
Apr 16, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD16Df02.html 
 
Residents wait in fear for aid


By Mohammad Ilyas Dayee

HELMAND - The people of Marjah, the focus of a major military operation in recent weeks to oust the Taliban, say they are still waiting for the promised security and reconstruction and many are afraid to leave their homes.

Operation Moshtarak (Dari for "Together") combined 15,000 Western and Afghan troops in a sweep across the southern Afghan province of Helmand that began in mid-February.

But, it seems, ordinary life has yet to resume. While government and Western forces are present at all the major road intersections, locals are still afraid of the Taliban.

The operation was intended to provide reassurance to local people after the insurgents' rule of fear, yet many still feel anxious. They avoid traveling and the crowds that used to be seen in the town of Marjah have gone. When they do go out, they walk carefully because of mines on roads and bridges.

People in Marjah, until recently considered a major center of heroin refining, say 40 civilians were killed in Operation Moshtarak. Helmand governor Gulab Mangal has put the figure at 15. In the worst incident confirmed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 12 civilians died when two rockets struck a house.

People do not visit from other places like before and many of the shopkeepers of Marjah say they have been forced to close for lack of business.

The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, did not respond to a request from IWPR for comment on the situation in Marjah after the military operation.

One local trader, Sharifollah, selling fruit and vegetables at an important road intersection, said, "People do not come to buy their groceries during the day as they are afraid of the foreigners.

"The intersection is full of dust during the day and our roads have been destroyed by tanks. During the night, people do not come out because they are afraid of the Taliban ... Only government officials buy anything from us."

One elder in Marjah, Hajji Moalem, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting by phone that during the day foreign and Afghan troops are in control but at night the Taliban emerge. "So how are the people supposed to live?" he said.

The governor of Marjah, Mohammad Zaher Khan, however, insisted that the Taliban were no longer a force in the region.

"I cannot accept that the Taliban control Marjah at night because we observe them all the time. We have even killed three groups of their mine planters so far. There are some movements, but it does not mean the Taliban govern Marjah," he said.

But Mangal has conceded that insurgents are still around. "I am aware that armed Taliban are active in some parts of Marjah at night, but the situation will not continue like this. We will take measures to solve the problem," he told a local gathering after recently visiting the area.

The governor said new security checkpoints would be set up and sought to reassure locals, "You can travel safely now."

The speaker of the provincial council in Helmand, Mohammad Anwar Khan, who accompanied Mangal to Marjah, said the security situation was improving. "The new checkpoints will cut communication between the Taliban," he said.

Police in Marjah recently seized Iranian weapons in a cache thought to be for the Taliban. Police commander Gholam Sakhi said by phone, "We captured hundreds of AK-47s and magazines which were recently brought from the Iran border for the Taliban. We seized the weapons during a search operation at a house."

However, Sakhi said his officers were faced with a lack of cooperation from people who he said had been brainwashed by the Taliban to oppose the government. He said locals will never cooperate with the government easily.

The United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, visited Marjah at the end of March and inspected US bases. Addressing a major gathering of local people, who appealed for help on things like roads, a hospital and crops, he reportedly said, "I fully understand your concerns. They clearly focus on what are very common needs. And I don't come here today with any magic formula."

Although the military work daily to deal with mines laid by the Taliban, the rebels quickly replace them, sometimes in the same holes from which old ones were removed, locals say.

One senior police officer said, "We still detect new mines or they blow up vehicles on a daily basis, inflicting casualties. The Taliban's activity has reduced in Marjah, but it has not stopped. They make new preparations every day."

The people of Marjah had expected rapid reconstruction work after the fighting ended, but have been disappointed that little has happened.

Local resident, Sayed Wali, fled to Lashkar Gah for a month at the height of the military operation and heard reports about security and reconstruction work going on in Marjah, but when he came home, nothing matched what the media had said.

"This is how it was during the era of the Taliban. Our lives have not changed but the military operation has bothered us a lot," he said.
Wali said he found his wheat fields had dried up when he returned home, his sheep had died and his house was damaged by bullets.
Locals also say that promised compensation for losses from Operation Moshtarak has not been forthcoming.

Dr Mirwais, who has shops in Marjah that were used as bases by foreign forces during the offensive, said, "Only a few houses and shops have been compensated. The people lose patience on a daily basis. If they are not going to pay for the losses, they should tell people."

Kahn, the governor of Marjah, has pledged that the authorities will pay for damage to any shops or houses caused during the military operation.

But he was also dissatisfied by the reconstruction effort, telling reporters, "No schools have been opened in Marjah yet. Education officials came, but they fled from here. I have only hired one temporary teacher who teaches 60 children in the ruins.

"People in Marjah want jobs and a functioning administration, but some government organizations have not sent their representatives here."

However, he said he was happy that he had been able to provide 1,000 young people with daily work in Marjah. They get US$5 a day, funded by the American military.

And in mid-March, senior officials of the Red Crescent came to Marjah with food and other supplies. "We provided assistance to more than 500 deserving families whose houses were destroyed and who had lost their belongings," Red Crescent director, Ahmadollah Ahmadi, said.

But some local officials believe that they will struggle to get Marjah back on its feet because of the continued rebel presence.

The head of the council in Marjah, Abdorrahman Jan, called for talks with the insurgents, "I say instead of wasting time, we should negotiate with the Taliban in the area and make them reconcile with us. We have no other solution."

Since the allied operation, the Taliban have killed ten civilians in the area, accusing them of spying for the foreign and Afghan forces, local people say.

The Helmand governor and many other government officials are worried that Marjah may become a second Musa Qala. That northern Helmand town was recaptured from the Taliban in an earlier operation and government and foreign forces made promises of assistance, but they did nothing for the district in practice, people say.

Mohammad Ilyas Dayee is an IWPR-trained reporter in Helmand.

(This article originally appeared in Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Used with permission.) 
 
 

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latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-secret-surge15-2010apr15,0,5221105.story

U.S. doubles anti-Taliban special forces

Secretive buildup of elite teams reflects view that time is short to degrade Afghanistan opposition

By Julian E. Barnes

April 15, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The Pentagon has increased its use of the military's most elite special operations teams in Afghanistan, more than doubling the number of the highly trained teams assigned to hunt down Taliban leaders, according to senior officials.

The secretive buildup reflects the view of the Obama administration and senior military leaders that the U.S. has only a limited amount of time to degrade the capabilities of the Taliban. U.S. forces are in the midst of an overall increase that will add 30,000 troops this year and plan to begin reducing the force in mid-2011.

Operations aimed at Taliban leaders have intensified as the military also gears up for an expected offensive this summer in Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is the Taliban's spiritual heartland. Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants to negotiate with the Taliban, and U.S. and allied forces are trying to lure rank-and-file fighters away from extremist leaders. By hunting Taliban leaders, the specialized units hope to increase pressure on foot soldiers to switch sides.

With such an abbreviated timeline, the elite manhunt teams are the most effective weapon for disrupting the insurgent leadership, senior officials said. The officials contend that stepped-up operations by teams inserted in recent months already have eroded the Taliban leadership. Defense officials specifically single out the work of special operations forces in eliminating mid-level Taliban leaders before the February offensive in the Helmand province town of Marja. They say the forces have begun similar operations in nearby Kandahar province.

"You can't kill your way out of these things, but you can remove a lot of the negative influences," said a senior Defense official. "A significant portion of the leadership has fled over the border, been captured or removed from the equation."

But the buildup carries risks. Special operations forces have been involved in some botched strikes that ended up killing civilians, mistakes that Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has said could undermine the overall mission. For years, Karzai and other officials have complained bitterly about civilian deaths in military actions by the U.S. and its allies.

A raid Feb. 10 in the Gardez district in southeastern Afghanistan, led by a unit assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command, left two Afghan officials and three women dead.

The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, encompasses special mission units such as the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team Six, as well as troops temporarily assigned to the command, such as Army Ranger units.

Neither Delta Force nor SEAL Team Six were involved in the Gardez raid, according to one government official, suggesting that Army Rangers or another unit temporarily assigned to the command was responsible.

Some Afghan investigators have accused U.S. forces of covering up evidence of the attack, a charge the military disputes.

The size of the military's Joint Special Operations Command is a highly classified secret. Officials would not discuss the number of covert teams or troops sent to Afghanistan.

Villagers fear special operations forces, who often strike in the dead of night, and speak of them in whispers. But special operations forces pride themselves on knowing and respecting local customs. And some units have developed close ties with Afghans.

The special SEAL and Delta Force units and others work in teams of as few as three. They operate in secret, often out of uniform and without regard to the military's strict regulations regarding hair length and beards.

Army Ranger units, working in larger numbers, often provide security for the special mission units, but also conduct their own capture-or-kill operations.

In the past, critics have charged that special operations forces were responsible for a preponderance of the civilian deaths caused by Western forces. Although officials concede that the number of civilian deaths caused by the teams has been damaging, the military command in Afghanistan does not believe that the elite forces are "running amok," said a Defense official.

Some of the incidents, according to officials, are a result of the high operational tempo. Special operations forces, including the JSOC teams, account for half or more of the missions being carried out by military forces in Afghanistan.

The secretive Joint Special Operations Command task force is a classified subgroup of the military's overall United States Special Operations Command. The overall command has 5,800 troops in Afghanistan on a mission to train Afghan security forces and conduct joint missions with Afghan commandos.

It is not clear whether that number includes the more highly specialized teams, which by some estimates number only in the dozens and were described last month by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, as a handful of troops compared with the overall U.S. and allied force, which is increasing to more than 140,000.

McChrystal, a former head of JSOC, has supported the secret buildup, even while imposing restrictions on the use of air power as well as new rules on night raids. He was not given direct control of the teams, but as their former commander, he retains a large amount of influence over them.

Pentagon officials recently have realigned the command structure to give McChrystal control of the U.S. Marines and special operations forces that are mainly involved in training.

The Defense official said that with the new buildup, there will be more of the special operations forces in Afghanistan than there were in Iraq at the height of the U.S. troop buildup there in 2007.

"Although we will have less general purpose forces than we had in Iraq, we will have more special forces," the official said.

Within the military, some consider the work of the Joint Special Operations Command units in Iraq to have been key to calming the violence at the time.

Some of the additional JSOC teams sent to Afghanistan have been shifted from Iraq, where they worked to root out extremist cells aligned with Al Qaeda. Despite the recent flare-up in violence, officials say the number of extremists being sought in the Mideast nation has declined precipitously. Describing the change in the idiom of the secret units, a senior official said: "Hunting season is over in Iraq."

In Afghanistan, the special units have been following a playbook similar to the one they used in Iraq, and Defense officials hope the elite teams will have a similar effect on the overall level of security.

Defense officials emphasize that even the teams not under McChrystal's direct control are bound by his tactical directives.

"Rules are rules for everybody," said the Defense official.

"McChrystal holds them to a higher standard than conventional forces. When things go wrong, he is extremely aware of what the costs are."

julian.barnes

@latimes.com

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Afghan resistance statement

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a country-wide Resistance Movement

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65071&hd=&size=1&l=e

Rabi ul Sani 28, 1431 A.H, Wednesday April 14, 2010

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Now after the passage of nine years since the American invasion of Afghanistan, the public of the world have reached the conclusion that the usage of the word of terrorism was an unjustified pretext and the attacks were an illegitimate aggression. Being so, it was part and parcel of a colonialist strategy of Washington drawn up by Pentagon strategists after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. By using this pretext, they wanted to bring the world under their belly.

Washington needed some slogans to make the invasion appear justified and the execution of the colonialist plan feasible. So they adroitly and cunningly coined the War on Terror cliché. However, the ground realities in Afghanistan indicate that the invading forces in Afghanistan are not fighting against a few armed opposition but they are facing the Afghan nation in an armed confrontation. Had it not been the case, they would not have needed 150,000 soldiers to maintain the status quo.

On 13, last February, 15,000 foreign troops supported by 20,000 Afghan hireling police and army soldiers launched massive offensive against Marja, a town in Helmand province., But now after the passage of two months, the American and their puppets see a certain defeat there. If there are a few terrorists as they prefer to call them, then why their highly-trained soldiers and sophisticated weapons could not achieve victory. Vice versa. Army may fight against an armed group but they could not withstand a people’s upheaval.

Nine years back, Bush claimed, Taliban were not more than 1000-2000 and promised to eliminate them soon. But today one of their prominent generals, general McKiernan, says America needs 400,000 soldiers to contain Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Likely, in the past nine years, never a day has passed without the invaders claiming that they have killed tens of armed Taliban. By now, they should have finished all those 2,000 Taliban. But the ground realities of today show that the resistance movement grows day by day.

According to a survey conducted by Western institutes, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has influence in 80% of the Afghan territory. Is it possible for 2,000 or even 10,000 armed men to do this? The fact is that the current Jihad movement is a nationalist, Islamic and country-wide movement. Torture, detention, air strikes and brutal raids would never eliminate it.

The Red Army of the former Soviet Union killed about two million Afghans but they could not put a stop to the resistance. The more the invading Americans and their allies martyr the Afghans, the more they would bounce back stronger, rather than being silenced; the flames of revenge will become more wide-spread and burgeoning.

The bottom-line is when the White House rulers and the Pentagon generals stop, not throwing dust into the eyes of the public of the world under the fake name of fighting terrorism and when they will abandon their ambitious colonialist goals and dreams of dominating the world?

We deem it necessary to a remind these rulers who are intoxicated by the craze of capturing the world, if you do not look at the realities as they are , you will certainly end up facing the fate of the former Soviet Union. Then surely, you will not only lose control of the world but face disintegration back home. Now the choice is yours.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan





 

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Canadian troops gave ‘innocent’ men to notorious Afghan spies, translator says


by Steven Chase

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65078&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 14, 2010

In wild and troubling testimony, military employee known as 'Pasha’ also tells MPs Canadian soldier shot unarmed man in back of head

An Afghan-Canadian who served as translator to Canada’s military levelled wild and troubling allegations at a Commons committee today, saying Canadian troops transferred "innocent" men to Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service and once shot an unarmed man in the back of the head.

Malgarai Ahmadshah, adviser to the former commander of Canada’s Joint Task Force Afghanistan unit, was speaking to MPs probing the detainee issue and this country's relationship with the Afghan National Directorate of Security.

The NDS is well known for its propensity to torture.

"What I learned in Afghanistan is that Canada often transferred innocent men to the NDS," Mr. Ahmadshah told the special Commons committee on Afghanistan.

The former translator said in some cases the Afghan intelligence service threatened these detainees and their lives.

Mr. Ahmadshah, whose Canadian Forces' code name was "Pasha," now lives in Ottawa.

He also alleged that during a raid in June or July of 2007 Canadian soldier shot an unarmed man in the back of the head because they mistakenly thought he had a pistol.

"After the Canadian Forces wrongly killed a man, they panicked, they swept through the neighbourhood, arresting people for no reason. They arrested over 10 men from about 10 to 90 years old.""

Mr. Ahmadshah said he was asked to personally interview them and determined none were Taliban.

"None did anything wrong except to be at home when the Canadian Forces murdered their neighbour," he recounted. "Yet Canada transferred all these innocent men to the NDS. I don't know what happened to them."

Mr. Ahmadshah also alleged the Canadian government transferred detainees to the NDS with the understanding they would be abused in order to extract more intelligence information from them. "They were subcontracting torture," he said.

Conservative MP Laurie Hawn challenged the former translator, saying he was insinuating that top military commanders have lied to Canadians by denying this. "So you are calling all of the generals who testified before this committee liars?"

The debate over whether Canada turned a blind eye to torture or knowingly handed over captives to maltreatment has transformed into a nasty political battle. The Conservatives refuse to offer an uncensored version of events even in the face of threats to find them in contempt of Parliament. Their rivals say they can be trusted to view the uncensored records in a secure manner.

Opposition parties are threatening to pass a motion declaring Tory cabinet ministers in contempt of Parliament for refusing a rare Commons vote last December that called on them to release uncensored records. Commons Speaker Peter Milliken is preparing to rule on whether such a condemnation is possible.

Earlier Wednesday, the Canadian official whose discovery of a tortured prisoner included the very implements used in his abuse told a separate detainee inquiry that he heard eight more complaints of mistreatment in the months that followed.

Nicholas Gosselin’s grim discovery spurred the federal government to halt transfers of detainees to the Afghans for about three months as it tried to improve its monitoring and reporting on prisoners.

The former Foreign Affairs employee told the Military Police Complaints Commission that he collected eight more allegations of abuse in the January to June 2008 period before he left Afghanistan.

Mr. Gosselin, who now works for another federal department, said the November 2007, discovery came during a prisoner interview he conducted at an Afghan detention facility.

The prisoner in question said he’d been knocked unconscious during questioning that included beatings, Mr. Gosselin told the commission today. "[The captive] showed us a scar on his hips and described abuse," he said.

The detainee even pointed out the equipment used in his maltreatment, saying his abuse had taken place in the very office in which they were situated. He directed them to a box under a chair in the room.

"We discovered under that chair an electrical wire and a section of rubber pipe – and the individual told us these were the tools used to mistreat him," Mr. Gosselin said.

He said the braided electrical wire was one-quarter inch thick and 18 inches long.

The Military Police Complaints Commission is investigating allegations by Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association that Canadian military police "aided and abetted the torture of detainees" by handing over prisoners to Afghan jailers despite reports of maltreatment.

Canada is bound by international conventions that make it a war crime to hand over prisoners to torture and that oblige countries to take back captives being abused.

While Mr. Gosselin reported eight complaints of abuse from detainees in 2008 before he left Afghanistan, the federal government has yet to make these reports available to the complaints commission.





 

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Emergency! Arrest of Humanitarian Workers must be fought!

by PINO CABRAS - Translated by Diego Traversa. Edited by Machetera.

April 14, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65083&hd=&size=1&l=e

The arrest of Emergency staff in Afghanistan—carried out through the war-on-terror "passepartout"—removes another stumbling block to the bloodshed in the Near and Middle East. Various secret services are increasing the pressure on the voices at variance with the pattern designed by G.W. Bush and continued by Obama.

In this pattern, the investigative machinery plays an important role, one which is ready to serve and integrate itself with that of the military occupying forces.

The investigation is plainly manipulated. In recent days, we have learned the news that hundreds of detainees in Guantanamo were innocent, that the secret services knew it, that although top officers in US Administration knew it, they did nothing to take them away from the Caribbean gulag: the falsified evidence cannot be revealed without collapsing the ideological framework supporting the war, which needed to show the bodies of hordes of terrorists. (See George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent', by Tim Reid)

Opponents, insurgents, and even unwitting people were marked with the "terrorist" label, the bogeyman to be fought under exceptional circumstances: through special and new laws, through a new legal apparatus which unilaterally denied even the laws of conventional war.

What has been crucial in all this, was the media intoxication. Machineries with huge financial means at their disposal have flooded the media with a massive load of fake information and news.



Gino Strada (rt) and a collaborator of Emergency

Those who are paying for all this today are the members from the organization set up by Gino Strada. Years of concrete commitment by Emergency, in order to save human lives and to witness the failure of war, risk being swept away by this huge operation in which any news from official sources is pathetically suspicious. The directors of the operation have even tried to deny NATO’s involvement, but their version was refuted with video within few hours. The direct presence of the occupying forces allows any manipulation of evidence, any false clue and any staged finding of weapons, just as the ones carried out in Genoa during the 2001 G8.

Now the media are parroting the prompting from Murdoch’s "Sunday Times" paper about the Italians who "have owned up". This is news that has been taken from "Afghan official sources", that is, from officers of a failed State that is in the pay of invaders. The same sort of officials who held the mediator in Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s liberation, Ramatullah Anefi, in prison for months, under the false accusation of being the instigator of the kidnapping and of having met him several times during his imprisonment.

Do not let yourselves be led astray by Frattini, Gasparri and some sycophantic journalists. We can venture the most sensible prediction that can be made: the news about the "confession" will be reduced, at most, to the fact that the operators might have admitted to knowing some Taliban fighters.  That’s a more than natural thing for anyone who wants to provide medical aid without siding with anyone in a territory devastated by war; that’s what Emergency has been doing since the start.

Yet, it’s a scandal to see the media reporting on the front pages that  "they have owned up". In this way, faces of courageous and innocent Italians are shamefully stained with far-fetched conspiracy assumptions, sealed by paranoid diplomats. Minister Frattini has had his own share in the intimidation of Gino Strada by saying that "It’s not a political matter", which smells of petty fascism.

Instead, we must say firmly that it’s a political question and report the slaughters, which look clearly planned, that will take place tomorrow, in addition to the dreadful ones of yesterday.

Either we believe Frattini, who has unrolled red carpets to welcome liars who committed crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, or we believe Gino Strada, who has denounced the lies of war in those same structures, now put into jeopardy by Frattini, while trying as much as he could to treat forty percent of the victims of those lies: the children.

The donation to Emergency, on our income tax return, would be the first and strongest answer we can give in these weeks.




   
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On Saturday, April 10, soldiers of the Afghan army and the International Coalition Forces attacked the Emergency Surgical Centre of Lashkar-gah and arrested members of the national and international staff. Three of them are Italian citizens: Matteo Dell'Aira, Marco Garatti e Matteo Pagani.

EMERGENCY is an independent and neutral organisation. Since 1999, EMERGENCY in Afghanistan has provided medical assistance free-of-charge to over 2,500,000 Afghan citizens, by establishing three surgical hospitals, a maternity centre and a network of 28 first aid posts.

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Emergency Surgical centre in Lashkar-gah
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Military Swoop Disappoints Marja People

14 Apr 10 — iwpr.net
http://www.iwpr.net/report-news/military-swoop-disappoints-marja-people

Operation to tackle rebels goes on but locals wait for promised reconstruction.

By Mohammad Ilyas Dayee in Helmand (ARR No. 358, 14-Apr-10)


 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, holds a shura with Afghan leaders in Marja, Afghanistan. Source: ISAF Media1

The people of Marja, the focus of a major military operation in recent weeks to oust the Taleban, say they are still waiting for the promised security and reconstruction and many are afraid to leave their homes.
 
Operation Moshtarak combined 15,000 western and Afghan troops in a sweep across the southern Afghan province of Helmand that began in mid-February.
 
But, it seems, ordinary life has yet to resume. While government and western forces are present at all the major road intersections, locals are still afraid of the Taleban.
 
The operation was intended to provide reassurance to local people after the insurgents’ rule of fear, yet many still feel anxious. They avoid travelling and the crowds that used to be seen in the town of Marja have gone. When they do go out, they walk carefully because of mines on roads and bridges.
 
People in Marja, until recently considered a major centre of heroin refining, say 40 civilians were killed in Operation Moshtarak. Helmand governor Gulab Mangal has put the figure at 15. In the worst incident confirmed by NATO, 12 civilians died when two rockets struck a house.
 
People do not visit from other places like before and many of the shopkeepers of Marja say they have been forced to close for lack of business.
 
The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, did not respond to a request from IWPR for comment on the situation in Marja after the military operation.
 
One local trader, Sharifollah, selling fruit and vegetables at an important road intersection, said, "People do not come to buy their groceries during the day as they are afraid of the foreigners.
 
“The intersection is full of dust during the day and our roads have been destroyed by tanks. During the night, people do not come out because they are afraid of the Taleban … Only government officials buy anything from us."
 
One elder in Marja, Hajji Moalem, told IWPR by phone that during the day foreign and Afghan troops are in control but at night the Taleban emerge. "So how are the people supposed to live?” he said.
 
The governor of Marja, Mohammad Zaher Khan, however, insisted that the Taleban were no longer a force in the region.
 
“I cannot accept that the Taleban control Marja at night because we observe them all the time. We have even killed three groups of their mine planters so far. There are some movements, but it does not mean the Taleban govern Marja," he said.
 
But Mangal has conceded that insurgents are still around.  “I am aware that armed Taleban are active in some parts of Marja at night, but the situation will not continue like this. We will take measures to solve the problem," he told a local gathering after recently visiting the area.
 
The governor said new security checkpoints would be set up and sought to reassure locals, “You can travel safely now."
 
The speaker of the provincial council in Helmand, Mohammad Anwar Khan, who accompanied Mangal to Marja, said the security situation was improving. "The new checkpoints will cut communication between the Taleban,” he said.
 
Police in Marja recently seized Iranian weapons in a cache thought to be for the Taleban. Police commander Gholam Sakhi said by phone, "We captured hundreds of AK47s and magazines which were recently brought from the Iran border for the Taleban. We seized the weapons during a search operation at a house."
 
However, Sakhi said his officers were faced with a lack of cooperation from people who he said had been brainwashed by the Taleban to oppose the government.  He said locals will never cooperate with the government easily.
 
The United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, visited Marja at the end of March and inspected US bases. Addressing a major gathering of local people, who appealed for help on things like roads, a hospital and crops, he reportedly said, "I fully understand your concerns. They clearly focus on what are very common needs. And I don't come here today with any magic formula."

 
Although the military are out daily dealing with mines planted by the Taleban, the rebels quickly replace them, sometimes in the same holes from which old ones were removed, locals say.
 
One senior police officer said, "We still detect new mines or they blow up vehicles on a daily basis, inflicting casualties. The Taleban's activity has reduced in Marja, but it has not stopped. They make new preparations every day." 
 
The people of Marja had expected rapid reconstruction work after the fighting ended, but have been disappointed that little has happened.
 
Local resident, Sayed Wali, fled to Lashkar Gah for a month at the height of the military operation and heard reports about security and reconstruction work going on in Marja, but when he came home, nothing matched what the media had said.
 
"This is how it was during the era of the Taleban. Our lives have not changed but the military operation has bothered us a lot," he said.
 
Wali said he found his wheat fields had dried up when he returned home, his sheep had died and his house was damaged by bullets.
 
Locals also say that promised compensation for losses from Operation Moshtarak has not been forthcoming.
 
Dr Mirwais, who has shops in Marja that were used as bases by foreign forces during the offensive, said, "Only a few houses and shops have been compensated. The people lose patience on a daily basis. If they are not going to pay for the losses, they should tell people.”
 
Kahn, the governor of Marja, has pledged that the authorities will pay for damage to any shops or houses caused during the military operation.
 
But he was also dissatisfied by the reconstruction effort, telling reporters, "No schools have been opened in Marja yet. Education officials came, but they fled from here.  I have only hired one temporary teacher who teaches 60 children in the ruins.
 
"People in Marja want jobs and a functioning administration, but some government organisations have not sent their representatives here."
 
However, he said he was happy that he had been able to provide 1,000 young people with daily work in Marja. They get five US dollars a day, funded by the American military.
 
And in mid-March, senior officials of the Red Crescent came to Marja with food and other supplies. "We provided assistance to more than 500 deserving families whose houses were destroyed and who had lost their belongings,” Red Crescent director, Ahmadollah Ahmadi, said.
 
But some local officials believe that they will struggle to get Marja back on its feet because of the continued rebel presence.
 
The head of the council in Marja, Abdorrahman Jan, called for talks with the insurgents, "I say instead of wasting time, we should negotiate with the Taleban in the area and make them reconcile with us. We have no other solution.”
 
Since the allied operation, the Taleban have killed ten civilians in the area, accusing them of spying for the foreign and Afghan forces, local people say.
 
The Helmand governor and many other government officials are worried that Marja may become a second Musa Qala. That northern Helmand town was recaptured from the Taleban in an earlier operation and government and foreign forces made promises of assistance, but they did nothing for the district in practice, people say.
 
Mohammad Ilyas Dayee is an IWPR-trained reporter in Helmand.

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Published on Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Inter Press Service

McChrystal Backtracks on Troop Veto for Kandahar Shuras

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military has now officially backtracked from its earlier suggestion that it would seek the consent of local shuras, or consultative conferences with those elders, to carry out the coming military occupation of Kandahar city and nearby districts – contradicting a pledge by Afghan President Hamid Karzai not to carry out the operation without such consent.

Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, told IPS Tuesday that local tribal elders in Kandahar could "shape the conditions" under which the influx of foreign troops operate during the operation, but would not determine whether or where NATO troops would be deployed in and around the city.

Asked whether the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is committed to getting local approval before introducing more troops into Kandahar and surrounding districts, the McChrystal spokesman said, "We're not talking about something as simple as a referendum."

At a Mar. 29 briefing in Kabul on plans for the Kandahar operation, however, an unnamed senior U.S. military official told reporters that one of the elements of the strategy for gaining control over the Taliban stronghold is to "shura our way to success" - referring to the Islamic concept of consultative bodies. In those conferences with local tribal elders, the officials said, "The people have to ask for the operation... We're going to have to have a situation where they invite us in."

Those statements clearly suggested the intention to get the support of local tribal elders before going ahead with the large-scale military operation scheduled to begin in June.

That is what President Karzai said to a shura of between 1,000 and 2,000 Kandahar province tribal elders Apr. 4. Karzai said NATO's Kandahar operation would not be carried out until the elders themselves were ready to support it, according to a number of press reports.

According to the report by RTA, Afghanistan's state television service, Karzai actually said, "I know you are worried about this operation," before asking their opinion. He also said that the shuras to be organized at the district level were for the purpose of "getting approval and deciding" on the operation, according to the RTA report.

And the assembled elders made it known that they didn't want the operation.

That was clearly not what McChrystal, who was sitting behind Karzai at the shura, wanted to hear.

McChrystal's Deputy Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. William Mayville, and spokesman Sholtis both sought to minimize the damage from the incident. Mayville asserted that Karzai is "on board" on the Kandahar offensive, adding, "We would not have had this shura if he wasn't convinced this is the right stuff."

Sholtis suggested that Karzai had only "made it clear that he would involve local leaders in the decision-making process".

Sholtis acknowledged that "nobody wants a counterinsurgency fought in their backyard", but claimed that the elders who spoke at the Kandahar shura had "made it clear that Kandahar also suffers from an unwanted Taliban presence."

Sholtis also said the three elders who had expressed concerns about the operation had been supported by "probably about a third of the more than 1,000 who attended".

But published accounts of the meeting show that the elders were not calling for expelling the Taliban from the city and its environs. When Karzai asked the assembled elders whether they were "happy or unhappy for the operation to be carried out", they shouted loudly, "We are not happy," the Sunday Times of London reported.

As reported by AFP, when Karzai asked, "Are you worried?" the elders shouted back, "Yes we are!"

According to the RTA account, one elder interrupted Karzai to say, "Who are the Taliban, but my son and another's nephew? The problem is actually these people who are in power, in particular the tribal elders and those who have power in Kandahar city."

And in a revealing response, Karzai said, "Absolutely, you are right..."

Some of the elders told CNN's Atia Abawi they preferred to negotiate with the Taliban rather than confront them in a military offensive.

McChrystal and other officials in the ISAF command appear to have hoped that the threat of a major influx of U.S. troops in and around Kandahar city would compel such local leaders and tribal elders to persuade Taliban troops to leave their district. Karen DeYoung and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported Mar. 21 that U.S. officials had been telling them they had to "improve governance, address corruption and eject the Taliban" or face "expanding military operations".

McChrystal and ISAF base that calculation on a broader U.S.-NATO assumption about the nature of the Taliban movement and its base of popular support in Kandahar and southwestern Afghanistan in general.

The British regional coordinator for southern Afghanistan, Nicholas Kay, told Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad in January 2007 that a majority of the population of southwestern Afghanistan supported the Taliban. But Kay said that 80 percent were Taliban or supporters only because they were "disgruntled by government inefficiencies and corruption" and were therefore "reconcilable".

Only 20 percent of the Taliban and their supporters were "ideologically committed" to the cause, Kay told Shahzad.

Kay's view formed the basis for the Barack Obama administration's optimistic strategy of "turning" the supposedly reconcilable 80 percent of the Taliban. That theory failed, however, to consider a key political dynamic in southern Afghanistan: the Taliban exploitation of the government's opium eradication policy, which systematically favored wealthy landowners - who were allowed to avoid destruction in return for a bribe - and fell entirely on the poor.

As early as spring 2006, tribal elders in Kandahar province were supporting the Taliban in return for the insurgents providing protection against government destruction of opium fields, as the well-informed International Council on Security and Development reported in April 2006.

Journalist Gretchen Peters found the same alliance between the Taliban and opium farmers against opium eradication in Helmand province in 2007. It was neither "ideology" nor mere anger about government corruption that was binding the rural population to the Taliban but something far more tangible.

The big Apr. 4 shura in Kandahar revealed a chasm between the prevailing U.S. view of soft support for the Taliban and the views of both Karzai and the tribal elders themselves. As a result there will be no empowering of district shuras to decide whether or not to invite U.S. and Canadian troops to confront the Taliban.

But McChrystal must now worry about how the Kandahar campaign can succeed in the face of opposition from both local leaders and President Karzai.

© 2010 IPS North America

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/15-4

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America and the dictators: From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai 


16/04/2010 01:30:00 PM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/America-and-the-dictators-From-Ngo-Dinh-Diem-to-H.html
 
The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse.


(AFP) With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia

By Alfred W. McCoy

The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.


After years of lavishing American aid on him, the leader of this country, our close ally, has isolated himself inside the presidential palace, becoming an inadequate partner for a failing war effort. His brother is reportedly a genuine prince of darkness, dealing in drugs, covert intrigues, and electoral manipulation. The U.S. Embassy demands reform, the ouster of his brother, the appointment of honest local officials, something, anything that will demonstrate even a scintilla of progress.


After all, nine years earlier U.S. envoys had taken a huge gamble: rescuing this president from exile and political obscurity, installing him in the palace, and ousting a legitimate monarch whose family had ruled the country for centuries. Now, he repays this political debt by taunting America. He insists on untrammeled sovereignty and threatens to ally with our enemies if we continue to demand reforms of him. Yet Washington is so deeply identified with the counterinsurgency campaign in his country that walking away no longer seems like an option.


This scenario is obviously a description of the Obama administration’s devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this April. It is also an eerie summary of relations between the Kennedy administration and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon nearly half a century earlier, in August 1963. If these parallels are troubling, they reveal the central paradox of American power over the past half-century in its dealings with embattled autocrats like Karzai and Diem across that vast, impoverished swath of the globe once known as the Third World.



With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country’s capital, Kabul, was ours for the taking -- and the giving. In the midst of this chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt. It proved a quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him back to safety in Pakistan.


Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called “bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting” to install Karzai in power. This process took place not through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign diplomats at a donors’ conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a “showdown” with the monarch, forcing him back into exile. In this way, Karzai’s “authority,” which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies that he was guarded by American security.


In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto endorsement of the president’s low road to power. As billions in international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle escaped the capital’s bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s second most corrupt nation, just a notch below Somalia.


As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just six years later -- a remarkable 53% of the country’s entire economy -- drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the police, cabinet ministers, and the president’s own brother, also his close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, “Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government.” Earlier this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion annually, a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, simply to bribe the police and government officials.


Last August’s presidential elections were an apt index of the country’s progress. Karzai’s campaign team, the so-called warlord ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back in 2005; and the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands,” one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.


Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai’s warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the U.N.’s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president’s tally well below the winning margin. Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” the deputy U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners."


Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election, Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a “puppet government” and blaming all the electoral fraud on “massive interference from foreigners.” In a meeting with members of parliament, he reportedly told them: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”


Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements poured into Afghanistan, Washington’s escalating pressure for “reform” only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama would insist that he prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.” It was time for the new administration in Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back into line.


A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no alternative to Karzai and began to retreat. Jones now began telling reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama had been “generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they’re approaching their job.”


All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American experience, if it weren’t actually so old.


Our Man in Saigon

The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon (1954-1963) offers an earlier cautionary roadmap that helps explain why Washington has so often found itself in such an impossibly contradictory position with its authoritarian allies.


Landing in Saigon in mid-1954 after years of exile in the United States and Europe, Diem had no real political base. He could, however, count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. One of the few people to greet Diem at the airport that day was the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, Washington’s master of political manipulation in Southeast Asia. Amid the chaos accompanying France’s defeat in its long, bloody Indochina War, Lansdale maneuvered brilliantly to secure Diem’s tenuous hold on power in the southern part of Vietnam. In the meantime, U.S. diplomats sent his rival, the Emperor Bao Dai, packing for Paris. Within months, thanks to Washington’s backing, Diem won an absurd 98.2% of a rigged vote for the presidency and promptly promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium.


Channeling all aid payments through Diem, Washington managed to destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for any of his potential rivals in the south, while winning the president a narrow political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of American support, Diem proceeded to deal harshly with South Vietnam’s Buddhist sects, harassed the Viet Minh veterans of the war against the French, and resisted the implementation of rural reforms that might have won him broader support among the country’s peasant population.


When the U.S. Embassy pressed for reforms, he simply stalled, convinced that Washington, having already invested so much of its prestige in his regime, would be unable to withhold support. Like Karzai in Kabul, Diem's ultimate weapon was his weakness -- the threat that his government, shaky as it was, might simply collapse if pushed too hard.


In the end, the Americans invariably backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As rebellion and dissent rose in the south, Washington ratcheted up its military aid to battle the communists, inadvertently giving Diem more weapons to wield against his own people, communist and non-communist alike.


Working through his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu -- and this should have an eerie resonance today -- the Diems took control of Saigon’s drug racket, pocketing significant profits as they built up a nexus of secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected dissidents. At the time of Diem's downfall in 1963, there were some 50,000 prisoners in his gulag.


Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1963, the regime only weakened as resistance sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance. Soon South Vietnam was wracked by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading Communist revolution in the countryside. Moving after dark, Viet Cong guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diem’s unpopular village headmen by the thousands.


In this three-year period, the U.S. military mission in Saigon tried every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy. They brought in helicopters and armored vehicles to improve conventional mobility, deployed the Green Berets for unconventional combat, built up regional militias for localized security, constructed “strategic hamlets” in order to isolate eight million peasants inside supposedly secure fortified compounds, and ratcheted up CIA assassinations of suspected Viet Cong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best military strategy could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the Viet Cong had grown from a handful of fighters into a guerrilla army that controlled more than half the countryside.


When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Duc assumed the lotus position on a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit his gasoline-soaked robes which erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diem’s batons cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu’s wife applauded what she called “monk barbecues,” Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diem (shades of Karzai) began working through his brother Nhu to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, signaling Washington that he was perfectly willing to betray the U.S. war effort and possibly form a coalition with North Vietnam.


In the midst of this crisis, a newly appointed American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in Saigon and within days approved a plan for a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Diem. For the next few months, Lansdale’s CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon’s generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with devastating effect on November 1, 1963.


As rebel troops stormed the palace, Diem and his brother Nhu fled to a safe house in Saigon’s Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by promises of safe conduct into exile, Diem climbed aboard a military convoy for what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein had vetoed the flight plans. A military assassin intercepted the convoy, spraying Diem’s body with bullets and stabbing his bleeding corpse in a coup de grâce.


Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diem's death would mean a "shorter war,” the country soon collapsed into a series of military coups and counter-coups that crippled army operations. Over the next 32 months, Saigon had nine new governments and a change of cabinet every 15 weeks -- all incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective.


After spending a decade building up Diem's regime and a day destroying it, the U.S. had seemingly irrevocably linked its own power and prestige to the Saigon government -- any government. The “best and brightest” in Washington were convinced that they could not just withdraw from South Vietnam without striking a devastating blow against American “credibility.” As South Vietnam slid toward defeat in the two years following Diem’s death, the first of 540,000 U.S. combat troops began arriving, ensuring that Vietnam would be transformed from an American-backed war into an American war.


Under the circumstances, Washington searched desperately for anyone who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute the war against the communists and eventually, with palpable relief, embraced a military junta headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu. Installed and sustained in power by American aid, Thieu had no popular following and ruled through military repression, repeating the same mistakes that led to Diem’s downfall. But chastened by its experience after the assassination of Diem, the U.S. Embassy decided to ignore Thieu’s unpopularity and continue to build his army. Once Washington began to reduce its aid after 1973, Thieu found that his troops simply would not fight to defend his unpopular government. In April 1975, he carried a hoard of stolen gold into exile while his army collapsed with stunning speed, suffering one of the most devastating collapses in military history.


In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands, yet popular with its own peasantry, strong enough to wage a war in the villages, yet sensitive to the needs of the country’s poor villagers. These were hopelessly contradictory political requisites. Finding that civilian regimes engaged in impossible-to-control intrigues, the U.S. ultimately settled for authoritarian military rule which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry.


Death or Exile?

So is President Karzai, like Diem, doomed to die on the streets of Kabul or will he, one day, find himself like Thieu boarding a midnight flight into exile?


History, or at least our awareness of its lessons, does change things, albeit in complex, unpredictable ways. Today, senior U.S. envoys have Diem’s cautionary tale encoded in their diplomatic DNA, which undoubtedly precludes any literal replay of his fate. After sanctioning Diem’s assassination, Washington watched in dismay as South Vietnam plunged into chaos. So chastened was the U.S. Embassy by this dismal outcome that it backed the subsequent military regime to a fault.


A decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee uncovered other U.S. attempts at assassination-cum-regime-change in the Congo, Chile, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic that further stigmatized this option. In effect, antibodies from the disastrous CIA coup against Diem, still in Washington’s political bloodstream, reduce the possibility of any similar move against Karzai today.


Ironically, those who seek to avoid the past may be doomed to repeat it. By accepting Karzai’s massive electoral fraud and refusing to consider alternatives last August, Washington has, like it or not, put its stamp of approval on his spreading corruption and the political instability that accompanies it. In this way, the Obama administration in its early days invited a sad denouement to its Afghan adventure, one potentially akin to Vietnam after Diem’s death. America’s representatives in Kabul are once again hurtling down history’s highway, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, not the precipice that lies dead ahead.


In the experiences of both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai lurks a self-defeating pattern common to Washington's alliances with dictators throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by massive American military aid, these client figures become desperately dependent, even as they fail to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build an independent political base. Torn between pleasing their foreign patrons or their own people, they wind up pleasing neither. As opposition to their rule grows, a downward spiral of repression and corruption often ends in collapse; while, for all its power, Washington descends into frustration and despair, unable to force its allies to adopt reforms which might allow them to survive. Such a collapse is a major crisis for the White House, but often -- Diem’s case is obviously an exception -- little more than an airplane ride into exile for the local autocrat or dictator.


There was -- and is -- a fundamental structural flaw in any American alliance with these autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of such American-anointed leaders almost inevitable. At the outset, Washington selects a client who seems pliant enough to do its bidding. Such a client, in turn, opts for Washington’s support not because he is strong, but precisely because he needs foreign patronage to gain and hold office.


Once installed, the client, no matter how reluctant, has little choice but to make Washington’s demands his top priority, investing his slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and resources to cultivating a following; Diem found himself isolated in his Saigon palace, while Karzai has become a “president” justly, if derisively, nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul.” Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, and in the end angrily, as well as resentfully, in the foreign embrace.


Nor are such parallels limited to Afghanistan today or Vietnam almost half a century ago. Since the end of World War II, many of the sharpest crises in U.S. foreign policy have arisen from just such problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. As a start, it was a similarly close relationship with General Fulgencio Batista of Cuba in the 1950s which inspired the Cuban revolution. That culminated, of course, in Fidel Castro's rebels capturing the Cuban capital, Havana, in 1959, which in turn led the Kennedy administration into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion and then the Cuban Missile Crisis.


For a full quarter-century, the U.S. played international patron to the Shah of Iran, intervening to save his regime from the threat of democracy in the early 1950s and later massively arming his police and military while making him Washington’s proxy power in the Persian Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the cornerstone of American power in this strategic region, but plunged Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with Iran that have yet to end.


After a half-century as a similarly loyal client in Central America, the regime of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza fell in the Sandinista revolution of 1979, creating a foreign policy problem marked by the CIA's contra operation against the new Sandinista government and the seamy Iran-Contra scandal that roiled President Reagan’s second term.


Just last week, Washington’s anointed autocrat in Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the presidential palace when his riot police, despite firing live ammunition and killing more than 80 of his citizens, failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital, Bishkek. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, last year the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously and successfully to preserve U.S. use of the old Soviet air base at Manas critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev’s “landslide victory” in last July’s elections, President Obama sent him a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With Washington’s imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev’s political slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.


Why have so many American alliances with Third World dictators collapsed in such a spectacular fashion, producing divisive recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad?


During Britain's century of dominion, its self-confident servants of empire, from viceroys in plumed hats to district officers in khaki shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through an imperial system of protectorates, indirect rule, and direct colonial rule. In the succeeding American “half century” of hegemony, Washington carried the burden of global power without a formal colonial system, substituting its military advisers for imperial viceroys.


In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains momentum.


With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup, Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran, or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963 -- a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces.


-- Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over the past 50 years. His latest book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on



-- Middle East Online

 

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US Military Still Lying About Special Forces Night Raid in Afghanistan


by Robert Naiman


 

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Ssmallfry, lafrancevi)

t r u t h o u t, April 15, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65112&hd=&size=1&l=e


US officials are "probing a possible attempted coverup" in the deaths of five Afghan civilians in February in a raid carried out by US Special Forces accompanied by Afghan troops, the Los Angeles Times reports. Among the charges is that the bodies were tampered with by US forces to conceal the cause of death.

But even as the US is supposedly investigating, US officials say allegations that bullets were dug out of the bodies as part of a coverup are baseless, The Los Angeles Times says.

Jerome Starkey had reported in the Times of London that Afghan investigators said US Special Forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies. But US Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's spokesman, said no forensic evidence or eyewitness testimony had been presented to support that account, the Los Angeles newspaper said.

Admiral's Smith's statements appear to be a classic non-denial denial. Apparently no one outside the US military is in any position to provide definitive "forensic" evidence, because Afghan investigators were not able to autopsy the bodies, as The New York Times reported, and because Afghan police were prevented by foreign forces from coming near the bodies, as The Los Angeles Times reported.

As for "eyewitness testimony," The New York Times reported on April 5:

Mohammed Tahir, whose 18-year-old daughter was killed, said he had watched from the compound through an open door as an American knelt over one corpse with a knife and tried to extract bullets. "I saw them working on the bodies," Mr. Tahir said. "I saw a knife in one of the Americans' hands."

But regardless of whether US forces removed bullets from the bodies - or if they did, what their motivation was for doing so - on the more basic question of whether there was a "cover-up" by US forces, it's hard to come up with any plausible story consistent with information now in the public domain that does not conform to the ordinary meaning of the term "coverup."

Here is part of what a NATO press release said about the incident on February 12, still posted on NATO's Web site:

Joint Force Operating in Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery

An Afghan-international security force found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during an operation in the Gardez district, Paktiya Province, last night.

The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a fire fight and were killed. Subsequently, a large number of men, women and children exited the compound and were detained by the joint force. When the joint force entered the compound, they conducted a thorough search of the area and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed. The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room.

NATO now admits that this account of events was not true: the women were killed during the US Special Forces raid.

Writing for Inter Press Service on April 7, Gareth Porter reported:

McChrystal's spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, told IPS Monday, "I can tell you unequivocally that there was no evidence of a cover-up."
[...]

In an email response to a question from IPS about how it was possible that the US Special Operations Forces personnel had killed the women but believed they had been killed before the raid, Breasseale suggested that the joint force had not discovered the bodies for some extended period of time after beginning their search of the compound.

But go back to the February 12 NATO press release, still posted on the Web. Not only was it claimed that the women were already dead when US Special Forces arrived on the scene, it was claimed that they were "tied up" and "gagged."

Even if one were to accept the claim that the US Special Forces could not distinguish between women that they had killed and women who were already dead when the raid began, presumably it does not require advanced medical training to distinguish between a corpse which is "tied up" and "gagged" and one which is not. Either they were or "tied up" and "gagged" or they were not. If they were not, then the claim that they were was a lie, and some human being made up that story, and presumably that story was made up to obscure the fact that the women were killed by the US Special Forces. And I would imagine that if one were to ask 100 disinterested observers selected at random, 100 would say that the fabrication of such a story, which was subsequently released by NATO as official information, would constitute a "coverup."

If you don't want your tax dollars spent murdering Afghan civilians, tell Congress.



 

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Civilian Toll Soaring in Southern Afghanistan

11 Killed in Latest Kandahar Bombing

by Jason Ditz, April 15, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/15/civilian-toll-soaring-in-southern-afghanistan/

Despite President Obama’s claims of “progress” in Afghanistan the nation’s restive south, where virtually all of the latest escalation of troops have been deployed, has continued to see soaring violence, particularly in Kandahar.

According to the latest numbers out of the Red Cross in Kandahar, the number of civilians wounded in roadside bombings has risen between 30-40 percent compared to the same months in 2009. Despite massive increases in the amount of personnel and funding the US has thrown at tackling the roadside bombs, the attacks are still rising dramatically.

These numbers are, of course, separate from the civilian toll caused by the foreign troops themselves, and while specific figures in that regard have not been released, a number of high profile attacks, like the US attack on a busload of civilians near Kandahar, seems to be on the rise as well.

The number will likely continue to rise as the June invasion of Kandahar looms. An attack today inside the city killed at least 11 people, 10 of them private security contractors, and injured at least 18 others. Two other bombings in the city earlier in the day killed at least two others and wounded 23.

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Obama: US Can’t Be in Afghanistan ‘in Perpetuity’

Nine Years After Invasion, Claims of 'Progress' Ring Hollow

by Jason Ditz, April 15, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/15/obama-us-cant-be-in-afghanistan-in-perpetuity/

In an interview today with the Australian Broadcast Corp, President Barack Obama rejected the notion that the Afghan War was getting worse, despite the growing evidence to that effect, claiming that the Taliban’s momentum had been “blunted” by his multiple escalations of the conflict.

But his more serious pledge was to promise that the United States would not be occupying Afghanistan forever, insisting “we can’t be there in perpetuity.”

Which is of course quite true. After all, the rising cost and rising death toll have already convinced some NATO allies to abandon the conflict, and domestic pressure may force several others to do so in the near future. Several other foreign invasions of Afghanistan have come and gone in finite periods of time, though few ever left of their own volition.

In the same way President Obama’s vague claims of “progress” in the war, coupled with equally vague promises to leave the nation eventually ring seriously hollow, particularly after nine years of similar claims.

Despite the pretense of a Summer 2011 timetable, something Obama Administration officials were rejecting almost as soon as it was announced by the president, few truly envision the war ending in a timely fashion. Even assuming President Obama wins a second term in office in 2012, it seems a very safe bet the war will be inherited by his successor. The occupation will surely end, as all occupations do, but any claim that it will be on America’s own terms flies in the face of nine years of this war’s history and thousands of years of Afghan history.

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Italian charity sees UK behind Afghan medic arrests

By Massimiliano Di Giorgio

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65139&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 16, 2010

ROME (Reuters) - Italian medical charity Emergency said on Friday that foreign troops, especially the British military, may have been behind the arrest of three Italian aid workers in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

An Italian doctor, nurse and logistics officer from the Milan-based charity were arrested on April 10 with six Afghans and accused of plotting to kill the governor of the southerly province. Rome has complained to Kabul about their treatment.

They were taken from a hospital run by Emergency in Lashkar Gah, capital of the violent province which is the scene of a major assault by U.S. and British forces against the Taliban.

Provincial authorities said explosive suicide vests, hand grenades and pistols were found at the charity's hospital.

Britain's Defence Ministry said international forces were not involved in the arrests, but that British troops "deployed to the hospital ... at the request of the provincial governor's office" to secure the location after the arrests were made.

Gino Strada, leader and founder of Emergency, said: "There is a very serious chance countries in the coalition were involved, at least at the level of taking the decision".

"How does the English government dare to send armed soldiers into a hospital run by an Italian NGO? What would have happened if Italian soldiers had burst into a hospital run by an English NGO?" Strada asked at a news conference in Rome.

Emergency plans a rally in Rome on Saturday for the release of the nine who include Italians Marco Garatti, Matteo Dell'Aira and Matteo Pagani. Strada said they were "completely innocent" and 340,000 people have signed a petition for their release.

The foreign ministry in Rome said an Italian official had visited the three in jail in Kabul and they were in good health.

Emergency, which has worked in Afghanistan since 1999 including under Taliban rule, treats anyone at the Lashkar Gah clinic, regardless of which side they may have been fighting on.

Emergency cannot explain the presence of arms but says it was possible that "one of the (Afghan) guards was bribed or threatened" to hide the weapons and explosives.

Strada said it could be part of an attempt to get rid of "independent observers" like his charity in Helmand ahead of a big new push against the Taliban.

(Additional reporting by Avril Ormsby in London; Writing by Stephen Brown; Editing by Dominic Evans)




 

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NATO’s Afghan Civilian Killings More than Doubled in Early 2010

Is This the "Progress" President Obama Spoke Of?

by Jason Ditz

April 16, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65146&hd=&size=1&l=e

Yesterday much was made of the Red Cross report that showed that the number of civilians wounded by Taliban bombings had increased some 40% year over year. Today, the figure is much more stark, as NATO’s own figures revealed that the number of civilians killed by NATO in Afghanistan had well more than doubled year over year.

In the first three months of 2009, NATO killed 29 Afghan civilians according to their own, extremely conservative statistics. In the same period of this year, those numbers show at least 72 Afghan civilians killed by the international forces.

The numbers come as Gen. Stanley McChrystal promises yet more changes to the rules of engagement in the nation, designed to minimize civilian killings by the international forces. It should be noted, however, that Gen. McChrystal revised these rules several times in late 2009, only to see the civilian killings rise precipitously.

It also comes just a day after President Obama gave a high profile interview insisting "progress" was being made in the war, and that the Taliban’s momentum had been blunted. This could perhaps be defended in that the Taliban’s civilian toll rose only 40% while NATO’s civilian toll rose 148%, but this hardly seems to be the sort of progress that the president should be bragging about in international interviews.



 

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Taliban claim victory after US leaves 'Valley of Death'

Pak Watan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65170&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 17, 2010

KABUL, Taliban militants on Thursday claimed victory after the US military withdrew this week from a rebel-infested area in eastern Afghanistan that became known as the 'Valley of Death’.

Troops pulled back from Korengal, a rugged mountainous region in Kunar province bordering Pakistan, as part of what NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said was its new "repositioning" strategy.

The commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, US General Stanley McChrystal, is looking to concentrate his counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban in more populated areas.

"The move does not prevent forces from rapidly responding, as necessary, to crises there in Korengal and in other parts of the region, as well," ISAF commander General David Rodriguez said in a statement.

But an Afghan defence official said withdrawal could play into the hands of the Taliban, who have been fighting an increasingly deadly war against the foreign forces who ousted them from power in late 2001.

"Not only Korengal but any area that is abandoned is good for the Taliban. The enemy benefits from it. They can mass there, they can benefit from the population there," the official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

The Taliban, the main insurgent group that controls several districts in southern and eastern parts of the country, were quick to seize on the US withdrawal, after years of fierce fighting in the sparsely populated valley.

"It's a great victory for us," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.

"The area is very, very important for us. Its mountains provide us a good hideout, it can be used as a training ground and lead our operations across the region from there," he said.

"US troops fled under our constant attacks." The withdrawal coincides with a gradual increase in foreign forces in Afghanistan before a planned military push against the Taliban in their spiritual heartland of Kandahar, in the south of the country.

Troops levels are expected to increase from the current 126,000 to 150,000 in the coming months.





 

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Army Researchers: Why the Kandahar Offensive Could Backfire


By Nathan Hodge  April 16, 2010
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/army-researchers-why-the-kandahar-offensive-could-backfire/

The southern Afghan province of Kandahar trusts the Taliban more than the government. And that’s according to a survey commissioned by the U.S. Army.

Kandahar is expected to be the focal point of operations for U.S. and NATO troops this summer, but a poll recently conducted by the Army’s controversial social science program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), is warning that rampant local corruption, and a lack of security, could undermine coalition efforts to win the support of the local population.

Among other things, the survey’s authors warned that a lack of confidence in the Afghan government “sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.”

The unclassified report (.pdf) is worth examining for several reasons.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/04/kandahar-province-survey-report-5-apr-2010-for-isaf.pdf
For starters, it addresses many of the questions raised by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan. In an assessment made public earlier this year, Flynn complained that the coalition lacked a real understanding of the cultural context of the insurgency, and said troops needed richer information about the communities they were trying to engage.

That’s where HTS is supposed to come in. Originally, the program was focused on embedding social scientists and anthropologists within brigades. But as several people close to the program tell Danger Room, there is now an emphasis on larger-scale polls run by local contractors as a way to obtain a larger picture of the situation.

Both polling and embedding researchers have their risks, and their shortcomings: Two HTS social scientists have been killed in Afghanistan, but conducting surveys, even through local companies, can also be perilous. The survey draws on a total of 1,994 interviews covering nine of Kandahar Province’s 16 districts. But it leaves out seven crucial districts: As the survey’s authors note, there are “inherent dangers associated with conducting surveys in a conflict zone” like Kandahar Province, and interviewers stayed out of areas with active violence.


In other words, the survey leaves out the populations that most need to be understood, at least from the coalition’s perspective. Still, the results are telling. Interviewers queried residents of Kandahar on everything from quality of services like clean water, electricity to the availability of primary schooling for girls and boys and medical care. They also asked local residents about security government effectiveness.

Among the findings: Security on the roads is a major issue for residents of Kandahar. “When respondents are asked if they feel unsafe traveling within their district or around the province, in eight out of ten districts, at least half say they are unsafe,” the study says. And the biggest threat to security while traveling in the province, respondents said: Army and police checkpoints.

Likewise, attitudes in the south are generally sympathetic to the Taliban. Reconciliation with the insurgency is a popular concept in the province, and a significant majority of respondents viewed Taliban as “our Afghan brothers.” Some 84 percent cited “corruption” as the main reason for the conflict. But most of that corruption in on the government side: 53 percent said the Taliban cannot be corrupted.

Finally, there’s a significant amount of skepticism about the local police and security forces. “The primary reason respondents in Kandahar consider joining the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] is the desire for a job and a paycheck,” the study says. “Respondents are deterred from considering a career in the ANSF because of the dangers. Across all districts, the ANP [Afghan National Police] is viewed as a more dangerous profession than the ANA [Afghan National Army].”

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/army-researchers-why-the-kandahar-offensive-could-backfire/#ixzz0lT94FoKl

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Explosions hit Kandahar, Kabul
 
 
19/04/2010 12:19:31 PM GMT   
 
 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Explosions-hit-Kandahar-Kabul.html

 
An explosion has hit the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, a few hours after another blast struck an Army base near Kabul's airport, killing one soldier.

According to the Reuters news agency, the blast that hit near several government buildings on Monday sent dust and smoke in the sky.

It was not immediately known if the blast had any casualties.

Earlier on Monday, an explosion in an Army base in Kabul claimed one soldier's life. Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing.

The blast comes as US, Canadian and other NATO forces prepare for a major military offensive in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

At present, much of the province, including the surrounding areas of Kandahar City, are under Taliban control, especially when night falls.

Earlier, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, declared the Kandahar offensive to be the cornerstone of the US-NATO efforts to reverse the growing strength of the insurgency.

RZS/AKM
Source: Press TV
 

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South Asia
Apr 20, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD20Df02.html 
 
Afghan hash at an all-time high

By Julien Mercille

In addition to being the world's leading producer of opium, Afghanistan has now become the largest producer of hashish, according to the first-ever cannabis survey released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) this month. Again, the US invasion is behind the new record.

The 2009 Afghanistan Cannabis Survey revealed that there is large-scale cannabis cultivation in half (17 out of 34) of Afghanistan's provinces, covering a total area of 10,000 to 24,000 hectares every year (lower than opium cultivation, which covers 125,000 hectares). Afghanistan's crop yield is so high at 145 kilograms of resin per hectare that it overtakes other leading producers like Morocco, where cannabis covers a larger land area but whose yield is lower, at 40 kg/ha.

It is estimated that Afghanistan produces 1,500-3,500 tons of hashish annually, an industry involving 40,000 households. The total export value of Afghan hashish is still unknown, but its farm-gate value - the income paid to farmers - is estimated at about US$40-$95 million, roughly 15% that of opium ($438 million in 2009).

Abundance of supply fuels demand, making hashish the most commonly used drug in Afghanistan, whose more than 500,000 users are mostly men. Marijuana, the other drug that can be obtained from the cannabis plant, is a minor product in Afghanistan as compared with hashish. Farmers choose to grow cannabis mainly because it sells at a higher price than licit crops and even opium, fetching over $3,000/ha compared to $2,000 for opium and $1,000 for wheat. Many farmers grow both drugs but opium is still more important, in part because cannabis has a short shelf life and is a summer crop (when less water is available for irrigation).

The history of the two plants and the ways in which they have supported US foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is similar, although opium's impact has been more important in scale. In the 1960s, Westerners traveled to the Orient on the "Hippie Hashish Trail", passing through Istanbul, Delhi and Kabul. They found Afghan hashish of such a high quality that they started smuggling it back to their home countries, through syndicates such as "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love", a famous American group. This popularized hashish consumption in the West and generated an enormous demand, which Afghanistan and Pakistan filled starting in the 1970s.

King Zahir Shah (1933-1973), under whose rule cannabis cultivation was allowed in Afghanistan, even encouraged farmers to use fertilizers to boost exports to the West, before outlawing cultivation in the early 1970s under pressure from Richard Nixon, who had just launched his war on drugs. The Afghan police succeeded in eradicating a lot of the cannabis crops, but conveniently, cannabis farms controlled by Afghan government officials were spared, a bias reminiscent of today's situation.

The 1979 Soviet invasion further disrupted cannabis cultivation, which partly moved to Pakistan's tribal areas, where transformation into hashish and export took place, just like poppy cultivation and heroin processing. The US-supported mujahideen used the hashish trade to finance their fight against the Russian invaders.

The Taliban regime used opium to finance itself in the 1990s, but outlawed hashish production, some say because hashish was consumed by Afghans whereas opium was for the unbelievers in the West, although the real reason had more to do with the fact that there would have been an uprising against the Taliban if farmers had not been allowed to grow poppies. The Taliban ban on hashish was extremely effective - the crop persisting only in a few places - just like their later ban on opium in 2000-2001. But the 2001 US invasion changed all that, leading to the spread of cannabis to new areas, especially from 2005 onwards, according to independent experts and UNODC.

US/NATO policy played a role in stimulating cannabis and hashish production in several ways. First, the invasion itself removed the Taliban's ban and empowered Northern Alliance and other drug lords who received the necessary protection to continue and increase their production and trafficking of cannabis and opium, up to this day.

Secondly, cannabis cultivation has also been stimulated by poppy eradication campaigns, which led some farmers to simply switch to cannabis. The latter has been sometimes safer to grow, having been targeted even less than poppies, to which the US and NATO have not paid much attention in any case.

Thirdly, US/NATO's militaristic policies have not helped to contain the spread of hashish production: the UNODC report notes that “villages that had not received agricultural assistance were slightly more likely to have cannabis cultivation”. The problem is that while the US spends about $1 million a year to support the deployment of one American soldier in Afghanistan, an average of just $93 in development aid has been spent per Afghan per year over the past seven years. Put differently, the US alone has spent $227 billion on military operations in Afghanistan since 2001, while all international donors together have spent less than 10% of this amount on development aid.

US/NATO allies in Afghanistan continue to benefit from the hashish industry, as confirmed to this author by a UNODC official involved in drafting the report. The document states that “there is a clear geographic association between opium and cannabis cultivation at the provincial level” as well as at the trafficking level: “a large proportion of cannabis traders also trade opium.” This means that many members of the police, local militias, and ultimately, government officials supported actively or tacitly by international troops, do benefit from hashish production.

Yet, the American government and UNODC continue to have their eyes set on the drugs-Taliban connection. For instance, UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa declared that “All drugs in Afghanistan, whether opium or cannabis, are taxed by those who control the territory, providing an additional source of revenue for insurgents” - and what about sources of revenue for government forces?

The Taliban-cannabis association is also emphasized by repeating that, over the last few years, cannabis cultivation has shifted away from the north to the south (just like poppies), where the insurgency is raging. Costa can therefore state: "A concentration of cultivation in the southern part of Afghanistan shows that the Taliban and those insurgents that control the southern parts of the country are not only funding themselves by trafficking opium but also by trafficking cannabis. It's the same area."

True, the Taliban tax and control part of the trade in cannabis products. But as the UNODC report shows, cannabis trading centers are spread all over Afghanistan, which means that even though crops are concentrated in the south, hashish is traded everywhere and exported following similar routes as opium and heroin, to Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia. Therefore, although precise numbers regarding the total value of the cannabis industry in Afghanistan are not available yet, revenues are tapped by many segments of Afghan society, from farmers and police forces to warlords and insurgents.

This might give pause to the many pundits who argue that we must fight a war on drugs in order to cut the Taliban's finances. Wouldn't eliminating opium and cannabis crops also cut many other Afghans' income, including government forces', weakening them in their fight against insurgents?

This question has been pondered by Dutch marijuana shop owners post September 11, who have wondered if smoking Afghan hash amounts to supporting terrorism. One of the owners, Nol van Schaik, gave an interesting answer: “If the Northern Alliance are the people on the ground who are going to defeat the Taliban, people who want to defeat the Taliban should buy as much of their hash as they can," Van Schaik said. "It's a patriotic duty to buy their hash."

Whatever one thinks of this solution, it undermines mainstream experts' claims that ignore the fact that those they support are also involved in drugs. There are good reasons to eradicate drugs, but weakening the Taliban may not be the most logical one.

In fact, a double withdrawal could be the best solution for Afghanistan: get international troops out of the country to reduce locals' grievances that fuel the insurgency, and treat drug addicts in the West and Afghanistan to reduce the demand for narcotics.

Julien Mercille is lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland. He specializes in US foreign policy and geopolitics. He can be reached at jmercille@gmail.com.

 
 
 

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South Asia
Apr 20, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD20Df01.html 
 
The Afghan solution lies in the valley

By Brian M Downing

Last week, the United States withdrew a small contingent of troops from the Korengal Valley in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar. The valley had been the scene of continuous skirmishes and the occasional sizable engagement, but no decisive battle took place.

The withdrawal was announced a few months back and it is seen as a reallocation of troops away from inconclusive attrition and toward the more promising counter-insurgency operations going on in Helmand and about to be launched in Kandahar, both in the Taliban heartland of the south, both thought to be the key to the unfolding of the war over the next year or so.

The valley should not be considered an irrelevant part of the country now. Indeed, events there might be more important than those in the south. The American withdrawal affords the opportunity to examine the nature of the insurgency and determine the impact of the presence of foreign troops - and the impact of their departure as well.

The Korengal area also presents a test case to determine the political adroitness of President Hamid Karzai. He has been dressed down by the US in recent weeks and faces the beginning of the US exit in a little more than a year. The grisly death of his predecessor, Mohammad Najibullah, in 1996 at the hands of the Taliban must run through his mind more than occasionally.

The departure of foreign troops
One of the principal bases of the insurgency, in Kunar and elsewhere, is the presence of foreign forces, who in time appear as another wave of interlopers. This appears paradoxical but the theme of opposition to foreign presence - Persian, British, Russian - runs throughout Afghan history.

United States troops have been present for over eight years now and the promise of political and economic developments has given way to skepticism and resentment, at least where it has not become overt opposition. American and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces are wearing out whatever welcome they could once lay claim to. Other sources of conflict abound.

Western soldiers - young, boastful and parochial - will almost inevitably conflict with people of a traditional society long governed by elders and custom. Engagements with insurgents bring inadvertent death and destruction, resulting in greater support for the insurgency. Locals join guerrilla bands not out of ideology or religious fervor, but out of the desire to expel those deemed as having brought war into their district.

The exit of US troops from the Korengal Valley will undermine this basis of insurgent support there, with portentous implications. Similar dynamics played out in the late 1980s as Soviet troops withdrew from several provinces before completely leaving the country in 1989. The Soviet exit led not to expansive safe havens for the mujahideen but to widespread desertions from the mujahideen ranks. Most fighters served to expel the foreigners and, having done that, they went home in numbers.

Mujahideen leaders, having lost troops but also the unity stemming from a common enemy, turned on each other. Locals saw the insurgents as unruly nuisances who offered them nothing. Notables, seeking to restore a measure of tranquility once the Soviets had left, worked with the Najibullah government and helped to forge pacts between insurgent leaders and the central government. Former fighters chose to serve in newly formed government militias and they used their contacts to urge other mujahideen to come over.

These policies and developments have obvious parallels to present-day ambitions in Washington and Kabul alike vis-a-vis the Taliban. This "national reconciliation" program was surprisingly successful until the Soviet Union collapsed, subsidies dried up, and Kabul fell to the mujahideen in 1992. Its lessons may be critical today - paradoxical and galling though they may be in many quarters.

The Karzai government
Another principal base of the insurgency is the Kabul government’s failure to forge effective ties with local power holders. Thus far Karzai’s efforts have been more attuned to building his power than respecting locals. The Korengal Valley provides the opportunity for Karzai to win back the region - and perhaps as importantly, to win back support from NATO and its publics.

The government must parley with locals - the tribal elders and also other figures who have attained prominence during the tumult of the previous 30 years of continuous war. The government can present the Taliban as the only remaining outsiders - ones who offer little in the way of resources and development. Najibullah provided the template during the Soviet period and Karzai’s benefactors in Washington have deeper pockets than his predecessor’s benefactors in Moscow did.

Karzai has built up his sagging prestige in the countryside by harshly criticizing the US - for killing large numbers of civilians through the use of firepower, which is quite understandable, and for meddling in the recent election, which inasmuch as Karzai was responsible for massive fraud, is quite absurd. No matter - both assertions will serve him in rallying popular support. Americans would do well to look past this irksome behavior and ask if it will help effect an exit from a long and unpromising war.

Karzai would do well to bear in mind that Washington's patience is limited. President Barack Obama has announced that US troops will begin to leave Afghanistan and though ambiguity abounds vis-a-vis the pace and end point of the withdrawal, Karzai must build support or face the prospect of a graceless flight from his country or worse, sharing the grisly fate of his Soviet-backed predecessor.

The prospect of a US exit should spur Karzai to be more judicious and accommodating with local notables and chieftains. It will be remembered that the greatest period of South Vietnamese reform came not when president Lyndon B Johnson was berating his counterpart in Saigon, but when president Richard Nixon was withdrawing a hundred thousand troops a year. Political and social reforms were forthcoming, though they were not sufficient to prevent a North Vietnamese victory.

Greater support from the Pashtun south and east will strengthen Karzai’s position in ongoing dialogs with Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami insurgent leaders. Presently, insurgents are having their way, inflicting casualties and negotiating alliances. Winning back parts of Kunar and other provinces will be helpful in getting local commanders to switch over to Kabul and in convincing insurgent leaders to accept a settlement well short of seizing Kabul and controlling the whole country.

More tact from Kabul will also increase its support from regional powers that oppose a Taliban return to the heart of Central Asia. Iran, India, Russia, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan want to see a competent state in Kabul with which they can work to control the rise of militancy in Central Asia, from Uzbekistan to western China.

Success in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere will provide valuable lessons for countering the insurgency elsewhere and setting the stage for a negotiated settlement. Determining the roles of Western forces in causing the insurgency and of withdrawing them in easing the insurgency will be especially important.

The Kabul government's failure to win support in the valley will confirm the widespread view in the American public that Karzai is an unworthy ally in a distant war with increasingly dubious relevance to its national security. The US has abandoned the Korengal Valley; Afghans must now win it back.

Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and the author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.

 
 
 

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Monday, April 19, 2010
10:27 Mecca time, 07:27 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/20104196826856839.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban takes over Afghan valley 

Watch :

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/20104196826856839.html


The Taliban is claiming victory in eastern Afghanistan's Korengal Valley following the withdrawal of US forces from the remote outpost.

US officials, however, say the withdrawal in Kunar province was "a repositioning of forces" following a decision by General Stanley McChrystal, head of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, to concentrate resources on urban areas.


 
Taliban fighters say tonnes of fuel and ammunition were left behind by US forces

 
Korengal Valley, dubbed the Valley of Death by US forces, was frequently the scene of heavy fighting. At least 42 US troops were killed there over the past five years.

Days after the US withdrawal, Al Jazeera visited the valley and found the Taliban had control of the area and access to every part of the camp.

Local Afghans were also coming to visit the area, now strewn with litter and debris.

One local man said he believed stability would return to the area, now that foreign forces are gone.

"We don't want Americans, we don't want Germans or any other foreigner. We don't want foreigners, we want peace. We want Taliban and Islam - we don't want anything else."

Taliban plans

Taliban fighters told Al Jazeera they intended to make use of the US camp and launch attacks to capture more territory in the region.

"There is a lot of ammunition left behind – mortars, rockets, and missiles. This, God willing, we will [use] against them"  Anwar, local Taliban commander
 
They also claimed that they had captured tonnes of fuel and ammunition left behind by US forces.

"There is a lot of ammunition left behind – mortars, rockets, and missiles. This, God willing, we will [use] against them," Anwar, a local Taliban commander, told Al Jazeera's Qais Azimy.

Al Jazeera contacted the presidential palace in Kabul, as well as the headquarters of Nato's International Security Assistance Force  (Isaf) and the Pentagon, but none of them would comment on the Taliban takeover.

Mark Perry, an author based in Washington, DC and specialising in US military analysis, said the withdrawal of American forces from Korengal was not necessarily either a victory or defeat, but was in keeping with past strategy.

"This is a pretty small battle," he said.

"It's true that we left, but we weren't going to stay there anyway."

He said the US military is pursuing a strategy to try to cripple the Taliban and al-Qaeda where possible, and create "a breathing space for the government in Afghanistan to become politically rooted in the society".
 
 

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Taliban Buildup In Kandahar:

Islamist Fighters Prepare To Face NATO In Afghanistan


KATHY GANNON | 04/18/10 08:18 PM |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/19/taliban-buildup-in-kandah_n_542418.html


FILE - In this April 15, 2010 file photo, U.S. soldiers arrive at the scene after a car bomb exploded outside a hotel in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The Taliban are moving fighters into Kandahar, planting bombs and plotting attacks as NATO and Afghan forces prepare for a summer showdown with insurgents, according to a Taliban commander with close ties to senior insurgent leaders. NATO and Afghan forces are stepping up operations to push Taliban fighters out of the city


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The Taliban are moving fighters into Kandahar, planting bombs and plotting attacks as NATO and Afghan forces prepare for a summer showdown with insurgents, according to a Taliban commander with close ties to senior insurgent leaders.

NATO and Afghan forces are stepping up operations to push Taliban fighters out of the city, which was the Islamist movement's headquarters during the years it ruled most of Afghanistan. The goal is to bolster the capability of the local government so that it can keep the Taliban from coming back.

The Taliban commander, who uses the pseudonym Mubeen, told The Associated Press that if military pressure on the insurgents becomes too great "we will just leave and come back after" the foreign forces leave.

Despite nightly raids by NATO and Afghan troops, Mubeen said his movements have not been restricted. He was interviewed last week in the center of Kandahar, seated with his legs crossed on a cushion in a room. His only concession to security was to lock the door.

He made no attempt to hide his face and said he felt comfortable because of widespread support among Kandahar's 500,000 residents, who like the Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, Afghanistan's biggest ethnic community.

"Because of the American attitude to the people, they are sympathetic to us," Mubeen said. "Every day we are getting more support. We are not strangers. We are not foreigners. We are from the people."

It is difficult to measure the depth of support for the Taliban among Kandahar's people, many of whom say they are disgusted by the presence of both the foreign troops and the insurgents. Many of them say they are afraid NATO's summer offensive will accomplish little other than trigger more violence.

Mubeen said Taliban attacks are not random but are carefully planned and ordered by the senior military and political command that assigns jobs and responsibilities to its rank and file. The final arbiter is the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who heads the council, or shura, that decides strategic goals which are passed down the ranks to commanders in the field, he said.

"We are always getting instructions from our commanders, what suicide attacks to carry out, who to behead if he is a spy," Mubeen said, gesturing with a maimed hand suffered during fighting in 1996 when the Taliban were trying to gain control of the capital of Kabul.

Story continues below 
Then, like now, his enemies were members of the Northern Alliance, dominated by Afghanistan's minority ethnic groups and returned to power by the U.S.-led coalition following the Taliban's collapse in 2001.

Mubeen, a native of Zabul province, worked with the Taliban's civil aviation minister, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, during the Taliban's five-year rule. In the final days before the Taliban abandoned Kandahar in 2001, Mubeen played a crucial logistical role, helping move weapons and supplies to hideouts outside the city.

Mullah Mansoor was one of two senior Taliban figures named by Mullah Omar to replace the No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader, who was arrested in Pakistan in February.

Mubeen said that in the first years after the Taliban were routed, fighters had to survive in the mountains, rarely making forays into Afghan towns and villages. He attributed the Taliban comeback to deep resentment – especially among ethnic Pashtuns – to the presence of foreign military forces and public disgust with the Afghan government.

"Our brothers are already here and ready," he said. "Our people are skilled now. They know a lot of things, how to make things more difficult and to be more sophisticated in our attacks."

Mubeen said Taliban fighters had received better training, although he would not say where and by whom.

"But we were interested to get the training and we understood that we needed the training," he said.

Mubeen said the Taliban's main goal in the war is the establishment of sharia, or Islamic law, in Afghanistan. When they ruled the religious militia enforced an antiquated and regressive interpretation of Islamic law that appalled the West, including publicly amputating hands and feet for theft and carrying out public executions.

"We want sharia. That is first. Everything else comes after that," he said. "People want sharia and then development."

Mubeen said he was confident that efforts by President Hamid Karzai and his international partners to win over rank-and-file members with promises of amnesty, jobs and money would not succeed in undermining the insurgents.

"The government and the Americans did a lot of work to make disputes in the Taliban and to give money to the Taliban," he said.

He also said peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership would not take place without the blessing of Mullah Omar.

"The world community should leave our country and then we are ready to negotiate," he said.

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Ninety-Four Percent of Kandaharis Want Peace Talks, Not War

By Gareth Porter*

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65200&hd=&size=1&l=e

WASHINGTON, Apr 18, 2010 (IPS) - An opinion survey of Afghanistan's Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers".

The survey, conducted by a private U.S. contractor last December, covered Kandahar City and other districts in the province into which Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to introduce more troops in the biggest operation of the entire war. Those districts include Arghandab, Zhari, rural Kandahar and Panjwayi.

Afghan interviewers conducted the survey only in areas which were not under Taliban control.

The decisive rejection of the use of foreign troops against the Taliban by the population in Kandahar casts further doubt on the fundamental premise of the Kandahar campaign, scheduled to begin in June, that the population and tribal elders in those districts would welcome a U.S.-NATO troop presence to expel the Taliban.

That assumption was dealt a serious blow at a meeting on Apr. 4 at which tribal elders from all over Kandahar told President Hamid Karzai they were not happy with the planned military operation.

An unclassified report on the opinion survey was published in March by Glevum Associates, a Washington-based "strategic communications" company under contract for the Human Terrain Systems programme in Afghanistan. A link to the report was first provided by the website Danger Room which reported the survey Apr. 16.

Ninety-one percent of the respondents supported the convening of a "Loya Jirga", or "grand assembly" of leaders as a way of ending the conflict, with 54 percent "strongly" supporting it, and 37 percent "somewhat" supporting it. That figure appears to reflect support for President Karzai's proposal for a "peace Jirga" in which the Taliban would be invited to participate.

The degree to which the population in the districts where McChrystal plans to send troops rejects military confrontation and believes in a peaceful negotiated settlement is suggested by a revealing vignette recounted by Time magazine's Joe Klein in the Apr. 15 issue.

Klein accompanied U.S. Army Captain Jeremiah Ellis when he visited a 17-year-old boy in Zhari district whose house Ellis wanted to use an observation post. When Ellis asked the boy how he thought the war would end, he answered, "Whenever you guys get out from here, things will get better. The elders will sit down with the Taliban, and the Taliban will lay down their arms."

The Kandahar offensive seems likely to dramatise the contrast between the U.S. insistence on a military approach to the Taliban control of large parts of southern Afghanistan and the overwhelming preference of the Pashtun population for initiating peace negotiations with the Taliban as Karzai has proposed.

Ironically, highlighting that contradiction in the coming months could encourage President Barack Obama to support Karzai's effort to begin negotiations with the Taliban now rather than waiting until mid-2011, as the U.S. military has been advocating since last December.

Obama told a meeting of his "war cabinet" last month that it might be time to start negotiations with the Taliban, but Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have opposed any move toward negotiations until Gen. McChrystal is able to demonstrate clear success in weakening the Taliban.

The Taliban ruling council has taken advantage of the recent evidence of contradictions between Pashtuns in Kandahar and the U.S. military over the Kandahar offensive by signaling in an interview with The Sunday Times of London that Taliban leader Mullah Omar is prepared to engage in "sincere and honest" talks.

In a meeting in an unidentified Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan reported Sunday, two Taliban officials told the newspaper that Omar's aims were now limited to the return of sharia (Islamic law), the expulsion of foreigners and the restoration of security. It was the first major signal of interest in negotiations since the arrest of Mullah Omar's second in command, Mullah Baradar, in late January.

The report of the Glevum survey revealed that more people in Kandahar regard checkpoints maintained by the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) and ANA and ANP vehicles as the biggest threat to their security while traveling than identified either Taliban roadside bombs or Taliban checkpoints as the main threat.

Fifty-eight percent of the respondents in the survey said the biggest threat to their security while traveling were the ANA and ANP checkpoints on the road, and 56 percent said ANA/ANP vehicles were the biggest threat. Only 44 percent identified roadside bombs as the biggest threat – the same percentage of respondents who regard convoys of the International Security Assistance Force – the NATO command under Gen. McChrystal – as the primary threat to their security.

Only 37 percent of the respondents regarded Taliban checkpoints as the main threat to their security.

In Kandahar City, the main target of the coming U.S. military offensive in Kandahar, the gap between perceptions of threats to travel security from government forces and from the Taliban is even wider.

Sixty-five percent of the respondents in Kandahar City said they regard ANA/ANP checkpoints as the main threat to their security, whereas roadside bombs are the main problem for 42 percent of the respondents.

The survey supports the U.S. military's suspicion that the transgressions of local officials of the Afghan government, who are linked mainly to President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar province council and the main warlord in the province, have pushed the population into the arms of the Taliban.

An overwhelming 84 percent of the respondents agreed that corruption is the main cause of the conflict, and two-thirds agreed that government corruption "makes us look elsewhere". That language used in the questionnaire was obviously intended to allow respondents to hint that they were supporting the Taliban insurgents in response to the corruption, without saying so explicitly.

More than half the respondents (53 percent) endorsed the statement that the Taliban are "incorruptible".

"Corruption" is a term that is often understood to include not only demands for payments for services and passage through checkpoints but violence by police against innocent civilians.

The form of government corruption that has been exploited most successfully by the Taliban in Kandahar is the threat to destroy opium crops if the farmers do not pay a large bribe. The survey did not ask any questions about opium growing and Afghan attitudes toward the government and the Taliban, although that was one of the key questions that Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the head of intelligence for Gen. McChrystal, had sought clarification of.

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

(END)



 

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Ready for Kandahar battle, Taliban say

By KATHY GANNON, AP



Options include 'leave and come back after' foreigners gone


April 18, 2010

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The Taliban are moving fighters into Kandahar, planting bombs and plotting attacks as NATO and Afghan forces prepare for a summer showdown with insurgents, according to a Taliban commander with close ties to senior insurgent leaders.

NATO and Afghan forces are stepping up operations to push Taliban fighters out of the city, which was the Islamist movement's headquarters during the years it ruled most of Afghanistan. The goal is to bolster the capability of the local government so that it can keep the Taliban from coming back.

The Taliban commander, who uses the pseudonym Mubeen, told The Associated Press that if military pressure on the insurgents becomes too great "we will just leave and come back after" the foreign forces leave.

Despite nightly raids by NATO and Afghan troops, Mubeen said his movements have not been restricted. He was interviewed last week in the center of Kandahar, seated with his legs crossed on a cushion in a room. His only concession to security was to lock the door.

He made no attempt to hide his face and said he felt comfortable because of widespread support among Kandahar's 500,000 residents, who like the Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, Afghanistan's biggest ethnic community.

"Because of the American attitude to the people, they are sympathetic to us," Mubeen said. "Every day we are getting more support. We are not strangers. We are not foreigners. We are from the people."

It is difficult to measure the depth of support for the Taliban among Kandahar's people, many of whom say they are disgusted by the presence of both the foreign troops and the insurgents. Many of them say they are afraid NATO's summer offensive will accomplish little other than trigger more violence.

Orders from Omar

Mubeen said Taliban attacks are not random but are carefully planned and ordered by the senior military and political command that assigns jobs and responsibilities to its rank and file. The final arbiter is the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who heads the council, or shura, that decides strategic goals passed down the ranks to commanders in the field, he said.

"We are always getting instructions from our commanders, what suicide attacks to carry out, who to behead if he is a spy," Mubeen said, gesturing with a maimed hand suffered during fighting in 1996 when the Taliban were trying to gain control of the capital of Kabul.

Then, like now, his enemies were members of the Northern Alliance, dominated by Afghanistan's minority ethnic groups and returned to power by the U.S.-led coalition following the Taliban's collapse in 2001.

Mubeen, a native of Zabul province, worked with the Taliban's civil aviation minister, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, during the Taliban's five-year rule. In the final days before the Taliban abandoned Kandahar in 2001, Mubeen played a crucial logistical role, helping move weapons and supplies to hideouts outside the city.

Mullah Mansoor was one of two senior Taliban figures named by Mullah Omar to replace the No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader, who was arrested in Pakistan in February.

Mubeen said that in the first years after the Taliban were routed, fighters had to survive in the mountains, rarely making forays into Afghan towns and villages. He attributed the Taliban comeback to deep resentment — especially among ethnic Pashtuns — to the presence of foreign military forces and public disgust with the Afghan government.

'More sophisticated' attacks vowed

"Our brothers are already here and ready," he said. "Our people are skilled now. They know a lot of things, how to make things more difficult and to be more sophisticated in our attacks."

Mubeen said Taliban fighters had received better training, although he would not say where and by whom.

"But we were interested to get the training and we understood that we needed the training," he said.

Mubeen said the Taliban's main goal in the war is the establishment of sharia, or Islamic law, in Afghanistan. When they ruled the religious militia enforced an antiquated and regressive interpretation of Islamic law that appalled the West, including publicly amputating hands and feet for theft and carrying out public executions.

"We want sharia. That is first. Everything else comes after that," he said. "People want sharia and then development."

Mubeen said he was confident that efforts by President Hamid Karzai and his international partners to win over rank-and-file members with promises of amnesty, jobs and money would not succeed in undermining the insurgents.

"The government and the Americans did a lot of work to make disputes in the Taliban and to give money to the Taliban," he said.

He also said peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership would not take place without the blessing of Mullah Omar.

"The world community should leave our country and then we are ready to negotiate," he said.




 

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Taliban’s Supreme Leader Signals Willingness To Talk Peace

By Stephen Grey in Kandahar

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25240.htm

April 18, 2010 "The Times" -- The supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has indicated that he and his followers may be willing to hold peace talks with western politicians.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, two of the movement’s senior Islamic scholars have relayed a message from the Quetta shura, the Taliban’s ruling council, that Mullah Omar no longer aims to rule Afghanistan. They said he was prepared to engage in “sincere and honest” talks.

A senior US military source said the remarks reflected a growing belief that a “breakthrough” was possible. “There is evidence from many intelligence sources [that] the Taliban are ready for some kind of peace process,” the source said.

At a meeting held at night deep inside Taliban-controlled territory, the Taliban leaders told this newspaper that their military campaign had only three objectives: the return of sharia (Islamic law), the expulsion of foreigners and the restoration of security.

“[Mullah Omar] is no longer interested in being involved in politics or government,” said Mullah “Abdul Rashid”, the elder of the two commanders, who used a pseudonym to protect his identity.

“All the mujaheddin seek is to expel the foreigners, these invaders, from our country and then to repair the country’s constitution. We are not interested in running the country as long as these things are achieved.”

The interview was conducted by a reputable Afghan journalist employed by The Sunday Times with two members of the shura that directs Taliban activity across the whole of southern Afghanistan, including Helmand and Kandahar provinces. It was arranged through a well established contact with the Taliban’s supreme leadership.

Looking back on five years in government until they were ousted after the attacks in America on September 11, 2001, the Taliban leaders said their movement had become too closely involved in politics.

Abdul Rashid said: “We didn’t have the capability to govern the country and we were surprised by how things went. We lacked people with either experience or technical expertise in government.

“Now all we’re doing is driving the invader out. We will leave politics to civil society and return to our madrasahs [religious schools].”

The Taliban’s position emerged as an American official said colleagues in Washington were discussing whether President Barack Obama could reverse a long-standing US policy and permit direct American talks with the Taliban.

If the Taliban’s military aims no longer included a takeover of the Afghan government, this would represent “a major and important shift”, the US official said.

The Taliban objectives specified on their website had already shifted, Nato officials said, from the overthrow of the “puppet government” to the more moderate goal of establishing a government wanted by the Afghan people.

In the interview, the two leaders insisted that reports of contact between the Taliban and the Kabul government were a “fraud” and stemmed from claims made by “charlatans”. Up to now, no officially sanctioned talks have taken place, they said.

They laid down no preconditions for substantive negotiations, saying simply that the Taliban were ready for “honest dialogue”. Another Taliban source with close links to the Quetta shura said the movement was willing to talk directly to “credible” western politicians, including Americans, but not to intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

This source said that although the Taliban’s unwavering objective remained the withdrawal of all foreign troops, their preconditions for talks might now be limited to guarantees of security for their delegates and a Nato ceasefire.

According to a Nato intelligence source, Taliban representatives have established direct contact with several ministers in President Hamid Karzai’s government. But they refuse to have any direct contact with Karzai, whom they regard as an “illegitimate puppet”.

During an interview that lasted for several hours and was interrupted only by the coming and going of messengers on motorbikes, our reporter heard nothing from the Taliban leaders to suggest that the movement was weary of war, as some western analysts have claimed.

Instead, he was told that the Taliban believe they are winning and are able to negotiate from a position of strength. Asked about a forthcoming Nato offensive in the Kandahar region, a local Taliban commander who sat alongside the two scholars boasted: “We’re ready for this. We’re going to break the Americans’ teeth.”

The Taliban leaders said that lessons had been learnt from Nato’s last big offensive in the Marjah area of Helmand province earlier this year. When Nato gave advance notice of the operation, the Taliban were lured into sending too many fighters to the area, some of whom died.

The leaders said that in Kandahar a plan to counter Nato had already been prepared.

“There will be no surprise there,” said Abdul Rashid. “We have our people inside all positions in the city, in the government and the security forces.”

He added that America already had enough problems “to haunt her” and fighting in Kandahar would only turn more people against it.

“People don’t trust the foreigners because they are backing the warlords. People are fed up with crime and brutality and that’s a big problem for the Americans. We’re well positioned, with supporters everywhere.”

As they prepare for the traditional summer fighting season, the Taliban leaders are placing as much emphasis as Nato on winning the hearts and minds of the population.

Abdul Rashid said there had been Taliban commanders who had financed their campaigns by taking bribes to give safe passage to Nato supply convoys or from drug smugglers. But the Taliban’s leadership had ordered a halt to this.

“What we do is not for a worldly cause — it is for the sake of Allah. More important than the fighting for us now is the process of purification. We are getting rid of all the rotten apples,” he said.

Copyright 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.
 

[bigron]

Don't mention the war

Afghanistan: A conspiracy of silence

By Brian Brady

AFP/Getty Images - A British soldier stands guard during a patrol in Qari Saheb village in Helmand province


April 18, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65209&hd=&size=1&l=e

An IoS poll shows 77 per cent of Britons want our forces to come home and a majority believe our presence makes UK streets less safe from terrorist attack. Yet all three parties are ducking this most critical issue

It is one of the few genuine issues of life and death during this general election campaign. It will not dictate how much any British school improves, how many police appear on the streets of a city, or how quickly patients are allowed to leave hospitals around the country. But it will, literally, decide the fate of thousands of British service personnel and, ultimately, how many of them live and die.

Yet nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan.

When Nick Clegg "won" the televised party leaders' debate on Thursday night, his victory owed nothing to his limp response to a question about support for British troops serving in Afghanistan. The Liberal Democrat leader agreed that British troops in Afghanistan were under-paid and under-equipped, but he did not question why they had lost 281 colleagues in that country, or why they were there in the first place.


Similarly, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have pledged loyal support for a campaign that is deep into its ninth year, and shows no sign of nearing an end. In front of the cameras, the Prime Minister offered sombre reflection on the campaign, while Mr Cameron queried the number of helicopters available to British forces. Yet neither has gone out of his way to tackle the issue head-on elsewhere during this campaign, to explain why the UK should remain in Afghanistan, why it should continue to support a discredited government in Kabul, and how many more British service personnel must die before the mission can be brought to a close.

Last November, The Independent on Sunday called for a "phased, orderly withdrawal" of British forces from the "ill-conceived, unwinnable and counterproductive" campaign in Afghanistan. The UK still remains in there – and more than 50 servicemen have died since then. Last month, The IoS revealed that Britain harboured profound concerns at the highest levels over the quality of the Afghan police who must guarantee security before our troops can leave.

The leaders may, at last, be forced to explain their positions this week, when the second debate concentrates on foreign affairs. But, given their performance so far, it is unlikely that they will offer any fresh hope for the service personnel in Afghanistan or their families back home.

"We want to see more substantive engagement on defence issues from the parties," said Douglas Young, executive chairman of the British Armed Forces Federation, an independent staff association for service personnel. "Up to now, there have been too many airy-fairy platitudes and not enough substance."

These are leaders who last week presented election manifestos amounting to more than 80,000 words on their grand plans for education, health, the economy, but who managed to mention Afghanistan only 19 times between them.

The stifling of the issue might be due to the fact that all the main parties know their policies are entirely at odds with the feelings of the population over Afghanistan. In November, a poll found that 73 per cent of people wanted British troops to come home within "a year or so" – and almost half of them called for immediate withdrawal.

A poll for The IoS today finds that this number has increased, with 77 per cent now supporting withdrawal on the same terms. The number disagreeing is now below one in seven. Further, more than 50 per cent of those polled believe that the risk of terrorism in the UK is increased by the presence of British troops in Afghanistan.

However, none of the major parties is promising to pull troops out if they get into government and only the Scottish National Party – confined to one part of the UK – is calling for an honest reappraisal of the operation. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, last week made much of his record of "speaking out pretty forcefully" on Afghanistan. But his manifesto commits the party to being "critical supporters of the Afghanistan mission'', albeit with a pledge to match the military surge to a strategy of tackling corruption and winning over moderate Taliban.

The Lib Dem defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, yesterday conceded that anti-war voters have few choices. "If they are against the whole principle of being involved [in Afghanistan], they'll struggle to find anyone putting that case," he said. For opponents of the war, the lack of differentiation between the three main parties and their failure to embrace the Afghan question during the first two weeks of the election campaign amounts to a "conspiracy of silence" to suppress debate.

Chris Nineham, of the Stop the War Coalition, said: "There has been a deafening silence about Afghanistan in the run-up to the election. The three main parties are doing their best not to mention the war, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population oppose it."

Yet, despite complaints from the most vocal critics of the war, there is no guarantee that, however strongly voters feel, they are prepared to treat it as an electoral issue. In November 2006, when the toll of British deaths during five years of the campaign stood at 41, pollsters Ipsos Mori found that "defence/foreign affairs/Iraq and Afghanistan" topped the list of concerns facing the country. Two out of five voters spontaneously identified it as a key national problem. Three and a half years on, with 240 added to the death toll – 36 this year alone – it has slipped to seventh.

A leaked CIA report last month observed how "some Nato states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission". It also argued that such apathy "enabled leaders to ignore voters". It seems that Britain's leaders are banking on indifference to help them through a potentially troublesome campaign without having to confront the most troubling issue before them.

"All three parties in 2001 thought we should go in. There are no votes in it, so they keep quiet about it," said General Sir Hugh Beach, former deputy commander of British Land Forces.

Five years ago, public opposition to the Iraq War was widely listed as a contributory factor behind a general election result that cut Labour's majority from 167 to 66. And lingering rancour over the war helped to lever Mr Blair from office two years later.

Afghanistan has been different. It has been overwhelmingly regarded as the "just" war. It was portrayed as a campaign to democratise a wild nation, to oust the Taliban, al-Qa'ida and all the extremists threatening the West with terror plots over the past decade.

That justification has lost its power as the death toll spirals and Afghans show little inclination to take control of their own affairs. Military commanders in Pakistan, where suicide bombers killed more than 40 people yesterday, regard the failure of US-led forces to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan with ill-concealed derision.

"They don't have the legitimacy we do," said Colonel Nauman Saeed, who commands 3,500 solders in Bajaur, a mountainous district on the Afghan border. "Afghans see them as illegitimate intruders and occupation forces." At the moment, the Pakistan military are in a victorious mood after retaking much of the territory along the Afghan border which was ruled by the Pakistan Taliban a year ago.

When experts point to terror plots from Pakistan and even within the UK, the Government's contention that the Afghan campaign is vital to protect Britain's security at home is difficult to explain.

And the government of President Karzai continues to raise concerns in Nato capitals. "The problem we have is that the regime in Afghanistan, which we support, is built on electoral fraud, with graft and corruption," said the SNP's foreign affairs spokesman, Angus Robertson. "We need to be absolutely honest about our options, and one of the aspects of that is that there needs to be a decision about when we bring our forces home."

The IoS military covenant panel

Major General Patrick Cordingley

"There is an embargo on the Ministry of Defence, so there is virtually no news coming out of them. The two main parties basically agree on Afghanistan. If somebody disagreed it would be a big issue but as they all agree, there's no point banging on about it."

Major Julian Thompson

"The reason is the parties have stayed off the issue in toto. Defence is unfortunately the last thing people think about and it is not something that turns people on. Labour got us in there in the first place and don't want people to be reminded of it."

General Sir Hugh Beach

"Nobody thinks there are votes in it one way or the other. All three parties in 2001 thought we should go in. There are no votes in it either way, so they keep quiet about it."

Rose Gentle, mother of Fusilier Gordon Gentle, killed in Iraq

"It isn't really a vote-winner. Iraq isn't mentioned and the soldiers that died there are the silent heroes. Families I've spoken to think someone should say something about it, but to be honest I don't think anyone will."

Retired Colonel Clive Fairweather

"In 2001 it was the war on terror, but since then the country can't make the connection with the war on terror any more. I don't think the Tories or Nick Clegg have much else to offer. It would only become an issue if there were multiple casualties, which is not very good for troop morale."

James Fergusson, journalist, foreign correspondent and author of 'A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan'

"It is easy to say we need more helicopters but I have always thought that the argument that we are fighting over there to protect the streets is easily shot down. But I think the [political] opponents are too scared to take on the issue."

The Rifleman: 'William would have made a fantastic husband and dad'

Anyone who met Rifleman William Aldridge had only to look at the teenager to know how much his family meant to him: he had the name of his young brother George tattooed on his arm.

He had planned to get Archie, the name of the youngest brother, inked on his other arm but was deployed to Afghanistan before he got the chance. He was killed, aged 18, by an IED blast while on foot patrol with the 2nd Battalion The Rifles in Sangin province on July 10. He now holds the tragic distinction of being the youngest British soldier to die in the conflict.

It took his mother Lucy Aldridge, 42, a couple of weeks to find the right words to tell his brothers – then aged five and four – that they would not see him again. "I explained that William was doing a very important job protecting people in another country but now he had a much more important job to do and that meant that he wouldn't be able to come home because he had gone to be with the angels and look after everybody."

William's brothers meant "everything to him. He would have made a fantastic husband and dad."

The rifleman was a "very keen outdoors type" as a child, enjoying martial arts, rowing and canoeing. He was a Cub and a Scout, and joined a rifles cadet force when he was 12, his mum said from the family home in Bredenbury, Herefordshire.

"It was his dream, so I couldn't have been happier with him knowing exactly what he wanted to do."

That dream saw him sign up at the age of 16 after taking his GCSEs at the Minster College in Leominster. He passed out in August 2008 after basic training at the Army Foundation College in Harrogate and moved to Catterick for infantry training. He joined his battalion in Ballykinlar, Northern Ireland, that December.

William, who had formed part of the rearguard looking after families of serving soldiers, was posted to Afghanistan three days after celebrating his 18th birthday on 23 May last year with a family meal.

In their last conversation he sounded in "good spirits" but also "extremely tired" after being at a patrol base for 10 instead of 28 days due to "an inability for them to be resupplied with equipment, with basics like water and ammunition".

Two days later, he was killed following an improvised explosive device (IED) blast during an early-morning foot patrol. The "calm" soldier helped comrades caught up in an earlier explosion in which he had also been injured. He was airlifted to Camp Bastion but died about an hour and a half later.

Ms Aldridge is calling for a ban on foot patrols "unless greater safety measures are put in place to protect these young men".

She has since thrown herself into fundraising, launching the Kilimanjaro 2010 Appeal in October. The project hopes to raise £40,000 for the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine patient welfare fund at Selly Oak Hospital and the Rifleman's Fund, supporting injured riflemen and bereaved families.

This October, she will officially launch the William Aldridge Foundation to raise money to support charities caring for wounded service personnel across the three armed forces. She wants to expand help "not just for the physically injured but those who are psychologically scarred", and describes the problem of soldiers suffering mental illness as a "ticking time bomb" that urgently needs government funding.

"I would hope that had my son returned home somebody would be doing the same for him," she said.

Kate Youde

The amputee: 'He never wavered'

At just three, Lance Corporal Simon Wiggins was inspired by his grandfather's interest in the Guards, and the pair watched Zulu together. Now 23, he is rehabilitating after stepping on an IED on 16 March 2008, while serving with the First Battalion Coldstream Guards in Helmand. The blast – two weeks before he was due home – necessitated the amputation of his leg. He also suffered extensive internal trauma and lost a finger. His mother, Gilly Wiggins, 50, of Coulsdon, Surrey, said his military passion never wavered during his childhood and "he used to go running with a backpack full of Coke bottles filled with water to train".

The sniper enlisted in 2004 after his A-levels and trained at Catterick, passing out in May 2005. He was serving in Iraq the following month.

But Mrs Wiggins, vice chair of a support group at the charity Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association Forces Help, worried about his deployment to Afghanistan and had a "strange feeling" about it. Her son made a "miraculous recovery" and is now at the regiment's Aldershot base.

Kate Youde

The veteran: 'I was a mess. The Army didn't help me'

Lance Corporal Jim Maguire (not his real name), 29, from Hull joined the Army in 1998 and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He began to develop obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), depression and anxiety in Iraq which developed into PTSD after he was ambushed in his Scimitar in a village in southern Afghanistan. "I was a mess. The Army didn't provide me with help. Fortunately I was referred to Combat Stress. They saved my life. I met other guys who'd been through it too. It was a massive help. It's easy to hide a problem. They hide people like me. "

Paul Bignell

The mother: 'I was glued to the news'

Diane Blackmore-Heal, a police officer from Banbury, near Oxford, welcomed her son, Adam, 22, home just two weeks ago after a seven-month tour with the Household Cavalry in Helmand province.

"Adam has wanted to be in the Army since he was five years old. This was his first tour of active duty, and I don't think I realised how stressed I was until he came home and I started to sleep properly again. I was glued to the news for seven months. Somehow I felt he would come back but I was aware of the IEDs and worried whether he would cope with a serious injury. Adam showed me a picture of a colleague, taken after he lost both legs on their last patrol; it could have been him."

Nina Lakhani

The parties...

Labour

Manifesto: 78pp, 30,227 words

Defence: 2,750 words

Health: 2,950 words, 47 mentions

Education: 1,927 words, 61 mentions

Afghanistan: 11 mentions

Conservatives

Manifesto: 120pp, 28,733 words

Defence: 1,178 words

Health 1,741 words, 72 mentions

Education: 1,184 words, 58 mentions

Afghanistan: 5 mentions

Lib Dems

Manifesto: 110pp, 21,668 words

Defence: 466 words

Health: 1,143 words, 34 mentions

Education: 1,719 words, 87 mentions

Afghanistan: 3 mentions

Greens

Manifesto: 50pp, 20,427 words

Defence: 254 words

Health: 715 words, 59 mentions

Education: 522 words, 35 mentions

Afghanistan: 4 mentions



 

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Afghan resistance statement

American Colonialist Agenda

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65215&hd=&size=1&l=e

Monday, 19 April 2010

The current war in Afghanistan is in all its shapes and manifestations a liberation struggle by indigenous people against foreign invaders and their internal surrogates. The Afghans have proved their mettle as a free and independent people throughout their history by never bowing to foreign aggressions. Though America paints this war as a fight against terrorism but in fact it is a colonialist slogan by Washington, aimed at extending its own tentacle over Asia and, by extension, all over the world. In 1992, when the former Afghan president Najibulla’s regime fell, the Americans embarked on a colonialist policy, indirectly encouraging domestic war in Afghanistan. On the one hand, they stopped the annual assistance the Afghans in the shape of humanitarian relief and weapons to the tune of $600 million which they used to give to the Afghan Mujahideen and refugees but on the other hand they insisted on inclusion of the remains of the former communists of Halq and Parcham in the new dispensation . They called it a broad-based set-up. Washington also did not insist on dissolution of some notorious militia groups of the Najibulla regime like Dostum militia, General Momin, Babajan and Naderi militias. These militias had key role in turning Afghanistan into bloodbath and perpetrating atrocities, killing and looting innocent people and committing crimes that were unprecedented in the Afghan history. They should have helped to bring these criminal to justice but instead of supporting a clean, independent , efficient government in Kabul, Washington indirectly ignited the flames of war. Pentagon strategist wanted to discredit the Mujahideen, weaken their manpower as a result of a war of attrition and get rid of the weapons that had amassed from the previous years. They began to call Mujahideen as warlords while previously they preferred to call them as freedom fighters. They provoked some unscrupulous elements inside the former Mujahideen groups to commit some heinous crimes against their own people because Washington believed it would end people’s enchantment with an Islamic government in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban Islamic Movement emerged to foil the American conspiracy and establish an Islamic government in the country. But Washington tended from day one to oppose the young Islamic government, until in October 2001 when America attacked Afghanistan under the spurious pretext of fighting terrorism.

Now we are in the ninth year of the war. Washington is still repeating the same hackneyed clichés of fighting terrorism, though it has lost its initial splendor. Throughout this period, Americans committed the worst kind of human rights violations in Bagram, Kandahar and Abu Gharib jails. They have tortured and killed many innocent prisoners in various secret cells of interrogations inside their military bases in Afghanistan which are run by CIA and special operation forces, bulldozing the dead bodies under the ground.

Now after almost one decade, many observers in the world have come round to believe that the American war in Afghanistan is not aimed at fighting terrorism as they claims but rather they want to:

1. Use Afghanistan as an outpost to destabilize and carry out a regime change in the neighboring countries.

2 To control central Asian natural resources by bringing to power pro-western elements in these countries of the former Soviet republics.

3. To change the regime in Iran by supporting anti-government forces in Iran, financially politically and militarily. To spark off racial and sectarians violence in that country.

4. To disintegrate and destabilize Pakistan.

5. To pave the way and ignite vast demonstrations in China through Faulong movement to destabilize that country; to monitor China internal politics and military arsenal by installing electronic equipment in Minhas base in Kyrgyzstan and in Marja Helmand province, Afghanistan to monitor Iran’s nuclear program.

4. To make alliance with the so-called big democracy i.e. India against China and Pakistan. American has already given green signal to New Delhi to ramp up its activities in Baluchistan by working closely with Baluchistan Liberation Army.

6. To create utopian fear among the establishment echelon in Islamabad by launching the Talibanization propaganda, encouraging them to support the so-called war on terror. However, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has made it clear time and against that it will not interfere in the internal affairs of any country and believe in the peaceful co-existence of countries with different social systems. . Until and unless Washington achieves those goals, it will always say it is not right time to withdraw from Afghanistan peacefully or seek peace talks with Taliban. Future developments will unravel this.




 

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UK accused over Taliban torture risk when handing over insurgents

by Richard Norton-Taylor

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65232&hd=&size=1&l=e

• Anti-war activivist seeks review over risk of torture
• Government accused of 'head in the sand' attitude

Arab 19, 2010

British forces handed over suspected insurgents to the Afghan secret service with a clear risk they would face "horrible abuse" and torture, the high court heard today.

The accusations were made by anti-war activist Maya Evans, from St Leonards, East Sussex, who is seeking judicial review of the government's detainee transfer policy in Afghanistan.

So concerned is the Ministry of Defence about the challenge to the practice, that it is insisting that evidence it had passed to her lawyers must now be suppressed.

As a result, skeleton argument from her lawyers – a document consisting of an outline of the case – includes a number of passages blacked out at the insistence of the MoD.

Following one long excised passage, the document revealed in court today reads: "The lessons from these shocking events is … investigation by the NDS [Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security] is obviously incapable of providing any satisfaction of the UK's human rights obligations."

Public Interest Lawyers, the solicitors' firm representing Evans, say the "horrific brutality" of the NDS was well documented.

They say they have gathered details of nine cases involving allegations of beatings, electrocution, sleep deprivation, individuals forced into stress positions and whipping with rubber cables.

Michael Fordham QC, for Evans, told the court: "The issue in this anxious case is whether the practice of handing over of suspect insurgents to the NDS is compatible with Article 3."

He told Lord Justice Richards and Mr Justice Cranston: "We will submit emphatically that it is not. It never was." Article 3 of the European Humans Rights Convention prohibits torture, and inhuman and or degrading treatment.

The MoD initially described Evans' legal challenge to the British practice of handing over detainees to the NDS as "totally misconceived", the high court was told.

However, after allegations came to light about ill-treatment at NDS facilities in Kandahar, Kabul, and Sangin, in Helmand province, there was a "change of direction".

The ministry "finally acknowledged that there were serious issues" involved and agreed to a judicial review, a court challenge to the practice, Fordham said.

He referred to "reputable reports which record that the use of torture and other serious ill-treatment is endemic and indeed routinely resorted to by NDS officials, even at a very high level".

The British government's denials of such abuse were the result of a "head in the sand" attitude, he said. Fordham continued: "The factual and evidential picture which has emerged is a deeply troubling one."

The judges were told that part of the case will be heard in secret without lawyers representing Evans from hearing the evidence.

Other parts will be heard in what was described as "semi-secret", with all the lawyers present but the media and members of the public excluded.

Britain agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2006 with the Afghan government upholding the "basic principles of international human rights law such as … the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment".

However, the court was told that British officials had admitted that the "whole legal basis" of the MoU was based on trust. One unidentified official was described as admitting that when the undertakings were broken it put the UK government "in a very difficult position".

The MoU was described as "aspirational in nature".

The NDS had consistently denied that it was bound by the MoU and had shown disregard, even contempt, for its terms, the court was told. The fact that there were no sanctions, political or legal, when the MoU was breached, was described as a "serious flaw".

Evans said before the hearing: "The government is deeply mired in allegations of torture in Afghanistan. I'm pleased that, at last, a British court is to scrutinise this. Human rights should be at the centre of our government's policy, not an inconvenient afterthought."

The hearing continues tomrrow.





 

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Push on to protect new troops from IEDs

Marines with the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion try to free an MRAP vehicle stuck in mud during a March 13 mission around Khan Neshin in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-04-18-mrap_N.htm

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is scrambling to provide the latest handheld mine sweepers and observation balloons to detect makeshift bombs for the thousands of additional troops President Obama has ordered to Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates assigned Under Secretary Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's top acquisition official, and Marine Lt. Gen. John "Jay" Paxton to identify what troops need and get it to them by the peak of the summer fighting season. By June, the last of the 30,000 new troops Obama ordered will arrive and are expected to be part of an offensive to secure Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city.

"Jay and I are not focused on next year, long programs, finding the perfect technical solution," Carter said in an interview with USA TODAY. "We're focused on the here and now."

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) continue to be the No. 1 threat to kill or wound U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.

Critical equipment being rushed to Afghanistan includes:

• Handheld mine and explosive detectors. Commanders in Afghanistan issued an urgent request for devices that can be used quickly and easily by troops who leave the protection of their armored vehicles. About 3,500 mine detectors are in the process of being shipped to Afghanistan..

Another device being fielded is the Sherlock, which helps troops detect explosives made from fertilizer, the primary component of bombs in Afghanistan.

• Balloon-mounted cameras, known as elevated line of sight surveillance.

"These are large airships like the balloon that's over the ball game," Carter said. "The soldier that looks up there knows that that's protecting him, the townsman knows that that's protecting him, the Taliban knows that that might be looking at him. That's a way of providing eyes in the sky when we just don't have enough of the fancy (drones)."

The military is doubling the number of balloons by summer, said Navy Cmdr. Wendy Snyder, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

• Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed specifically for rugged terrain and poor roads in Afghanistan. The vehicle's raised chassis allows the blast to dissipate before hitting its V-shaped hull, which deflects the force.

There are about 1,000 all-terrain MRAPs in Afghanistan, and thousands more will be shipped there as quickly as possible, Carter said.

Another key to reducing bomb attacks is stemming the flow of fertilizer — the primary ingredient — from Pakistan, Paxton said.

"What we're expecting to do, particularly along the border is to make the transshipment of it more difficult, to make the detection of it more positive and earlier and to do all those things where we can to interdict or identify and narrow down and close the supply chain," he said.

The Counter-IED Senior Integration Group's mission is to accelerate the work of task forces and organizations also charged with a portion of the Pentagon's IED effort, Carter said. Task forces already exist for MRAPs and intelligence gathering and surveillance. JIEDDO, the principal counter-IED agency, will have a budget of $3.4 billion in 2011.

"We're not a new bureaucracy," Carter said.

Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Carter's group can help if it expedites critical equipment to Afghanistan, though he wondered if another task force was needed.

"I wouldn't want a gap to go unfilled, but this does seem a little late in the game," he said.

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US forces kill 4, injure dozen Afghans

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:59:42 GMT
http://presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=123850&sectionid=351020403

   
 
US military forces have opened fire on a vehicle killing four and wounding more than a dozen civilians in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost.

The dead included an Afghan lawyer, Afghan provincial authorities said.

The Afghan government said it has launched a joint investigation into the incident, a Press TV correspondent reported on Tuesday.

The US military claimed its forces opened fire after the driver ignored flares and other warnings to slow down, including hand signals.

At least 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed in fighting last year, an increase of 14 percent from 2008, according to the United Nations.

Civilian deaths are a result of actions by militants, including ambushes, assassinations and roadside bombs, as well as offensives and indiscriminate air strikes carried out by US-led forces in conflict-plagued Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly criticized coalition forces for violating their commitment to safeguard Afghan civilian lives.

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Officials: NATO forces kill four Afghan school students

The Education Ministry said in a statement that the four dead were students, aged 11 to 17.


Deutsche Presse-Agentur
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65257&hd=&size=1&l=e

The body of a child lies in a coffin decorated with flowers in Khost province on April 20, 2010. Four children were killed April 19 in crossfire between foreign soldiers and insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, the education ministry said on April 20. (Photo: Getty Images)




April 20, 2010 - DPA


Kabul - Afghan officials said Tuesday that NATO forces shot dead four Afghan school students, but NATO said those killed were Taliban militants and their associates.

The incident happened around three kilometres south of Khost city, the capital of the south-eastern province of Khost, on Monday night, Mubarez Mohammad Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial governor, told the German Press Agency dpa.

He said all the deceased were civilians who were driving in a vehicle that failed to stop at military checkpoint. 'We condemn the attack,' he said.

The Education Ministry said in a statement that the four dead were students, aged 11 to 17. The ministry condemned the attack.

However, NATO said in a statement that two of the dead people were 'known insurgents' and the other two were their associates.



Afghan mourners gather to pray by the flower-decorated coffins of four children in Khost province on April 20, 2010. Four students were killed April 19 in crossfire between foreign soldiers and insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, the education ministry said. (Photo: Getty Images)


A vehicle approached a military convoy and did not stop despite warning shots, it said, adding, 'Several rounds were fired in an attempt to disable the vehicle, and finally shots were fired into the vehicle itself.'

'All four died of wounds at the scene,' it said.

Civilian casualties at the hands of international troops have become a delicate issue in Afghanistan. Such deaths have become the main source of tension between the Afghan government and foreign troops.

'We have a simple objective when it comes to civilian casualties,' Mark Sedwill, the senior NATO civilian representative in Afghanistan, said at a press conference on Tuesday in Kabul. 'And that is one civilian casualty is one too many. We will make all efforts to avoid them.'

Separately, a bomb strapped to a bicycle was detonated in the centre of Khost city close to the main police headquarters on Tuesday, causing no death or damage, Zadran said.

Meanwhile, unknown gunmen shot dead a deputy mayor in the southern province of Kandahar in what the Interior Ministry on Tuesday called a 'terrorist attack.'

Azizullah Zeyarmal was en route Monday night to a mosque in the provincial capital, also called Kandahar, when unknown gunmen opened fire on him, the ministry said in statement.

Zeyarmal died on his way to hospital, Mohammad Shah Farouqi, deputy provincial police chief, said.

No group took responsibility for the attack. However, the ministry said the attack was carried out 'by enemies of Afghanistan,' a term often used by Afghan officials to describe Taliban militants.

The shooting came hours after three children were killed and four other people were injured when a bomb hidden in a donkey-drawn cart exploded in front of the residence of influential tribal chief Haji Fazelluddin in the centre of Kandahar city.

Fazelluddin, a former district governor for Spin Boldak, was unhurt in the attack, but three of his nephews were killed.

On Thursday, a suicide bomber carried out an attack in the centre of Kandahar city, killing three Afghans and wounding around two dozen people, including foreign contractors.

Attacks that bear the hallmark of Taliban militants are on the rise in Kandahar, the spiritual home and birthplace of the Taliban, ahead of a much-publicized military operation in the province in the coming months.

Afghan and NATO officials have said their offensive was under way in the province, but it is to get a push in summer when thousands of additional US troops arrive in the region.

The total number of foreign troops in Afghanistan is set to rise to 150,000 from more than 125,000 currently stationed in the war-torn country.



Afghans carry bodies of four people killed when they ignored warnings to stop by one of NATO's convoys in Khost province late Monday, southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, April 20, 2010. NATO said two of those killed in the incident were later identified as "known insurgents," although the provincial chief of police said the dead were all civilians, and included a 12-year-old child. (Photo: AP)


 

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No talks with US, say Taliban

By Mushtaq Yusufzai

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65242&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 19, 2010


PESHAWAR: Afghan Taliban on Sunday rejected media reports that their leader Mulla Omar had shown willingness to hold direct talks with US and given pledge to stay away from mainstream politics if foreign forces left Afghanistan.

"There is no change in our stance. We will not hold any talks with the US and its allies. Our stance is that the US and all other foreign occupation forces should leave Afghanistan to enable the Afghans to decide future of their country," explained Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Afghan Taliban.

He called The News from an undisclosed location and said the US and its allies were now trying to create differences among Taliban by spreading such false media reports after their other tactics failed. Mujahid said why Taliban would compromise on their stance when they had an upper hand in Afghanistan.


 

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Raiding a Hospital


Emergency in Afghanistan


By MICHAEL LEONARDI

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65258&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 20, 2010

On the 10th of April a hospital operated by the Italian Non Governmental Organization Emergency in Lashkar-gah in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan was attacked and shut down by Afghan police and Afghan secret service in cooperation with the British military, who secured the perimeter outside of the hospital. The surgical center was entered by Afghan armed forces who then went directly to a storage closet where they identified several boxes that contained suicide vests, grenades and other armaments. Three Italian staff members were arrested along with six Afghan members of the hospital staff.

The role played by the Italian based medical relief agency Emergency in Afghanistan has been the antithesis of NATO’s war for peace onslaught on the Afghan population. Emergency established a presence in Afghanistan in 1999 and operates three surgical centers, a maternity clinic and a network of 28 health centers in Afghanistan. Emergency is neutral and has a policy of treating all victims of war regardless of what side they may be affiliated with. Emergency’s surgical center for victims of war in Lashkar-gah has treated over 66 thousand people since it began operating in 2004.

After a week of wild accusations from the Afghan authorities and in the British media, condemnations of Emergency by elements of the Berlusconi government, and a mass mobilization in Italy on behalf of Emergency and their clear stance against the war, the three Italians were freed on Sunday the 18th of April. The Karzai government cited lack of concrete evidence as a the motive for the release of the Italians, but it is now being stated by some elements of the Afghan negotiating team that the Italian government promised to stop the operation of Emergency’s hospital in Lashkar-gah in exchange for the Italians’ release.

The three Emergency workers who were arrested in what looks to be an effort to stop and discredit the work of this forceful anti-war organization are logistical coordinator Matteo Pagani, nurse Matteo Dell’ Aria and surgeon Marco Garatti. One of the accusations against them is that they were involved in a plot to assassinate the governor of the Helmand province and that they had received 500,000 dollars to carry out this attack. Elements of the Berlusconi-led government, including Maurizio Gasparri, president of the majority for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party in the Senate, and Ignazio La Russa, minister of defense, were quick to denounce Emergency as a disgrace to the Italian people and as supporters of terrorism.

The media outlets in Britain were the first internationally to report on Emergency’s troubles and the pro war elements in Italy, usually quick to denounce the British media as anti-Berlusconi Stalinists, seized on the accusations in an attempt to discredit Emergency’s work and anti-war stance. Emergency’s founder Gino Strada denounced the attack on the hospital in Lashkar-gah as an obvious attempt to frame the organization and stop their support and care of the civilian victims of war. He pointed to the corrupt governor and police force of the Helmand region, in cooperation with NATO as the culprits for this attack on the NGO and hindrance of their work.

During the week from the 10th to the 18th there was a mass mobilization on behalf of Emergency throughout the Italian peninsula. The social networks such as facebook were abuzz with "I am with Emergency" lists and pages being created in support of the organization and its’ captive workers. "I am with Emergency" Banners were flown from balcony’s across the country and on Saturday over 50,000 people rallied in Rome’s piazza San Giovanni to call for the liberation of Emergency’s workers and an end to the war as the solution to the world’s conflicts.

Emergency is neutral in their administering of medical treatment but forcefully partisan in their stance against all wars, the use of landmines, and the constant attacks on the civilian population witnessed daily in NATO/American led "war on terror". Emergency repudiates war and documents the civilian toll of injuries and death the "war on terror" continues accumulate with its campaign of indiscriminate bombings and shootings, decimations of entire villages and staged television battles.

Emergency reported that over 41% of the victims of war that they treated at their Lashkar-gah hospital in 2009 were children under the age of 14 years old, and that well over 50% of the victims were civilians. These are numbers that NATO, and in particular the British who operate in that area along with the Afghan forces, would not like the public to know as they continue to hope that their Orwellian war for peace doublespeak will eventually convince people of their just cause in opening the floodgates of Heroin and developing a natural gas pipeline through indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population.

Endless war seems the only refuge for this insane Global Economy based on the exploitation of human and non-renewable natural resources and intent on making this planet unlivable for future generations. Emergency does not buy into Obama’s and NATO’s "just war" argument awarded by the Nobel commission. An open letter from Gino Strada that was published by the Italian daily la Repubblica on Thursday the 15th of April states:

"We will not be silenced, Emergency has a high idea of politics, we think in terms of the objective of finding a way to be together on this planet, to be a global community. We believe that we can find a way to live together, leaving intact our diversity, but avoiding killing each other. Emergency is inside this goal. We believe that the use of violence creates other violence, we believe that only gravely insufficient brains can love, desire, and praise war. We don’t believe in war as an instrument, it is horrible, and monstrously stupid to think that it can function effectively. Can we remember 'the war to end all wars’ of American president Wilson? It was in 1916. And how can we think to end all war if we continue to make them? The last war can only be one already concluded, not one still underway.

The response of Emergency is simple. We learned from Albert Einstein that war cannot be made be made pretty, or rendered less brutal: 'War cannot be humanized, it can only be abolished.’ In our idea of politics, and in our conscience as citizens, there is no space for war. We have excluded it from our mental horizon. We repudiate war and want its abolition the same as the abolition of slavery.

Utopia? No, we are convinced that the abolition of war is a political project to realize, with great urgency. For this we cannot be silent in the face of war, any war. We are guilty of proposing the abolition of war."

Billions of dollars continue to be spent on endless wars of Imperial Conquest. Meanwhile the ecosystems on our planet continue to be ravaged by Global Capitalisms destructive engines and war based economy. The American military industrial complex is still the dominant reality and the ever more devastated environment is always pushed aside. When will humanity make a shift away from utter stupidity and begin to address the irreparable damage that our species has done?

Michael Leonardi currently lives in Calabria. He teaches English at the University of Calabria in Cosenza and at the Vocational Highschool in Maratea for training hotel and restaurant workers. He can be reached at mikeleonardi@hotmail.com

 

 

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Army Researchers: Why the Kandahar Offensive Could Backfire

by Nathan Hodge
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65264&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

Afghan protest against US occupation

Wired, April 20, 2010


The southern Afghan province of Kandahar trusts the Taliban more than the government. And that’s according to a survey commissioned by the U.S. Army.

Kandahar is expected to be the focal point of operations for U.S. and NATO troops this summer, but a poll recently conducted by the Army’s controversial social science program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), is warning that rampant local corruption, and a lack of security, could undermine coalition efforts to win the support of the local population.

Among other things, the survey’s authors warned that a lack of confidence in the Afghan government "sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban."

The unclassified report (.pdf) is worth examining for several reasons. For starters, it addresses many of the questions raised by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan. In an assessment made public earlier this year, Flynn complained that the coalition lacked a real understanding of the cultural context of the insurgency, and said troops needed richer information about the communities they were trying to engage.

That’s where HTS is supposed to come in. Originally, the program was focused on embedding social scientists and anthropologists within brigades. But as several people close to the program tell Danger Room, there is now an emphasis on larger-scale polls run by local contractors as a way to obtain a larger picture of the situation.

Both polling and embedding researchers have their risks, and their shortcomings: Two HTS social scientists have been killed in Afghanistan, but conducting surveys, even through local companies, can also be perilous. The survey draws on a total of 1,994 interviews covering nine of Kandahar Province’s 16 districts. But it leaves out seven crucial districts: As the survey’s authors note, there are "inherent dangers associated with conducting surveys in a conflict zone" like Kandahar Province, and interviewers stayed out of areas with active violence.


In other words, the survey leaves out the populations that most need to be understood, at least from the coalition’s perspective. Still, the results are telling. Interviewers queried residents of Kandahar on everything from quality of services like clean water, electricity to the availability of primary schooling for girls and boys and medical care. They also asked local residents about security government effectiveness.

Among the findings: Security on the roads is a major issue for residents of Kandahar. "When respondents are asked if they feel unsafe traveling within their district or around the province, in eight out of ten districts, at least half say they are unsafe," the study says. And the biggest threat to security while traveling in the province, respondents said: Army and police checkpoints.

Likewise, attitudes in the south are generally sympathetic to the Taliban. Reconciliation with the insurgency is a popular concept in the province, and a significant majority of respondents viewed Taliban as "our Afghan brothers." Some 84 percent cited "corruption" as the main reason for the conflict. But most of that corruption in on the government side: 53 percent said the Taliban cannot be corrupted.

Finally, there’s a significant amount of skepticism about the local police and security forces. "The primary reason respondents in Kandahar consider joining the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] is the desire for a job and a paycheck," the study says. "Respondents are deterred from considering a career in the ANSF because of the dangers. Across all districts, the ANP [Afghan National Police] is viewed as a more dangerous profession than the ANA [Afghan National Army]."



 

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US ban on Arab TV


by YUSRA ALVI

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65265&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 20, 2010

THE United States claims that one of its top foreign policy initiatives is to spread democracy and freedom around the world. But a recent bill in the US Congress has led many to wonder whether the US wants to become one of the world’s biggest hindrances to media freedom.

Early December the US House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming majority to pass a bill in order to stop satellite TV channels from 17 Arab nations from being transmitted to American audiences due to their engagement in 'anti-American incitement to violence’.

In a Congress that cannot seem to agree on many burning issues — whether fixing the broken healthcare system or ways of dealing with the turbulent economic situation — the bill passed with 395 'yes’ votes, and only three dissenters.

The bill — known as House Resolution 2278 — has to pass many stages before it becomes a law, but it has shocked many for contradicting American support for free speech.

Airing of respectful disagreement with the policies of the US government is a part of the development process, which should be taken positively the US.

YUSRA ALVI
Karachi




 

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Afghan resistance statement

Statement of the Leadership Council of the Islamic Emirate
Regarding the Recent Propaganda about Neg


Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65266&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 20, 2010

Quoting the Daily Sunday Times, some mass media outlets have reported that the leadership of the Islamic Emirate is ready to participate in a dialogue with the USA. The Sunday Times has published the report against all codes of journalism, on the basis of two unknown and alleged members of the Leadership Council of the Islamic Emirate. Other news agencies have published it without any alternations and verification from the official and well-known spokesmen of the Islamic Emirate. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, while believing that such farcical rumors is a fatuous propaganda stunt of the moribund enemy, declares its stand as follows:

1. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan emphasizes its unwavering stand regarding talks with the Americans and considers unconditional withdrawal of all invading forces from Afghanistan as a prerequisite for talks and negotiation with the Americans. Talks with America in conditions of presence of foreign forces would mean giving their invasion legitimacy.

2. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan believes that the presence of Americans in Afghanistan is the main factor of instability in Afghanistan and the whole region. So any deal under the name of negotiation is a betrayal to the Islamic aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and all vital interests as long as this factor remains in its place.

3. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has an organizational set-up inside the country for the conduct and advancement of all Jihad activities against the invaders. The organizational entity by the name of Quetta Council which the enemy ascribes to the Islamic Emirate is a groundless and fabricated designation which has no existence on ground.

4. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has appointed two spokesmen for the clarification and elucidation of its official policy. These two spokesmen are entrusted with the duty to pronounce stand of the Islamic Emirate and explain the policy of the Islamic Emirate regarding all pertinent issues of the country. If some one speaks on behalf of the Islamic Emirate, it should be verified from these two spokesmen. Every posturing or political course of action which bobs up in the Western media from time to time, being contrary to the official line of the Islamic Emirate and lacking prior verification from the official spokesmen of the Islamic Emirate , is categorically a part of the enemy maligning campaign against the Islamic Emirate. It does not reflect or represent the official stand of the Islamic Emirate.

5. The leadership Council of the Islamic Emirate respectfully urges all independent news agencies and media outlets to fulfill their due obligations of journalism while publishing such report and observe all journalistic rules and norms in this regards. Similarly avoid painting such assertions of unknown persons as the official stand of the Islamic Emirate without prior clarification and verification from the official spokesmen of the Islamic Emirate.

The Leadership Council

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.



 

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Published on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 by Associated Press


NATO Admits Shooting Victims Were 4 Afghan Civilians Not 'Known Insurgents'

by Elizabeth A. Kennedy

KABUL - NATO acknowledged Wednesday that four unarmed Afghans who were killed this week when a military convoy opened fire on their vehicle were all civilians, correcting an earlier claim that two of the dead were "known insurgents."

Afghans carry bodies of four people killed when they ignored warnings to stop by one of NATO's convoys in Khost province late Monday, southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, April 20, 2010. NATO said two of those killed in the incident were later identified as "known insurgents," although the provincial chief of police said the dead were all civilians, and included a 12-year-old child. (AP Photo)

The shooting Monday night in Khost province sparked an immediate outcry from the victims' family, who insisted that all four were civilians driving home from a volleyball game. The youngest boy was just 13, said Rahmatullah Mansour, whose two sons and two nephews were killed in the shooting.

On Wednesday, NATO said it had described two of the victims as insurgents because their fingerprints matched those in a military biometric database. But their presence in the database does not necessarily mean they were insurgents.

"The term 'insurgent' should not have been used," NATO said in a statement. Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a NATO spokesman in Kabul, confirmed all four were civilians.

NATO said it fired on the car because it kept accelerating toward the military convoy despite attempts to flag the vehicle down by flashing lights and firing warning shots. The victims were unarmed and no weapons were found in the car.

Civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. and other international forces are believed to fuel resentment of the Afghan government and generate sympathy for the insurgency. Earlier this month, U.S. forces fired on a civilian bus outside the southern city of Kandahar, killing four Afghans and stoking anger over the international presence.

Mansour said that the victims in Monday's shooting were his sons Faizullah, 13, and Nasratullah, 17; and nephews Maiwand and Amirullah, both 18. He said all were students except Amirullah, who was a police officer.

"Nobody can imagine what is going on in my family," Mansour told The Associated Press. "My two brothers and I lost sons. It was difficult even to recognize their bodies because there were bullet holes in their face, chest, hands and feet."

The United Nations has called for better protection of Afghan civilians after the civilian death toll in violence rose last year to its highest level since the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime. Some 2,412 civilians were killed in 2009 - a 14 percent increase over the 2,118 who died in 2008, according to the U.N.

Nearly 70 percent of civilian deaths last year, or 1,630, were caused by the insurgents, the U.N. said.

International and Afghan forces, meanwhile, continued operations targeting individuals and networks responsible for making and placing roadside bombs responsible for most military casualties and large numbers of civilian deaths.

NATO said a suspected Taliban bomb-maker was captured in Kandahar's Arghandab district in a raid Tuesday night, along with nearly a dozen other suspected insurgents.

One person was detained in the operation.

On Wednesday, the Afghan army destroyed a cache of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in a controlled explosion in Kabul province. Ammonium nitrate is widely used by the Taliban as an ingredient of roadside bombs, and its use by farmers has been banned in Afghanistan.

A day earlier, Afghan border police inspecting vehicles along Kandahar's frontier with Pakistan discovered more than 3,200 pounds (1,450 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate along with 12 sticks of a substance believed to be TNT and 800 blasting caps, NATO said.

Also Wednesday, Afghan and NATO officials announced that authorities captured a local Taliban commander, Mullah Faqir, earlier this month after a gunbattle in Uruzgan province.

He was believed to have been responsible for attacks against local and coalition forces, said Gen. Juma Gul Himat, the provincial police chief.

Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez and Christopher Bodeen in Kabul contributed to this report.

© 2010 Associated Press

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/21-5

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THE ANATOMY OF AMERICA’S DEFEAT IN AFGHANISTAN

by Mohammed Daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65297&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 21, 2010

With the long awaited decision by the Obama Administration in regards to the new strategy for Afghanistan, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated to the point that the US commanders started using the word 'defeat’ in their report to Washington. The word defeat has rarely been uttered by military; however, Afghanistan is the exception, where defeat is a realistic outcome. There, defeat is a reality that all invaders have faced since the beginning when Pashtuns have inhabited this region. The Pashtuns’ resistance is one of multiple factors characterizing the Anatomy of US’s Defeat in Afghanistan, where the inevitability of defeat for the US and NATO appears to be a certainty.

FACTORS OF DEFEAT
American Military underestimated the Afghans (Pashtuns)

When the American troops landed in Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, they were confident that the defeat of the Taliban and take over of Afghanistan was inevitable. Their behavior was typically American characterized with excessive over confidence totally oblivious of Afghan history. Characteristically, they did not expect to suffer significant casualties either; however, much to their dismay, American causality has become quite apparent The overconfidence of American military was detailed by a reporter of IWPR:

"…in October when the Americans began deploying at the airport,
they were gung-ho, telling their Uzbek counterparts that it would take no more than a month and a half to defeat the Taleban…"

The report continues:

"Uzbek army personnel working at the air base said scores of US casualties have been arriving there. From November 25 to Decemeber [sic] 2, an Uzbek orderly working with American medical staff said he had witnessed the arrival of four to five US helicopters - carrying between them 10-15 American casualties - each day."

The wounded soldiers that had returned from Afghanistan were frustrated by the sudden change in their self-perceived invincibility. The frustrations of the wounded soldiers on the base played out in daily occurrences of shouting and name-callings. These were the same soldiers that had heroic mentality before entering Afghanistan.

Similar experiences were reported in other parts of Afghanistan. For example, during operation Anaconda in 2002, America had used massive firepower to subdue a Taliban Commander Saifu-r-Rahman Mansoor in Shah-e-Kot in Southeastern Afghanistan. The Americans thought they could destroy the Afghan resistance by having superior airpower. They learned this to be more a wishful thinking. In the days of the fighting, Pentagon made various extravagant claims of having destroyed Mansoor’s defenses and killing more than a thousand (1000) Taliban fighters. The facts were otherwise. The US forces went to the battle with a heroic mind set, but they were bitterly surprised when they sustained heavy losses and had lost 16 helicopters ranging from apaches to Chinooks. The escalation reached a point of no return when 22 American Special Forces were caught alive. The heavy losses coupled with the captured soldiers started to take its toll on the US forces until March 10, 2002 when General Tommy Frank decided to pull back 400 troops to Bagram. The official explanation was that the conflict had ended for the most part while media reported that the troops suffered from battle fatigue. The truth was that the pull back was an attempt at building confidence aimed at convincing Taliban that American military is serious in seeking the release of the 22 Special Forces Commandos. The Taliban Commander, Maulana Mansoor demanded the release of all captives held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the 22 Special Forces soldiers.

Meanwhile, as the US forces encountered stiff resistance, it claimed to be fighting against a force of 1000 fighters when in reality there were 100 Afghan fighters, 120 Uzbek, and 30 Arab fighters. The US claimed to have killed 700 of 1000 Taliban/Al-Qaida fighters:

"U.S. military spokesmen estimate 700 out of roughly 1,000 Islamic extremists have been killed in the past nine days of fighting, which has cost the lives of eight Americans and three allied Afghans."

The number of Taliban and foreign fighters killed stood at 88 (mostly Uzbek including 8 Arabs) while the number of US, British and others were much higher. Different media sources reported different numbers in regards to US losses. For example, the Russian online newspaper Strana.Ru on April 8, 2002, reported that the US lost 100 Special Forces and four Apache helicopters. However, data obtained from the battlefield put the casualty figure at 228 killed. From this figure 186 Americans killed in the battle, 22 prisoners executed when the US refused to release Guantanamo prisoners and 20 British SAS were killed when their vehicles were ambushed. The 186 killed Americans included those that were onboard helicopters. The total number of helicopters shot was 16 out of which two Chinook and 6 Apaches were totally destroyed and the remaining crash landed. The Canadians and Australians killed were reported as victims of friendly fire.

This is what happens when armed forces exhibit patronizing mentality and underestimate the enemy.

American Brutality-Excessive Use of Force and Racist View

The sheer use of excessive force coupled with individual cases of callous murder and torture could be viewed in the dichotomy of intention and reaction. The aspect of intentionality points to the way the military views the targeted population. The US military as an institution and their personnel must consider the people they bomb or murder perhaps less human, otherwise, the excessive use of force, committing murder and tortures would not be wide spread in their ranks. For example, by October 2002, the first anniversary of US invasion of Afghanistan, more than 10000 tons of bombs dropped on Afghan soil. (Socialist Worker Online, October 11, 2002) Imagine the magnitude of carnage and contamination caused by such massacre. While another report by Kate Randall on December 2001, put the number of US bombed dropped at 12000:

"Since the US launched the war on Afghanistan October 7, more than 12,000 US bombs have been dropped on the country. According to the Pentagon, about 60 percent of these bombs have been precision-guided by satellite or laser technology. However, many of these bombs—dropped by B-52s and other aircraft from tens of thousands of feet in the air—have strayed off course, hitting civilian targets." (WSWS, December 29, 2001)

In another report, a year after September 11, 2001, Matt Kelley of the Associated Press put the US munitions statistics as follows:

"U.S. and coalition airplanes have conducted more than 21,000 flights over Afghanistan, dropping more than 20,000 munitions. About 60 percent of the ordnance dropped on Afghanistan has been precision guided, the highest percentage in any conflict."

Similarly the Guardian reported on April 10, 2002:

"More than 22,000 weapons - ranging from cruise missiles to heavy fuel-air bombs - have been dropped on the country over the past six months…. US pilots dropped more than 6,600 joint direct attack munitions (J-dams), the satellite-guided bombs… One in four bombs and missiles dropped by the US on Afghanistan may have missed its target"

The new generations of hard target weapons whose warheads are made of uranium have contributed to the heavy contamination of land, water and general population. The carnage brought upon by the usage of these Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) would remain essentially forever. Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years. This means Afghans would be dying from cancers and other diseases for generations. For the past several years, the rate of various cancers have risen all over Afghanistan, however, the rate of this menace has been highest among the Pashtun people since they are on the receiving end of bombing raids. Imagine the magnitude of carnage and contamination caused by such barbarism.

The individual cases of slaughter are too many to list. However, I need to point out that American military shoots first and asks questions later. Many Afghans are shot on mere suspicion. In many cases, the person would be either going to work or coming from work.
The most serious of all the behaviors of the US military is their disregard for the privacy, dignity and lives of the Pashtun People. The behavior of the US military is similar to the South African police of the apartheid era entering Black African and Indian homes with no regard to their privacy. Similarly, American Soldiers enter Pashtun homes without any regard for their privacy and dignity. Moreover, they behave like thieves in the way they attack a residence at night when families are deep asleep. The entrances to peoples’ houses are blown with explosives and then men and boys are dragged from bed in full view of their children and wives. More often, before they could drag anyone from bed, they order their attack dogs to attack these families before they could leave their bedrooms. Consequently, many children are bitten to death. In many instances, after the inhabitants are bitten, the soldiers have shot indiscriminately. In Laghman Province, a man recalled the following event:

"At night, the Americans entered our homes, commandeered their attack dogs and then shot my son and my brother. I was asleep; when I woke up; a dog was standing next to me and bit me. Subsequent to that, the dogs pulled the corpse of my brother and son to the ally. We were terrified and abandoned our village."

In another case in Khost, in mid-December of 2008, the home of Dr. Bilal was raided by the US forces. The US forces mistaken believed he was linked to Al-Qaida network while he worked for the province public health department. The AFP reported the following:

"The Americans entered without warning. They first killed one of my nephews, Amin, who was 14 years old, who was sleeping next to a rifle," says Bilal Hassan, who works for the provincial department of health.
"My brother went out with a gun. He was shot down, like his wife who followed him," he says.
A sister-in-law was hit in the spinal cord and paralysed [sic].
"Then they released their dogs," the doctor remembers. The dogs attacked the bodies and bit off some of the fingers, he says. Then they bit the wounded woman and a child of five. "They took our savings, all our guns, used for self-defence [sic], and even papers for some of our properties.... Why did they do all that?"

The question is why are Pashtuns specifically targeted? One of the answers could be the racist mentality of the American military. However, the most likely explanation is that Pashtuns are the custodians of Afghanistan and they have defended Afghan independence throughout history. As long as the Pashtuns remain a potent force, US-NATO alliance would not only succeed but also face a realistic prospect of utter defeat.
In all fairness, other militaries exhibit dreadful behaviors as well. However, the US military appears to be one of the worst violators among the so-called democratic societies.

American over Reliance on Tajiks and Other Minorities

In the aftermath of 911, the Afghan Tajiks who were affiliated with the brutal and rapist organization of Northern Alliance or were supporters of these criminals stepped forward to the Bush Administration to accomplish two things. First, it was an opportunity for them to undermine the Pashtun (Afghan) majority of the country. These Northern Alliance elements were toppled by Taliban in 1996 after they carried out some of the most gruesome atrocities ever committed in Afghan history. The Northern Alliance was formed from war criminals, rapist and human rights violators. Thousands of women disappeared during the reign of the Northern Alliance. Second, by offering their services as mercenaries, the Northern Alliance wanted to take advantage of the situation to control the post-Taliban regime. Despite the massive air power and indiscriminate usage of wide array of bombs, the Northern Alliance failed to break through Taliban defenses situated 90 miles north of the Capital Kabul. After 45 days of bombing, Taliban decided to retreat to the countryside.

With the Taliban’s retreat, the Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul. The first task on their agenda was the firing of most civil servants that spoke Pashto. The imposition of minorities that constitute roughly 37% of the population on 63% Pashtun created resentment among the Pashtuns. It is worth mentioning that the CIA World Facts Book is grossly inaccurate when it comes to the percentage of Pashtuns in Afghanistan. Dr Zirakyar has traced the pattern of false statistics in this book and presented his analysis as follows:

"Until 1991, this type of "finished intelligence" registered Pashtuns as majority of the Afghan population (50% as ethnic group and as language group). Almost a year later in April 1992, the Northern Alliance (Masood-Rabani group) took over the power in Kabul. The World Factbook 1992, considerably lowered the statistical significance of the Pashtun ethnic group and their language (Pashto): 38% as ethnic group, and 35% as language group. In World Factbook 2009, statistical data for Pashtuns shows improvement as ethnic group (42%) but remained the same as language group (35%)."

He established the true number representing the percentage of Pashtuns in Afghanistan by tapping into the research of Wak Foundation:

"For the record, a six-year survey and research project (1991-1996) was conducted by WAK-Foundation for Afghanistan, the results of which was published in 1998 (1377 A.H.). According to this source, from the total population of Afghanistan, Pashtuns make up 62.73 percent as ethnic group and 55 percent as language group."

Based on the pattern of falsehood illustrated in the CIA World Facts Book and consistently presenting false information about the Pashtuns, it would not be far fetched to state that there is an international conspiracy against the Pashtuns. That is why; Pashtuns are killed in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

In the post US invasion, Pashtuns were cleansed from many areas in Northern Afghanistan, where majority of the minority Tajik population is living. Pashtun lands were confiscated, forcing more than 300,000 Pashtuns to become refugees to neighboring Pakistan. This group of people formed the backbone of Taliban insurgency against the US and their mercenaries of the Northern Alliance.

Incidentally, the Afghan Tajiks and other minorities were lining up to become translators and falsely claiming to speak Pashto. These individuals intentionally while others due to ignorance of Pashto language labeled every Pashtun the Americans arrested as member of Taliban and Al Qaida. That is why; the youngest inmate in Guantanamo Bay was 11 years old. The unfair mentality of the American military and the animosity of the Tajiks and other minorities toward the Pashtuns resulted in many tragedies. Many innocent Pashtun men were tortured and killed in Bagram.

The reader might ask as to why Tajiks have this type of animosity toward the Pashtuns. The answer is Tajiks were mostly artisans, musicians-entertainers and refugees from Central Asia ungrateful for the life they had in Afghanistan. Similar to most minorities in different parts of the world, they also wanted to occupy the power in the country. However, they desired power at the expense of Pashtun majority.

Consequently, Pashtuns whether they agreed with Taliban or not joined Taliban led insurgency to secure their rights. To this end, both Americans and their mercenaries have become their targets. Meanwhile, the Afghan National Army (ANA), which hardly has a national character, is dominated by Tajiks. Majority of the commanders of the ANA are Tajiks. Equally, the current President, who is from Kandahar, is more than eager to please these criminal elements of the Northern Alliance by instituting their language as the administrative language ignoring Pashto and Pashtuns. It is speculated that Karzai is half-Pashtun, hence, the influence of his maternal uncles, who are qazelbash, on him drew him away from his own language. At this point it is purely speculative; however, Pashtuns are trying to rationalize the indifference of Karzai by presenting various explanations.

This unnatural arrangement and oppression of the Pashtuns inspired Pashtuns to fight against Americans and their installed regime in Kabul.

Americans Lack of knowledge of the Pashtun Culture

Lack of knowledge of Pashtun culture is another important factor ensuring US’s defeat in Afghanistan. There are two sources wherein this lack contributes to the permanence of hostility of Pashtuns toward the US and her allies. The first issue is the tribal structure and the cohesion within the tribes in matters of self-defense. When a member of the tribe or sub-tribe is killed, the killer is not only the enemy of the family whose member he has killed, but rather he has gained the enmity of the tribe whose member he has murdered. Thus, the US forces have turned tribes, sub-tribes and villages against them by slaughtering their members in the hundreds and thousands. The second source is a tenet of the Pashtunwali—the Pashtun Code of Honor. This tenet is that of revenge, which goes hand in hand with tribal cohesion. A Pashtun father, brother, and son and tribesmen have to avenge the death of their relative. There is an old saying that after a Pashtun took his revenge after100 years, he said, "I think I rushed it." This points to the permanence of hostility.

Surge or the Final Nails in the Coffin of US’s Defeat

With the hoopla of surge and new strategy, the US politicians and military leaders lack complete awareness of the Afghan society, especially the Pashtun culture. To the Pashtun people surge means continuation of the indignity imposed on them by the US and her allies. This means more Afghan civilians would die. This also means the continuation of the same pattern of disregard to the privacy of Pashtuns’ homes. In essence, Pashtuns view this as affirmation by the part of the political and military leaders that the crimes they have committed for the past 8 years are not crimes, but rather righteousness which adds insult to injury.

Furthermore, this would increase the resolve of the Afghan insurgency and their supporters. Meanwhile, the insurgents are working on obtaining modern Russian Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers. In the past, Afghan Mujahideen used RPG7; however, RPG7 is not effective against NATO armor. Hence, the most effective weapon would be RPG32, which penetrates all NATO and US armor vehicles and tanks. Furthermore, insurgents are also working on obtaining modern version of SAM7 anti aircraft shoulder-held missiles. This would be the final nails in the coffin of US’s defeat in Afghanistan.

I have tried in vain to get the attention of the US political and military leaders with my peace proposal to institute permanent peace in Afghanistan. But unfortunately, they showed no interest for the most part. My proposal 'White Paper for Permanent Peace in Afghanistan’ is a comprehensive approach to a long lasting peace for Afghanistan.

After receiving cold shoulders from political and military leadership, I came to hypothesize that they must be gaining financial benefits in the form of contracts or perhaps even kickbacks. Otherwise, it would be natural to seek peace than war especially when the insurgency has gained a lot of momentum.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned factors outline a pattern of hatred and killing. This pattern contributed to the permanence of hatred and enmity of Americans and their allies. The violations outlined depict acts of righteousness on the part of the American forces and points to strong conviction on the part of the US-NATO forces to continue committing atrocities.

Finally, President Obama’s speech in Norway by referring to the genocide in Afghanistan as a 'just war’ is adding insult to injury. The award of the Nobel Prize to the President of a country that is actively murdering Afghans and turning their environment uninhabitable with the continued usage of uranium munitions is a travesty of justice and an abomination that should be condemned worldwide. Moreover, the award of the Nobel Prize is affirmation of support on the part of the Western establishment that the murder and genocide of the Pashtun people is acceptable, and it strengthens the hypothesis that the war on terror is in part an international conspiracy against the Pashtun Nation.


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2010
Mohammed Daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD
- mdmiraki@ameritech.net
- maidan11@yahoo.com
www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com


Notes

1.Afghanistan: US Casualty Spiral http://www.iwpr.net/?p=rca&s=f&o=162298&apc_state=henirca200
1
2. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80079&page=1
3.Similar events happened one too many times http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2009/february/feb2
2009.html#3
4. Anti-Taliban alliance composed of Afghan minorities
5.http://www.sabawoon.com/articles/index.php?page=kite_runner
6.http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL01Df02.html
7.www.sabawoon.com/articles/index.php?page=home and www.rense.com/general88/whitep.htm