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

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Thursday, April 29, 2010
16:44 Mecca time, 13:44 GMT
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201042991933295636.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
US cautious on Afghan progress 


 
The Pentagon called the report a "sober" evaluation of progress in Afghanistan [GALLO/GETTY]

 
 
The Afghan president enjoys little support in "strategically important" areas of the country, a US defence department report has concluded just weeks before Hamid Karzai is due to visit Washington.   

In what the Pentagon called a "sober" assessment of its progress in Afghanistan, it concluded on Wednesday that violence was up nearly 90 per cent on levels the previous year.

The 152-page report said that, despite efforts to reduce the influence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, much of the country is either neutral towards Karzai's administration or outright supports the anti-government fighters.

"The overall assessment indicates that the population sympathises with or supports the Afghan government in 24 per cent [29 of 121] of all key terrain and area of interest districts," it said.

"The establishment of effective governance is a critical enabler for improving development and security."

Popular anger

Part of the problem is the widespread perception among Afghans of Karzai's government being corrupt and inefficient.

"While Afghanistan has achieved some progress on anti-corruption, in particular with regard to legal and institutional reforms, real change remains elusive, and political will, in particular, remains doubtful," the report said.

The killing of Afghan civilians by US and other foreign forces has also been a polarising issue.

In the latest incident, hundreds of people protested on the streets of the city of Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, on Thursday over the death of a relative of an Afghan member of parliament.

That popular anger, combined with a spike in violence during the presidential election last August, has allowed the Taliban to "perceive 2009 as their most successful year," the US report said.

"Expanded violence is viewed as an insurgent victory, and insurgents perceive low voter turnout and reports of fraud during the past presidential election as further signs of their success," it said.

According to Pentagon figures, violence is "sharply above the seasonal average for the previous year - an 87 per cent increase from February 2009 to March 2010".

'Right direction'

Despite the rise in violence though, the report also cited opinion polls showing that more Afghans were feeling safe, with 84 per cent saying security levels were "fair" or "good".

A US defence official briefing journalists on the report said it showed that "after a number of years of things moving in the wrong direction ... we are no longer moving in the wrong direction and there are signs we are moving in the right direction".

Pentagon said with an increase in US forces in the country, Taliban fighters were now coming under "unprecedented pressure".

"This strain has been compounded by the recent high-profile arrests of several Pakistan-based insurgent leaders by Pakistani authorities and removal of many Afghanistan-based commanders," it said.

However, the US defence official added that there was no indication of any leadership crisis within the Taliban hierarchy.
 
 

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Posted by bettenoir at 11:29 am
April 29, 2010
http://blogs.alternet.org/bettenoir/2010/04/29/tall-tales-and-war-games/

Our Magical Thinking in Afghanistan

President Obama’s official timeline for surging our military presence in Afghanistan still has fourteen months to run; in that timeframe, there is (in some quarters) an expectation that the US and NATO will manage to quell increasing insurgent attacks, convince Afghan government officials that corruption doesn’t pay, plant the framework of a 21st century democracy (i.e., “Government-in-a-box) — while simultaneously training tens of thousands of illiterate drug addicts to serve as guardians of the peace in the National Police Force – the “mission critical” key to success in Afghanistan, we are told. So far, the insurgent’s “Shadow Government,” alive and well throughout Afghanistan, has “Government-in-a-box” beat all to hell according to this recent report:

“The Taliban-led insurgency’s “operational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding,” said the report, adding the “strength and ability of (insurgent-run) shadow governance to discredit the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government is increasing.”

Complicating that already tall order for the next 14 months, is the apparent need for one last face-saving summer offensive on the Taliban’s “spiritual home” turf in Kandahar – the military equivalent of “territorial marking” — so that we can get the hell out of Afghanistan without being called “losers.” General McChrystal has already telegraphed his impending assault and added that this will be “no D-Day or H-hour” — believable enough if the muddled precursor Marjah “offensive” is any indication. The Kandahar Offensive, of course is the public battle that provides distraction from the secret “special operations” program of targeted assassinations and “things that go bump in the night” that have the civilian population of Afghanistan quite effectively terrorized (and blaming the Coalition forces for their state of terror).

Surely, as far as President Karzai (and his brother Wali) are concerned, the offensive in Kandahar is unnecessary and politically unpopular. No one in Kandahar is feeling particularly beset by the Taliban, whom they describe as their “Afghan brothers.” Flying solo, Karzai has already launched a fairly sensible-sounding endgame of diplomatic meetings with Taliban leaders that has drawn in Afghanistan’s neighbors, in region – Pakistan, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia — even Russia is said to have dropped in and out. NATO is signaling its weariness with America’s version of the War on Terror; only the US seems out-of-the-loop on winding down, like staggering guests who don’t realize when “the party’s over.”

Who’s Zooming Who?
One of the persistent complaints about our strategy in Afghanistan has been that we don’t seem to have one. No one is very clear on our mission or what victory might look like. Others are getting ever clearer on the need to end it, whatever “it” is. To that end, Hamid Karzai is scheduled to visit the White House, next month and, as Ahmed Rashid has written in the Washington Post, it’s pretty much “crunch time” for our Nobel Laureate President to decide whether he’ll come down on the side of continued war or a regionally-brokered peace in Afghanistan. Here’s a snip from Rashid’s article:

“According to U.S. and Afghan officials, Karzai’s first question when he arrives will be whether Washington supports his efforts at reconciliation with the senior Taliban leadership. In January, the United States and NATO agreed to reintegration — bringing in Taliban foot soldiers and low-level commanders — but Washington balked at full reconciliation, saying it wants to see the Taliban weakened militarily over the next six to 12 months before considering talks with its leaders.”

“Karzai’s representatives, however, have spent the past 12 months holding talks about talks with senior Taliban representatives in several Arab Gulf states. Taliban leaders have made clear that they want to talk directly to the United States, and Karzai knows his discussions with the Taliban cannot go further without public U.S. support and a commitment to engage. The Afghans want a clear answer from Washington that they will lead any future negotiations.”

The position that “Washington balked at full reconciliation, saying it wants to see the Taliban weakened militarily over the next six to 12 months before considering talks with its leaders” smacks of a bout of magical thinking on the part of the Administration. The US military has had close to ten years to a) find Osama bin Laden b) eliminate Al Qaeda and (c) break the back of the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, is, of course, still at large; Al Qaeda has been routed in Afghanistan only to resurface in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, etc; and, as of, six months ago, in October, it was reported that the our nine years of efforts have only resulted in a resurgent Taliban that is growing exponentially and nearing military strength. Here’s a bit from that report:

“WASHINGTON – A recent U.S. intelligence assessment has raised the estimated number of full-time Taliban-led insurgents fighting in Afghanistan to at least 25,000, underscoring how the crisis has worsened even as the U.S. and its allies have beefed up their military forces, a U.S. official said Thursday.”

“The U.S. official, who requested anonymity because the assessment is classified, said the estimate represented an increase of at least 5,000 fighters, or 25 percent, over what an estimate found last year.”

“’The rise can be attributed to, among other things, a sense that the central government in Kabul isn’t delivering (on services), increased local support for insurgent groups, and the perception that the Taliban and others are gaining a firmer foothold and expanding their capabilities,’ the U.S. official said.”

And then there’s this article from March, 2010 handily blaming NATO for the Taliban resurgence:

“‘The Taliban has reaped a recruiting bonanza the past two years, capitalizing on NATO’s stagnant posture in southern Afghanistan by increasing fighter ranks by 35 percent,’ U.S. officials say.”

“The increase is one reason NATO forces, in an ongoing offensive, are meeting strong resistance as they fight town by town to gain control of the Taliban stronghold in the city of Kandahar and in Marjah in neighboring Helmand province.”

“It also shows the enemy’s resilience in an eight-year insurgency. In the face of air strikes and NATO raids that kill scores of Taliban at a time, the former rulers of Afghanistan still have been able to pad their ranks.”

And, finally, we have this “straight from the horse’s mouth”:

“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…’”

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, all of this suggests to me that, perhaps, we have been dead wrong about everything Afghan and should reconsider our approach; and I’m not talking about switching from traditional combat to Gen. McChrystal’s odd concoction of public and clandestine “black ops” warfare tricked out as “counterinsurgency.” These Middle East adventures have been propaganda campaigns and it’s pretty much time to send a message to Congress and the Pentagon that the American people are not as stupid, naïve and gullible as they are banking on.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . .
Our military is currently engaged in two separate endeavors in the Middle East that they are ill-equipped to take on as part of their mission – one is PR and the other is nation-building. Bungling these aspects of the conflict do us no good at all; in fact, it’s likely that they do permanent damage to America’s diplomatic stature in the world. Our military is nothing if not persistent, however, so the nonsense goes on until someone has the presence of mind to order them to stop.

Consider some of the more recent SNAFUs and ask yourself if these nonsensical events wouldn’t get you quickly fired if you tried to pull them in your “real-world” job:

The Marjah Offensive – by now many of us (who care to know) discovered that the much-touted Marjah Offensive was a world class Snow Job, not to mention an embarrassing non-event that made Coalition forces look ridiculous. Much is made of the illiteracy of the Afghan population but those illiterates saw through the Marjah Offensive and had a good laugh at the Coalition’s expense. From the distortion of the unincorporated villages of the Marjah district into a bustling city of 80,000 and a hub of Taliban support to the appointment of the ex-con, expatriate governor who hasn’t set foot in Afghanistan for 15 years and who’s afraid to leave home unless he’s in an Osprey, Marjah was an unmitigated pack of lame lies aimed at whipping up some enthusiasm for the War in Afghanistan in a world grown weary of it.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald did a great job of summing up the Marjah propaganda strategy and telling us what to expect ahead of the Kandahar Offensive:

“The Independent declared on February 9, 2010, that General McChrystal wants the Marjah offensive to “be one of the most significant in the country since the fall of the Taliban in 2001″ and, of Obama’s war strategy, said that “Marjah looks like being its first major — and possibly decisive — test.” The BBC quoted a NATO official who proclaimed that Marjah “was ‘probably the definitive operation’ of the counter-insurgency strategy” and “this operation could potentially define the tipping point, the crucial momentum aspect in the counter-insurgency.” Time helpfully informed us that “U.S. officials believe it will mark a turning point in the war.”

“Now that that ‘make-or-break decisive test’ has failed (or, at best, has produced very muddled outcomes), did the Government and media follow through and declare the war effort broken and the strategy a failure? No; they just pretend it never happened and declare the next, latest, glorious Battle the real ‘make-or-break decisive test’ — until that one fails and the next one is portrayed that way, in an endless tidal wave of war propaganda intended to justify our staying for as long as we want, no matter how pointless and counter-productive it is.”

Sure enough, The New York Times rolled out the “trailer” for the Kandahar Offensive this week, breathlessly pronouncing it:

“The looming battle for the spiritual home of the Taliban . . . shaping up as the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, including how much the United States can count on the country’s leaders and military for support, and whether a possible increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting will compromise a strategy that depends on winning over the Afghan people.”

Notice that the Times is already anticipating an “increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting” that could complicate “winning over the Afghan people.” Of course, those who care to dig out details on where we are in our battle “to win over the Afghan people” will know that the Kandahari’s have already spoken and the only possible way for us to “win over” the 90% of Kandahari’s who despise us is to stay away from their city.

Another fact that could easily slip past us is the mention of Gen. McChrystal’s strategy of keeping American troops outside of Kandahar and send the Afghan Army in to do the fighting as a test of their ability to be effective counterinsurgents. That should yield interesting results . . .

The Morning After
OK, so we declare a “decisive, pivotal, turning point of a win” in Kandahar – and then what? According to Jason Ditz at AntiWar.com the Pentagon just released an ominous report to Congress explaining how it might be disastrous to turn over a “liberated” Afghanistan to the hand-picked, but nonetheless, evil and corrupt (if not drug-addled downright crazy) Hamid Karzai. Here’s that:

“The Pentagon has issued a new report to Congress about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, warning that the Taliban is increasing the size of their insurgency even as support for President Hamid Karzai remains sparse in the most important regions.”

“In fact of the 121 districts cited as ‘key’ to winning the war in the report, only 29 of those districts had populations seen as even sympathizing with the Karzai government.”

“The report pointed to the enormous levels of corruption in the Karzai government as a major problem fueling this lack of credibility, and warned further that the political will to reform was ‘doubtful.’”

Funny how the same problems are cropping up in Iraq, too? War is over, democratic government has been installed and yet . . . insurgent attacks are on the rise, and the government can’t get out of it’s own way. Could it be that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan actually want the US (or at least their treasury) to leave before they’ve sucked a lot more US dollars out of them. And could it be that the Pentagon is only too happy to report that the State Department picked a bad “puppet” to install as head of state in Afghanistan and now the military will have to hang around to ensure peace for the couple of years it’ll take to effect regime change?

Along those lines, The Washington Post published an interesting report, this morning, on recent US manipulations of the political scene in Kandahar. Having failed to budge Wali Karzai out of his position of control in Kandahar, the US has decided to try an end-run around him by supporting the prodigiously unimportant Governor of Kandahar, Tooryalai Wesa, another expatriate “outsider” like the newly installed Governor of Marjah. The Post describes Wesa as “a mild-mannered academic who spent more than a decade in Canada and is considered by many Afghans to be ineffectual.”

The American thinking behind the sudden infatuation with Wesa is described this way:

“In the hope of pushing power brokers such as Karzai to the sidelines, American officials are trying to infuse Wesa and his government with more clout and credibility. They see better governance as a central part of a U.S.-led effort that has brought thousands of troops to the region for a summer offensive against the Taliban.”

“But the government headed by Wesa has severe problems of its own. It remains understaffed, is viewed by many as corrupt and does not reflect the province’s tribal mix. Karzai and other allegedly corrupt political bosses who dominate Kandahar show no sign of giving way.”

“’Wesa is a weak governor,’ said Rahmatullah Raufi, a former general and Kandahar governor.

Nevertheless, the US knows best and is busily indoctrinating Governor Wesa in anticipation of turning Kandahar over to him after our “pivotal” win there this summer.

“To bolster Wesa’s beleaguered office, U.S. officials plan to hire about two dozen Afghan staff members, to be split with the mayor. American helicopters ferry Wesa to meetings, where U.S. officials take notes on his progress. They hope that Wesa’s attempts at grass-roots organizing, combined with an infusion of funds into the province, can earn some support from a skeptical public.”

My money says Wesa will be dead sooner rather than later. As Rahmatullah Raufi, former general and Kandahar governor put it: “If Ahmed Wali Karzai wants him to die, he will die. If he says, ‘Live,’ he’ll live.”

The Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Most of this public relations carnival can at least be quasi-rationalised, but some just gets recycled until it’s totally meaningless. Like the saga of Hakimullah Mehsud, current leader of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who has been “assassinated” and confirmed dead seven times – since last August.

“According to a senior member of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency Hakimullah, who was “confirmed” killed in January and then assumed to be gravely wounded, and who was “confirmed” to have died of his injuries in February, is alive and “basically ok.’”

And of course there was the recent high-fiving in Baghdad over the alleged assassination of two legendary leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq by a joint US – Iraqi force. That news might have been more earthshaking if it had not included the name of “Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the group’s umbrella organization, the Islamic State of Iraq.

Here’s al-Baghdadi’s resume:

March 9, 2007 — the Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi was captured in Baghdad on, which claim was later recanted

May 3, 2007 — the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that al-Baghdadi was killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad

July, 2007 — the U.S. military reported that al-Baghdadi never actually existed. A detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, a self-proclaimed intermediary to Osama bin Laden, claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that statements attributed to al-Baghdadi were actually read by an Iraqi actor.

Autumn, 2008 – US military officials reported that although the previous al-Baghdadi was fictional, Al Qaeda had filled the “Baghdadi vacancy” with an actual Al Qaeda leader.

April 23, 2009, Agence France-Presse reported that al-Baghdadi was arrested by the Iraqi military, and on April 28 the Iraqi government produced photos to prove it to skeptics. The claim was denied by the Islamic State in Iraq which according to SITE Institute released an apparently genuine recording of al-Baghdadi denying the government’s recent claims. However, the Iraqi government refuted this claim and insisted that the man captured was indeed Baghdadi.

Which brings us to April, 2010 in which the previously killed/captured al-Baghdadi somehow got away from his Iraqi captors, last year, and wound up in a safe-house in Tikrit where he was, once again, apprehended and killed.

Pardon my skepticism but I think that there is more truth in this statement from The Washington Post account than in any of the foregoing:

“The two top leaders of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq were slain in a U.S. airstrike over the weekend, a decisive tactical victory for American and Iraqi forces and one that provides Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with additional political leverage at a crucial time.”

“Maliki stands to gain from the slaying of the men — Masri was perhaps the most wanted person in Iraq — at a time that is critical to his political future. He has made restoring security and weaning Iraq from dependence on the U.S. military centerpieces of his bid to keep his job once a new parliament is seated. Maliki’s bloc, which came in second in the elections, securing 89 seats, must woo other coalitions in order to secure the 163 votes needed to appoint a new prime minister.”

How timely. Of course the announcement was met with skepticism in Iraq — Maliki’s government has in the past falsely reported the death and the capture of Baghdadi, most recently last spring. It never retracted the claim back then, making the most recent announcement a sort of back-handed admission that the previous story was total bunk. Oh well . . .

Now, however, enjoying the last word, the US has confirmed via DNA analysis (please, gimme a break) that the story is true and Gen. Ray Odierno and Vice-President Biden quickly did a little victory dance in the end zone.

I really only have one question remaining and that is “Do our leaders really believe that the American people are stupid enough to be taken in by all of this inane and inexpert propaganda?” But, come to think of it, they probably care less if we “buy” it, as long as we’re willing to keep paying for it . . .

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Pentagon Report: Still Not Enough Troops in Afghanistan

After Multiple Escalations, Will Enough Ever Be Enough?


by Jason Ditz, April 29, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/29/pentagon-report-still-not-enough-troops-in-afghanistan/

After 15 months in office President Obama has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by an almost impossible amount, going from 30,000 (itself the product of an end-of-term escalation by President Bush) to 86,000… with the troop level pushing 100,000 by the end of the summer.

But in what is rapidly becoming the ultimate example of a mission that grows to exceed whatever resources it is given, the Pentagon’s latest report on Afghanistan is warning that they still don’t have enough troops to cover even half of the “key districts” in the nation, let alone the rest of the country.

The report was released yesterday, with an emphasis on the grim assessment of just how unpopular President Hamid Karzai is in those “key” districts. The report also noted that the Taliban continue to grow and claimed, speciously considering the data in the report, that the rising violence had “leveled off.”

Yet the Obama Administration clearly can’t do anything to make Karzai a more palatable president, and nine years suggest the US has no idea how to keep the Taliban from growing. In the end it may therefore be the troop shortages that shape the policy, as if the administration is willing to do one thing it is throw more troops at the conflict.

Though Pentagon officials expressed hope that the remainder of the current US escalation, coupled with the foreign escalations, would cover the “key” districts, there seems to be no wiggle room in the US strategy, and little to stop other districts from suddenly taking on greater importance.

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Marines face challenge in unstable Helmand

By Dan Lamothe - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Apr 29, 2010 6:39:15 EDT
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/04/marine_afghanistan_042810w/
   
MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. — U.S. forces face a tough summer in Afghanistan, and the former Taliban stronghold of Marjah and other parts of Helmand province will be among the most treacherous, said a top officer overseeing operations there from the Pentagon.

“One thing I caution people is to not look at all of Afghanistan through the filter of Marjah because Marjah and Helmand are the toughest places in Afghanistan,” said Army Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, director of the joint Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination cell. “So we can’t judge the success of the entire endeavor on how tough it is in the hardest area. We have to look across the board at the entire country, and there are many areas where we are seeing a greater degree of stability.”

Nicholson’s comments on Marjah, taken over by the Corps following an assault launched Feb. 13, came during a wide-ranging April 21 forum on Afghanistan attended by numerous Marine generals at Marine Corps University.

Marine units have performed well in securing areas up and down the Helmand River valley, Nicholson said, but Marjah is still among the most unstable areas in the country. The general also said that for all the efforts of troops on the ground, it is still uncertain whether civilians in southern Afghanistan can be swayed to trust their local government after years of instability, indifference and corruption.

“This is not a sure thing,” he said, speaking to a crowd of about 200 officers and foreign policy analysts. “It’s going to be tough, and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. We have a lot of difficult days ahead of us, especially in terms of governance ... and people feeling that connection to their government. We’re obviously working very hard to make that part successful.”

The operations in Marjah will continue while U.S. forces prepare for new operations in neighboring Kandahar province. Nicholson said they will begin in June and July, with forces that haven’t yet arrived in Afghanistan leading the way. He didn’t say which units could be involved, but with the Corps’ buildup downrange complete, it would appear the Army is in line to lead operations near Kandahar city, a sprawling city of about 850,000 people.

Nicholson said Kandahar operations will be conducted differently than in Marjah — and they likely will involve seizing less terrain.

“It won’t be the same as Marjah, which had a D-Day where we moved into a very well-defined enemy enclave, then cleared it,” he said. “For those of you who have been to Iraq, [the Marjah assault] wasn’t as much kinetic activity as some of what we saw in Iraq, but it was more kinetic than what Kandahar city will be.”

Problems training Afghans
U.S. forces also will continue to train Afghan army and police forces this summer, but it needs to step up the pace, officials said. The Afghan National Army currently has control over half of Kabul province, just east of the capital city, but isn’t in charge anywhere else and needs to be pushed to improve, said retired Marine Col. Jeff Haynes, who also spoke at the forum.

Haynes, who oversaw 700 U.S. trainers in 2008 as commander of Regional Corps Advisory Command-Central, said the problems in the ANA go straight to the top in the capital, where the “Kabul mafia” of politically connected Afghan officers lacks leadership.

“There’s not enough good leaders in the ANA to go around, and that results in a lack of accountability and initiative,” he said. “These guys are smart. They’re clever people. They can do more, and they’re playing us. We need to stand up to that and stomp them out of that now.”

The Afghan army, however, has some impressive enlisted leaders and rank-and-file soldiers, he said. While acknowledging it wouldn’t be easy, Haynes said the U.S. should consider pressing the Afghan government to develop a commissioning program for promising senior noncommissioned officers and have them take over for corrupt officers.

“There are fantastic sergeants major out there, young guys, senior NCOs who are in their late 20s and 30s,” said Haynes, the vice president of operations for Glevum Associates, an independent research center in Washington. “It’s a young army, so they make sergeant major pretty quick. Some of those guys, if I had my way, I’d make them majors tomorrow.”

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South Asia
May 1, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE01Df06.html 
 
Helmand's poppy growth surges


By Aziz Ahmad

HELMAND - Landowner Hajji Fateh Khan lives in one of the most violent districts in Afghanistan, but this spring he says is a happy man as deep-pocketed buyers eye the imminent opium yield from his poppy plantations.

"The year before last, four kilograms of opium was sold for US$200, but now that weight fetches up to $1,000," the farmer from Nad Ali in southern Helmand province said.

"Who does not like more money? And this is the only crop which earns lots of it," he added with a laugh.

Khan has further cause to celebrate his illegal harvest. It was produced not on his own 40-hectare spread of arable farmland, but rather on a 12-hectare patch he started cultivating in the outlying, government-owned desert. And so far, no one has tried to destroy it.

Not only does the fertile desert soil push up bumper yields once irrigated from deep wells, but Khan says a strong Taliban presence there deters attempts by the authorities to implement eradication.

Provincial officials continue to downplay reports of a jump in prices and production. Following a one-third drop in cultivation nationally since 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime this year also predicts a stable crop in Helmand, which has 70,000 hectares of poppy fields and accounts for an estimated 60% of the world's production of heroin.

But in Helmand's Nad Ali district, the head of the shura (local assembly) committee for social affairs, Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, said the situation is noticeably deteriorating.

"Opium production is increasing this year because the price is high and eradication programs are not as active as last year," he told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. "A lot of people are now growing in the desert." Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, who until mid-2008 was Helmand's police chief, also said that according to his information, local poppy farming had increased 20% this year.

"Beside an increase in opium prices, cultivation has also been boosted by other factors like growing administrative corruption in Helmand, insecurity, poverty, usurpation of government-owned land and a rising number of drug traffickers," he said.

A switch-round in opium and wheat prices that occurred in 2008 resulted from grain shortages in Afghanistan and low imports from abroad, pushing the wheat price way above that of the drug.

Now the balance is tipping back in favor of opium, say those who produce it. Farmers in some areas actually cited an increase in government eradication as driving up profits from production.

As well as ramifications for trafficking volumes to Western markets, poppy's see-sawing fortunes are a crucial element in the conflict between the Taliban and international forces. Opium revenues are a chief source of funding for the insurgency.

However, Daud Ahmadi, spokesman for the Helmand governor, Mohammad Gulab Mangal, remains adamant that there is no marked increase in cultivation and reiterated the intention of the authorities to stamp out poppy farming.

According to Ahmadi, the fight against its growth in Helmand rests largely on a three-phased British carrot-and-stick initiative now under way called the Food Zone program.

The first phase supplies farmers with fertilizers and improved seeds for alternative crops. The second includes a public awareness campaign highlighting the dangers of opium, while the third brings prosecutions against those who persist in growing poppy.

"If farmers who have already been assisted through the Food Zone project still cultivate poppy, their poppy fields will be destroyed and they will be detained," Ahmadi said, while also pledging the destruction of fields of farmers who reject the British program.

"This year a considerable decrease will be observed in poppy cultivation," he predicted.

But like other aspects of government here, the plan to break the opium trade is vulnerable to localized corruption.

While a considerable chunk of the proceeds from poppy cultivation goes into the Taliban's coffers, corrupt law enforcement and government officials also feed off this giant industry.

"We aren't alone in this business," Hajji Baridada, a poppy farmer in Gereshk district, told IWPR. "The Taliban tell us to grow poppy and that they will protect it from the government by planting mines.

"They then take US$600 to 1,200 from us for each deep well we use. Then local [army or militia] commanders come and tell us that they will protect our poppy fields but we will have to give them one kilogram of opium for every 2,000 square meters planted.

"Then the police also come and take their share. We no longer know what we should do."

Standing just over one meter tall on thick green stems, the immature poppy seed pods are slit and drained of their milky latex sap which then dries to a sticky brown opium residue.

This contains up to 12% morphine, which can then be chemically processed into heroin. Production facilities are readily accessible to most small farmers with some modest start-up capital.

But for another Helmand farmer, Hajji Mawladad, paying off all sides got too much. Eventually, he decided to turn his back on the opium trade and grow only wheat this year with help from the British program.

"Farming poppy is a great headache, because there is fear of destruction of the field on one hand and the cuts local commanders receive on the other," he said.

In a bid to step up pressure on farmers whose fields enjoy Taliban protection, Helmand's new chief of police, Asadullah Sherzad, told a recent news conference that growers would answer for any harm inflicted on his subordinates.

"We will hold responsible any farmer on whose land a mine harms one of my officers," Sherzad declared.

Despite such warnings, enforcement prospects are still weak in remote rural areas where Taliban control is strong. Even aerial eradication is no guarantee of success, because unless farmers can be reached to offer an alternative livelihood, wholesale destruction of their crops can trigger a dangerous backlash.

Hajji Zaqum, a poppy growing landlord in Helmand's much fought-over Sangin district, said government eradication of fields would only strengthen the insurgents.

"I can say with confidence that if people's poppy fields in Sangin are destroyed, they will go over to the Taliban and fully support them," he said.

Regarding those like the landowner Khan who cultivate poppy in government-owned desert areas, the governor's spokesman, Ahmadi, said they could expect no leniency for having broken the law on two counts.

"The government will destroy their fields, but will not provide them with any kind of assistance," he said.

But farmers who expressly moved their operations that far into areas controlled by the Taliban clearly did not do so on a whim and will not be easily deterred.

Unlike the overworked green farming areas by the canals and rivers, the desert soil is highly fertile and can be brought to life using wells bored 100 m or deeper and served by generator-powered water pumps. Once irrigation is steady and the poppies take root, a superior grade of drug bounty flows.

"I am happy about my cultivation this year because on the one hand it is in the desert and on the other the opium is very good quality and strong," Khan said.

Aziz Ahmad Tassal is an IWPR-trained reporter in Helmand.

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

[bigron]

Friday, April 30, 2010
19:37 Mecca time, 16:37 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/2010430161625170956.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Nato troops kill three Afghan women  
 

 
 
Two women and a girl have been killed and two men injured after Nato troops opened fire on a car in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

Afghanistan's interior ministry said that the victims were travelling on a highway in Zabul province on Friday when foreign troops opened fire, killing three of the five civilians in the car.

"A foreign forces convoy opened fire on a vehicle coming the other way, thinking they were Taliban," Zemarai Bashary, the interior ministry spokesman, said.

"Two women and one girl were killed and one other woman was wounded."

'Investigation underway'

A spokesman for the Zabul governor said the troops were part of Nato's US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and had stopped on the road to defuse a bomb.

"ISAF had to defuse a roadside bomb near a bridge when a small vehicle approached. ISAF told them to stop, fired a warning shot, then shot at the car," Mohammad Jan Rasul Yar, the spokesman, said.

Eyewitnesses said that the troops, were carrying out house-to-house searches in a village, opened fire first without firing warning shots.

Nick Carter, the ISAF regional commander, said that the military was investigating the allegations but gave no further details.

Friday’s incident is the latest in a long list of civilians mistakenly killed by US-led troops fighting the Taliban.

It comes just weeks after US troops opened fire on a bus in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital, killing four civilians and sparking angry public protests.

It also comes one day after the French military admitted that its troops accidentally killed four children in eastern Afghanistan on April 6 in a missile attack.
 
 

[bigron]

Pentagon Report: Still not enough troops for Afghanistan operations

By Jeff Schogol, Stars and Stripes

April 29, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65541&hd=&size=1&l=e


• Read the report here. (PDF, 4MB)
http://www.stripes.com/10/apr10/afghan_report.pdf

ARLINGTON, Va. — Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, according to a congressionally mandated report released Wednesday on progress in Afghanistan.

Coalition forces have decided to focus their efforts on 121 key districts in Afghanistan, but right now, NATO has enough forces to operate in only 48 of those districts, the report said.

There are currently 86,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up from about 30,000 when President Barack Obama took office. By August, there will be 98,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

With the rest of the U.S. and foreign partner troops that will arrive in Afghanistan this year, coalition and Afghan security forces will be able to focus on all 121 districts "over coming months," a senior Defense official said Wednesday, declining to be more specific.

The 150-page progress report said that Afghanistan’s deteriorating situation has leveled off, but violence still increased 87 percent between February 2009 and March 2010. A senior Defense official attributed the increase to the presence of more troops in Afghanistan moving into tougher areas.

The most significant challenge that coalition forces face is fielding enough high-quality Afghan troops and police to assume primary responsibility for security in Afghanistan, the official said. The need for police trainers is particularly pressing.

While the Afghan police force has grown substantially over the past year, many were rushed into service for the August presidential elections with little or no training, the report said. Those police will complete their retraining by July.

Meanwhile, corruption is a continuing problem, according to the report, the fifth in a series required every 180 days.

While the Afghan government has taken steps to fight corruption, "real change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful."

"The government of Afghanistan, as a whole, has yet to exercise sustained leadership on this critical issue or to take the initiative, instead of merely responding to international community initiatives, pressure, and encouragement," the report said.

Frustration with the government is one reason behind the success of the insurgency.

Insurgents in Afghanistan regard 2009 as their "most successful year," according to the progress report.

While instability has leveled off, the insurgency has a "robust means of sustaining its operations."

"A ready supply of recruits is drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks," the report said.

Among the insurgents’ strengths is their ability to carry out media campaigns, conduct complex attacks, and crate a "shadow government" that undermines the Afghan government’s legitimacy.

But the insurgency does have weaknesses:

Fissures among local insurgent leaders

-Violence against civilians

-Over-reliance on outside support

-Layered command structure that makes it hard to act on a decentralized level

-Dependence on marginalized or threatened segments of the Pashtun population.

The report anticipates a "significant insurgent response" to NATO operations in Kandahar, expected to kick off in June.

While NATO troops have cleared some insurgent strongholds, the Afghan government has been slow establishing a presence there.



 

[bigron]

30 - May 2, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/kelly04302010.html

A Troubling Timeline

Atrocities in Afghanistan


By KATHY KELLY and DAN PEARSON

Peace activists can hasten an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan by demanding a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal. A bill in the U.S. Congress introduced by Representatives McGovern and Jones, requires such a timetable. In the Senate, a similar bill has been introduced by Senator Feingold. Arguments in favor of a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan should include readiness to examine disturbing patterns of misinformation regarding U.S./NATO attacks against Afghan civilians.

It is worth noting that even General McChrystal acknowledges that U.S. forces have killed civilians who meant them no harm. During a biweekly videoconference with US soldiers in Afghanistan, he was quite candid. "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force,” said General McChrystal. “To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

Those families and individuals that General McChrystal refers to should be our primary concern. We should try to imagine the sorrow and horror afflicting each individual whose tragic story is told in the “timetable” of atrocities committed against innocent people. How can we compensate people who have endured three decades of warfare, whose land has been so ravaged that, according to noted researcher Alfred McCoy, it would cost $34 billion dollars to restore their agricultural infrastructure. We should notify our elected representatives that the $33 billion dollar supplemental funding bill sought by the Obama administration to pay for U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be directed toward helping Afghanistan replant its orchards, replenish its flocks, and rebuild its irrigation systems. We should insist on an end to atrocities like those which follow.

The list below describes, in part, the suffering and agony that people in Afghanistan have endured since April, 2009. To focus on this list doesn’t excuse atrocities committed by Taliban fighters. It does indicate our own responsibility to urgently educate others and ourselves about a deeply disturbing pattern: U.S./NATO officials first distribute misleading information about victims of an attack and later acknowledge that the victims were unarmed civilians.

* * *

Date: April 9, 2009
Place: Khost Province, Ali Daya

Circumstances: U.S. forces were positioned on the rooftop opposite the home of Brigadier Artillery officer Awal Khan. In a night raid, U.S. forces burst into Awal Khan’s home. Awal Khan was away from home. His family members ran to the rooftop, believing that robbers had entered the home. When they emerged on their rooftop, U.S. forces on the opposite roof opened fire, killing Awal Khan’s wife, his brother, his 17 year-old daughter Nadia, and his fifteen year-old son, Aimal and his infant son, born just a week earlier.

U.S. /NATO initial response: April 9, 2010, coalition forces issue a statement that the four people killed by troops were "armed militants." Later that same day [another statement] (http://washingtonindependent.com/38058/us-accepts-responsibility-for-khost-civilian-casualties) admits that further inquiries "suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported."

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: The Times of London reported the following, on April 11, 2009:

The US military conceded that its forces killed the civilians in error during the night-time raid that targeted the neighbouring compound of a suspected militant. The father of the dead family is a lieutenant-colonel in the Afghan Army fighting the Taleban in the restive province of Ghazni.

The US military reported that two males, two females and an infant were believed to have died in the incident, and two other women were wounded. A relative of the dead family told reporters that the dead infant was a boy born last week. “This was a terrible tragedy,” a US spokesman, Colonel Greg Julian, told The Times.

* * *

Date: December 26, 2009
Place: Kunar Province

Circumstances: In a night raid, U.S. forces, claiming to attack a bomb-making factory, attacked a house where eight youth, aged 11–18, were sleeping. They pulled the youngsters out of their beds, handcuffed them, and executed them. Villagers said that seven of those killed were students and one was a neighboring shepherd.

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: February 24, 2010--U.S. forces issued an apology, admitting that the U.S. had killed seven schoolboys and a neighboring shepherd.

* * *

Date: February 2010
Place: Helmand Province

During this month, U.S./NATO forces launched a military offensive against three hamlets in the Marja district. Researcher Prof. Marc Herold presents a detailed summary and analysis of Afghan civilians killed directly by U.S/NATO forces during this particular month.

* * *

Date: February 12, 2010
Place: Paktika Province

Circumstances: In a night raid, U.S. forces attacked a home where 25 people, 3 of them musicians, had gathered for a naming celebration. A newborn was being named that night. One of the musicians went outside to relieve himself. A flashlight shone in his face. Panicked, he ran inside and announced that the Taliban were outside. A police commander, Dawoud, the father of the newborn, ran outside with his weapon. U.S. forces opened fire, killing Officer Dawoud, a pregnant mother, an eighteen year old, Gulaila, and two others.

U.S. / NATO initial response: February 12, 2010--U.S. forces claimed that the women had been killed earlier, in an honor killing. Nato’s initial press release bore the headline: “Joint Force Operating in Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery.” The release said that after "intelligence confirmed militant activity" in a compound near a village in Paktika province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged "several insurgents" in a firefight. Two "insurgents" were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed."

* * *

March 16, 2010

The UN issued a scathing report, stating that the U.S. had killed the women. Villagers told Jerome Starkey, reporting for the Independent, that U.S. troops tried to tamper with evidence by digging bullets out of the womens’ bodies and out of the walls.

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians:

April 6, 2010--Almost two months later, the Pentagon was finally forced to admit that international forces had badly bungled the raid that night in Paktika, and that U.S. troops had, in fact, killed the women during their assault on the residence. One of the women was a pregnant mother of ten, and the other was a pregnant mother of six children.

* * *

Date: February 21, 2010
Place: Convoy en route to Kandehar

Circumstances: U.S. aerial forces attacked a three-car convoy traveling to a market in Kandehar. The convoy had planned on continuing to Kabul so that some of the passengers could get medical treatment. At least three dozen people were passengers in the three cars. The front car was an SUV type vehicle, and the last was a Land Cruiser. When the first car was hit by U.S. air fire, women in the second car jumped out and waved their scarves to indicate that they were civilians. U.S. helicopters continued to fire rockets and machine guns, killing 21 people and wounding 13.

U.S./NATO initial response: February 22, 2010--The day after the attack, the U.S.-led military coalition said that NATO forces had fired on a group of "suspected insurgents" who were thought to be on their way to attack Afghan and coalition soldiers a few miles away. When troops arrived after the helicopter strike, they discovered women and children among the dead and wounded.

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: Feb 24, 2010--General Stanley McChrystal delivered a videotaped apology.

* * *

Date: April 12, 2010
Place: Kandahar

Circumstances: According to the New York Times, “American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, (April 12).” The attack killed five civilians and wounded 18.

Initial U.S./NATO response: A statement issued by the American-led military command in Kabul said that four people were killed. It said “an unknown, large vehicle” drove “at a high rate of speed” toward a slow-moving NATO convoy that was clearing mines.

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: April 12, 2010--“ISAF deeply regrets the tragic loss of life in Zhari district this morning. According to ISAF operational reporting, four civilians were killed, including one female, and five others were treated for injuries at the scene of the incident today. Upon inspection, NATO forces discovered the vehicle to be a passenger bus."

April 13, 2010--The New York Times reported that “a military spokeswoman confirmed that a convoy traveling west, in front of the bus, opened fire, but said the second convoy was traveling east toward the passenger bus. She also said the driver of the bus was killed. A survivor, however, identified himself as the driver and said he did not violate any signal from the troops. ‘I was going to take the bus off the road,’ said the man, Mohammed Nabi. ‘Then the convoy ahead opened fire from 60 to 70 yards away,’ he said.”

* * *

Date: April 20, 2010
Place: Khost Province

Circumstances: A NATO military convoy attacked a car approaching a checkpoint, claiming that the car sped up after being warned to stop. Four young men were killed. According to the New York Times, “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. 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.”

Initial U.S. / NATO response: April 21, 2010--From the New York Times: “Without offering proof, NATO described the dead as two insurgents and their “associates.” In a statement on Tuesday, NATO said the vehicle ignored warning shots and accelerated toward the military convoy. But the statement did not challenge the Afghan account that no weapons were found in the vehicle.”

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: April 22, 2010--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.''

* * *

Date: April 28, 2010
Place: Surkh Rod district, near Jalalabad

Circumstances: According to Safiya Sidiqi, a member of the Afghan parliament, dozens of Afghan and U.S. soldiers entered her family home, blindfolded and handcuffed men and women, and killed her brother-in-law, Amanullah, a 30 year old car mechanic with five children. “They shot him six times. In his heart, in his face, in his head,” Sidiqi said on Thursday, April 29th. Both legs were broken. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042900331_pf.html)

Initial U.S./NATO response: April 29, 2010--An Afghan-international security force killed one armed individual while pursuing a Taliban facilitator in Nangarhar last night.

(http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/article/isaf-releases/afghan-isaf-operations-in-nangarhar.html)

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the person killed was an unarmed civilian: None, as yet. The case is still under investigation.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) and Dan Pearson (dan@vcnv.org) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

 

[bigron]

Published on Friday, April 30, 2010 by Inter Press Service


Pentagon Map Shows Wide Taliban Zone in the South

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon was still trying to spin its report on the war in Afghanistan issued this week as holding out hope because the instability had leveled off, even as some news outlets were noting that it documents the continued expansion of Taliban capabilities and operations.

The most significant revelation in the report, however, is that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and the U.S.-NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) joint command now acknowledge officially that the Taliban insurgents dominate a vast contiguous zone of heavily populated territory across southern Afghanistan that McChrystal regards as the most critical area in the country.

The report admits that the population in key districts across most southern provinces is sympathetic to or supportive of the insurgents.

The contiguous zone of Taliban political power stretches all the way across the 13 provinces from Farah province in the far west of the country through Helmand and Kandahar to Wardak, Logar, Paktia and Khost provinces west and south of Kabul.

The extent of Taliban political power in southern Afghanistan, which had not been acknowledged previously by ISAF, is documented in a map showing an "overall assessment of key districts" as of Mar. 18.

The map shows for the first time the location and political and security status of 121 districts chosen late last year by planners on McChrystal's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Joint Staff as the most important for a strategy of weakening the Taliban gains.

The contiguous Taliban zone includes but is not limited to 58 of the 121 key districts, of which seven have populations assessed as "supporting" the Taliban, 25 with populations "sympathetic" to the Taliban, and 21 with populations that are "neutral".

Only five of the districts within that zone are shown as having populations that are "sympathetic to" the Afghan government and none that are "supporting" the government.

The degree of Taliban political dominance in the south is partly obscured, however, by an obvious effort to portray the attitudes of the population in Helmand and Kandahar provinces more favourably than is reflected in reports from those locations.

Eight of the "neutral" districts shown on the map are in Helmand province, where it has acknowledged in the past that the population was largely sympathetic to the Taliban.

The districts of Nad Ali, in which Marja is located, Naw Zad, Lashkar Gah and Sangin are all shown on the map as having "neutral" populations, even though it has been well documented that the populations of those heavily opium poppy-growing districts had turned decisively against the government and foreign troops over government eradication efforts and the abusive behaviour of police associated with local warlords.

The population of Nad Ali had been shown in an assessment in late December as being supportive of the Taliban. Naw Zad and Sangin districts, on the other hand, had been assessed as "neutral" in December.

A report by The Guardian's Jon Boone last week quoted a recent British visitor to Sangin as remarking on the "intense hatred of people who hate everything you stand for" he had felt from people there.

McChrystal's staff apparently defined "neutral" so as to include populations in districts where U.S. and NATO forces have carried out operations aimed at clearing the Taliban and are now the object of attempts to change their political views.

Earlier this year, however, an ISAF official familiar with the assessment on which the command was basing its plans clearly included those same districts among those in which the Taliban were regarded as having gotten popular support. The official told IPS in an interview in late January, "We have a system of 80 districts where Taliban influence is strongest, where people support the Taliban for whatever reason."

That set of 80 districts that are the most pro-Taliban in the country is same set of 80 "Key Terrain districts" defined in the new Pentagon report as "areas the control of (and support from which) provides a marked advantage to either the Government of Afghanistan or the insurgents."

The ISAF official also said that "about one-fourth" of the 80 districts in which the Taliban had the strongest support would be in the "contiguous security zone" that ISAF was planning to establish in Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year. That coincides with the 19 districts in those two provinces that are shown on the Dec. 24 assessment map as "neutral", "sympathetic" to the Taliban or "supportive" of the Taliban.

If the districts labeled on the map as "neutral" are understood to be pro-Taliban as well, the districts in all three categories form an almost unbroken chain of territory with populations leaning toward the Taliban across the full length of the Pashtun south.

The 80 districts described by the ISAF official in January as providing the strongest support to the Taliban apparently included only those pro-Taliban districts that had the largest population and were closest to the major lines of communications. The list does not include a large number of other districts in several Pashtun provinces of the south where the Taliban insurgents predominate but which are farther from the major roads.

The evidence of a coherent Taliban zone of political control in the new Pentagon assessment is consistent with an Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) Provincial/District Threat Assessment as of Apr. 23, 2009, which was reported by BBC last August. An ANSF security map reflecting the ASNF assessment showed almost every district in the Pashtun south except for Nimruz province as being either "high risk" or Taliban-controlled.

Although McChrystal seemed to reject the idea that the Taliban had broad political support in his initial assessment last August, an "integrated campaign plan" jointly agreed by McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry that same month hinted strongly at such support in Pashtun areas.

The campaign plan document concluded, "Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided."

McChrystal's announcement earlier this year that ISAF would establish a "contiguous security zone" which would include the bulk of the population of Helmand and Kandahar provinces may have been a response to the recognition that the Taliban had formed its own zone of political dominance in southern Afghanistan.

However, given recent evidence that foreign troops have been unable to clear insurgents from Marja, and that local leaders and elders in Kandahar are opposing U.S. military operations in and around the city, that objective now appears to be well beyond the reach of U.S. and NATO troops.

 

© 2010 IPS North America

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/30-11

[bigron]

Published on Friday, April 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org


Atrocities in Afghanistan: A Troubling Timetable

by Kathy Kelly and Dan Pearson

Peace activists can hasten an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan by demanding a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal. A bill in the U.S. Congress [1] [1] introduced by Representatives McGovern and Jones, requires such a timetable. In the Senate, a similar bill has been introduced by Senator Feingold. Arguments in favor of a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan should include readiness to examine disturbing patterns of misinformation regarding U.S./NATO attacks against Afghan civilians. 

It is worth noting that even General McChrystal acknowledges that U.S. forces have killed civilians who meant them no harm. During a biweekly videoconference with US soldiers in Afghanistan, he was quite candid. "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force," said General McChrystal. "To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

Those families and individuals that General McChrystal refers to should be our primary concern. We should try to imagine the sorrow and horror afflicting each individual whose tragic story is told in the "timetable" of atrocities committed against innocent people. How can we compensate people who have endured three decades of warfare, whose land has been so ravaged that, according to noted researcher Alfred McCoy, it would cost $34 billion dollars to restore their agricultural infrastructure. We should notify our elected representatives that the $33 billion dollar supplemental funding bill sought by the Obama administration to pay for U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be directed toward helping Afghanistan replant its orchards, replenish its flocks, and rebuild its irrigation systems. We should insist on an end to atrocities like those which follow.

The list below describes, in part, the suffering and agony that people in Afghanistan have endured since April, 2009. To focus on this list doesn't excuse atrocities committed by Taliban fighters. It does indicate our own responsibility to urgently educate others and ourselves about a deeply disturbing pattern: U.S./NATO officials first distribute misleading information about victims of an attack and later acknowledge that the victims were unarmed civilians.


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

Date:  April 9, 2009

Place:  Khost Province, Ali Daya

Circumstances:  U.S. forces were positioned on the rooftop opposite the home of Brigadier Artillery officer Awal Khan.  In a night raid, U.S. forces burst into Awal Khan's home.  Awal Khan was away from home.  His family members ran to the rooftop, believing that robbers had entered the home.  When they emerged on their rooftop, U.S. forces on the opposite roof opened fire, killing Awal Khan's wife, his brother, his 17 year-old daughter Nadia, and his fifteen year-old son, Aimal and his infant son, born just a week earlier.

U.S. /NATO initial response:  April 9, 2010, coalition forces issue a statement that the four people killed by troops were "armed militants." Later that same day [another statement] (http://washingtonindependent.com/38058/us-accepts-responsibility-for-khost-civilian-casualties [2]) admits that further inquiries "suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported."

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians:  The Times of London reported the following, on April 11, 2009:

The US military conceded that its forces killed the civilians in error during the night-time raid that targeted the neighbouring compound of a suspected militant. The father of the dead family is a lieutenant-colonel in the Afghan Army fighting the Taleban in the restive province of Ghazni.

The US military reported that two males, two females and an infant were believed to have died in the incident, and two other women were wounded. A relative of the dead family told reporters that the dead infant was a boy born last week. "This was a terrible tragedy," a US spokesman, Colonel Greg Julian, told The Times.


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

Date:  December 26, 2009

Place:  Kunar Province

Circumstances:  In a night raid, U.S. forces, claiming to attack a bomb-making factory, attacked a house where eight youth, aged 11-18, were sleeping.  They pulled the youngsters out of their beds, handcuffed them, and executed them. Villagers said that seven of those killed were students and one was a neighboring shepherd. 

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: February 24, 2010--U.S. forces issued an apology, admitting that the U.S. had killed seven schoolboys and a neighboring shepherd.


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

Date: February 2010

Place: Helmand Province

During this month, U.S./NATO forces launched a military offensive against three hamlets in the Marja district. Researcher Prof. Marc Herold presents [a detailed summary and analysis] (http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/03/10/one-month-of-the-obama-killing-machine-in-afghanistan-data-and-a-lesson-for-the-unama-and-its-groupies.html [3]) of Afghan civilians killed directly by U.S/NATO forces during this particular month.


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

Date:  February 12, 2010

Place:   Paktika Province

Circumstances: In a night raid, U.S. forces attacked a home where 25 people, 3 of them musicians, had gathered for a naming celebration. A newborn was being named that night. One of the musicians went outside to relieve himself. A flashlight shone in his face. Panicked, he ran inside and announced that the Taliban were outside. A police commander, Dawoud, the father of the newborn, ran outside with his weapon. U.S. forces opened fire, killing Officer Dawoud, a pregnant mother, an eighteen year old, Gulaila, and two others. 

U.S. / NATO initial response: February 12, 2010--U.S. forces claimed that the women had been killed earlier, in an honor killing. Nato's initial press release bore the headline: "Joint Force Operating in Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery." The release said that after "intelligence confirmed militant activity" in a compound near a village in Paktika province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged "several insurgents" in a firefight. Two "insurgents" were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed."

 

March 16, 2010--The UN issued a scathing report, stating that the U.S. had killed the women. Villagers told Jerome Starkey, reporting for the Independent, that U.S. troops tried to tamper with evidence by digging bullets out of the womens' bodies and out of the walls.

 

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: 

April 6, 2010--Almost two months later, the Pentagon was finally forced to admit that international forces had badly bungled the raid that night in Paktika, and that U.S. troops had, in fact, killed the women during their assault on the residence. One of the women was a pregnant mother of ten, and the other was a pregnant mother of six children.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/asia/06afghan.html?hp [4])


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

Date:  February 21, 2010

Place:   Convoy en route to Kandehar   

Circumstances: U.S. aerial forces attacked a three-car convoy traveling to a market in Kandehar. The convoy had planned on continuing to Kabul so that some of the passengers could get medical treatment. At least three dozen people were passengers in the three cars. The front car was an SUV type vehicle, and the last was a Land Cruiser. When the first car was hit by U.S. air fire, women in the second car jumped out and waved their scarves to indicate that they were civilians. U.S. helicopters continued to fire rockets and machine guns, killing 21 people and wounding 13.

U.S./NATO initial response:  February 22, 2010--The day after the attack, the U.S.-led military coalition said that NATO forces had fired on a group of "suspected insurgents" who were thought to be on their way to attack Afghan and coalition soldiers a few miles away. When troops arrived after the helicopter strike, they discovered women and children among the dead and wounded.

(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/03/89795/afghan-survivors-describe-nato.html#ixzz0mGErxQSL [5]) U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians:

Feb 24, 2010--General Stanley McChrystal delivered a videotaped apology.


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

Date:  April 12, 2010

Place:  Kandahar

Circumstances:  According to the New York Times, "American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, (April 12)."  The attack killed five civilians and wounded 18.  (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/world/asia/13afghan.html [6])

Initial U.S./NATO response:  [A statement]( http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/article/isaf-releases/joint-team-assessing-civilian-casualty-incident-in-zhari.html [7]) issued by the American-led military command in Kabul said that four people were killed. It said "an unknown, large vehicle" drove "at a high rate of speed" toward a slow-moving NATO convoy that was clearing mines.

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians: April 12, 2010--"ISAF deeply regrets the tragic loss of life in Zhari district this morning. According to ISAF operational reporting, four civilians were killed, including one female, and five others were treated for injuries at the scene of the incident today. Upon inspection, NATO forces discovered the vehicle to be a passenger bus." (http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/article/isaf-releases/joint-team-assessing-civilian-casualty-incident-in-zhari.html [7])

 

April 13, 2010--The New York Times reported that "a military spokeswoman confirmed that a convoy traveling west, in front of the bus, opened fire, but said the second convoy was traveling east toward the passenger bus. She also said the driver of the bus was killed. A survivor, however, identified himself as the driver and said he did not violate any signal from the troops. ‘I was going to take the bus off the road,' said the man, Mohammed Nabi. ‘Then the convoy ahead opened fire from 60 to 70 yards away,' he said."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/world/asia/13afghan.html [6])


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

Date:  April 20, 2010

Place:  Khost Province

Circumstances:  A NATO military convoy attacked a car approaching a checkpoint, claiming that the car sped up after being warned to stop.  Four young men were killed. [According to the New York Times,] (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/21/world/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html [8]) "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. 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."

Initial U.S. / NATO response:  April 21, 2010--From the New York Times: "Without offering proof, NATO described the dead as two insurgents and their "associates." In a statement on Tuesday, NATO said the vehicle ignored warning shots and accelerated toward the military convoy. But the statement did not challenge the Afghan account that no weapons were found in the vehicle."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/world/asia/21khost.html [9])

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the people killed were unarmed civilians:

April 22, 2010--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.''

(http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/21/world/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html [8])

 

Date: April 28, 2010

Place:  Surkh Rod district, near Jalalabad

Circumstances: According to Safiya Sidiqi, a member of the Afghan parliament, dozens of Afghan and U.S. soldiers entered her family home, blindfolded and handcuffed men and women, and killed her brother-in-law, Amanullah, a 30 year old car mechanic with five children.  "They shot him six times. In his heart, in his face, in his head," Sidiqi said on Thursday, April 29th. Both legs were broken.  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042900331_pf.html [10])

Initial U.S./NATO response: April 29, 2010--An Afghan-international security force killed one armed individual while pursuing a Taliban facilitator in Nangarhar last night.

(http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/article/isaf-releases/afghan-isaf-operations-in-nangarhar.html [11])

U.S. /NATO acknowledgement that the person killed was an unarmed civilian: None, as yet. The case is still under investigation.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org [12]) and Dan Pearson (dan@vcnv.org [13]) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.


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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/30-10

[bigron]

NATO Forces Still Regard Afghan Allies With Fear

Growing the Afghan Army and Trusting It Are Two Very Different Things

by Jason Ditz, April 30, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/30/nato-forces-still-regard-afghan-allies-with-fear/

For NATO’s political leaders and top military brass, the pledge to grow the Afghan military is always a safe default. Indeed, the Afghan military is already so large that the Afghan government could never hope to pay for it, and plans are in place to dramatically increase its size.

But for the troops on the ground, distrust of their Afghan “allies” is so great that when trouble breaks out they aren’t sure if they should train their guns on the Taliban or the Afghan Army.

It isn’t just an overreaction to those occasions when Taliban have infiltrated the security forces and killed NATO troops. It isn’t even the fact that so many of the Afghan troops are raw recruits with almost no training, most of whom will be gone after a few paychecks.

The corruption in the Afghan government is well known, but less often discussed is how deeply it extends into these enormous security forces being bankrolled by the US and its allies. The raw recruits may be incompetent, but many of the commanders only got where they are through overt bribery, and then only on the assumption that they can steal and coerce enough to make a profit on the deal. In short the Afghan security force is a wreck from top to bottom, and are so unpredictable that any plan, short or long term, dependent on them seems doomed to fail.

[bigron]

Petraeus: Tough Times Ahead in Kandahar

Insists June Invasion 'Not Going to Be a Conventional Offensive'

by Jason Ditz, April 30, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/30/petraeus-tough-times-ahead-in-kandahar/



With local resentment of the US forces already at an enormous level and civilian killings sparking anti-US riots, Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus today warned that more “tough times” are ahead for the city’s residents, something which likely will not be greeted with welcome or patience.

“The enemy is going to take horrific action to disrupt the progress,” Petraeus predicted. Civilian death tolls caused by both US and Taliban forces have been steadily on the rise in southern Afghanistan in recent months.

Petraeus repeatedly likened the situation to that in Iraq, and insisted that his prediction that “the enemy fights back” was a lesson he learned in Iraq. He insisted that the offensive was “not going to be a conventional offensive,” however, which may suggest that the initial plan to use the Marjah invasion as a model has been shelved.

He capped off his news conference, as so many others, with a reference to 9/11, insisting that “it was right here in Kandahar that the 9/11 attacks were planned.”

[bigron]

US needs more oversight of Afghan funds - auditors


30 Apr 2010 18:58:04 GMT
Source: Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30131153.htm


* Not enough controls in place

* Obama asks for $20 billion more

* Audits show no master plan for army buildings

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Reuters) - The Obama administration needs better controls to prevent waste and fraud as it asks Congress for an additional $20 billion to speed up rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, U.S. auditors said on Friday.

The budget request, which covers the 2011 fiscal year and 2010 supplemental funding, is a 38 percent increase over the nearly $51.5 billion that Congress has already allocated for Afghanistan's reconstruction since 2002.

"United States' agencies need to pay more attention to oversight and they need to pay more attention to increasing the capacities of the Afghan agencies to provide oversight," John Brummet, acting deputy special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told Reuters.

In a bid to boost Afghanistan's own capacity, the Obama administration plans to funnel much of the new money directly through the Afghan government, which has been repeatedly accused of corruption and mismanagement of donor funds.

Two recent U.S. inspections of Afghanistan's anti-corruption office as well as the key agency responsible for auditing public finances, found both lacked the independence and qualified staff to do the job, said a quarterly report filed by the special inspector general's office to Congress on Friday.

"Without proper and intense oversight, our contributions to rebuild Afghanistan can easily be exposed to waste, fraud and abuse," said Arnold Fields, the chief inspector.

Recent audits by his office reflect similar problems found during the Bush administration when it spent tens of billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq and oversight was seen as sub-par.

"I think there have been some of the same mistakes. One of the differences in Afghanistan, compared to Iraq, is that the capacity of the Afghan government is weak and needs to be strengthened," Brummet said.

SECURITY FOCUS

Included in Obama's 2011 budget request is $11.6 billion to train, equip and mentor Afghanistan's security forces as well as $3.3 billion for government and development programs.

Overall, nearly 70 percent of reconstruction budget requests are to bolster Afghan security forces, whose competence is key for U.S. forces to begin leaving as planned from July 2011.

The goal is for Afghan security forces to reach a target of 300,000 personnel in 2011. But U.S. auditors complained of a lack of a master plan to build facilities to house this expanding military.

Audits released separately on Friday criticized two new garrisons being funded by U.S. taxpayers, finding "significant" problems and a lack of quality assurance for the buildings.

In inspections of a garrison in the northern province of Kunduz being managed by U.S. company DynCorp <DCP.N>, auditors found serious deficiencies in the work, including severe settling of soil that was causing walls to crack and lean.

In addition, the first phase of the project was more than 20 months behind schedule and the second phase more delayed.

The quarterly report said 19 criminal cases had been conducted of U.S. taxpayer funds used in Afghanistan, resulting in the recovery of $2 million so far. Some 42 cases were under investigation, the report said.

In another case, a U.S. Navy employee working in a contract office in Kabul admitted taking $10,000 in bribes to influence the award of U.S. fuel and construction contracts. The Navy had taken disciplinary action, the report said, without giving details. (Editing by Xavier Briand)

[bigron]

April 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/world/asia/01afghan.html?ref=world

NATO Investigates 3 Afghan Civilian Deaths

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SCOTT SAYARE


KABUL, Afghanistan — The French military took responsibility on Friday for killing four Afghan children during a missile strike in early April, and NATO said it was investigating allegations of a military convoy gunning down two Afghan women and a girl in southeastern Afghanistan.

The reports underscore concern over rising civilian deaths caused by the American-led military coalition as troops step up operations across the country. Last June, the new NATO and American commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, instituted guidelines credited with reducing civilian casualties caused by Western military forces.

That downward trend has abruptly been reversed: In the first three months of 2010, at least 72 Afghan civilians were accidentally killed by troops, compared to about 30 killed in the same period last year, according to a NATO official in Kabul.

The latest allegations of civilian deaths were in some dispute. On Friday, Afghan officials said international forces killed two Afghan women and a girl riding in a car in Zabul Province as they approached a military convoy stopped on the road to remove a buried bomb.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Kabul, Zemary Bashary, said “foreign forces” had killed the women in Zabul.

Mohammed Jan Rasool Yar, a spokesman for the Zabul governor, said the Afghan authorities had not determined which military unit shot the women. He said the driver of the car, a man, was wounded and hospitalized.

As troops defused the bomb, Mr. Yar said, a Toyota approached. They “tried to stop them, but they did not stop,” he said, and troops opened fire.

But while a NATO spokesman in Kabul said early Saturday morning that one military convoy had fired warning shots at a civilian car, he said that the driver stopped and there were no casualties. The spokesman said that NATO forces were continuing to investigate the allegations of civilian casualties in Zabul, but that they had no confirmation of any involvement by NATO troops.

Also on Friday, the French military said its own investigation found that its forces killed four children during a fight with insurgents on April 6 in Kapisa Province, north of Kabul.

According to Rear Adm. Christophe Prazuck, a French military spokesman, French and Afghan forces were setting up a combat outpost when insurgents attacked in the Bedrau Valley. Forces at a checkpoint returned fire and drove them back, he said.

As the militants regrouped, French observers spotted seven insurgents hidden behind a wall, and troops fired one antitank missile.

Thirty minutes later, a civilian vehicle arrived at the checkpoint with four children, ages 10 to 15, said to have been wounded in the attack, and another child who had already died. Three of the wounded children died shortly thereafter.

“The children were near the insurgents and beneath a tree,” Admiral Prazuck said. “No civilian activity had been observed.”

A French military investigation concluded in recent days. No further investigation or punitive measures are planned, Admiral Prazuck said.

Late Wednesday night, a relative of an Afghan member of Parliament was shot and killed during an operation involving NATO forces in Nangarhar Province, setting off angry demonstrations the following morning that blocked the main road to Kabul for an hour amid chants of “Death to America.”

The lawmaker, Safia Sidiqi, said troops came to her house just before midnight. She was in Kabul at the time, but she said her brother had called her to say there were thieves outside the house. She said she had called the provincial police and was told that American troops were conducting an operation.

“They came to my house intentionally and killed one of my family members,” she said. “The Americans knew this was my house.”

NATO officials said troops from a joint NATO-Afghan force had killed “one armed individual” while pursuing a “Taliban facilitator.” In a statement, NATO said the man had been shot and killed after aiming his weapon at the troops and ignoring commands and hand signals to lower his gun.


Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Kabul, and Scott Sayare from Paris. Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul.

[bigron]

Updated May 02, 2010

Afghanistan says civilian deaths are rising; fears that military buildup could worsen problem

Associated Press
KABUL
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/02/afghanistan-says-civilian-deaths-rising-fears-military-buildup-worsen-problem/

KABUL (AP) — Civilian casualties are rising in Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO reinforcements stream into the country as part of a military buildup to combat the resurgent Taliban, the Interior Ministry said Sunday.

There have been 173 civilian deaths in violence in Afghanistan from March 21 to April 21, marking a 33 percent increase over the same time period last year, the ministry said. A recent quarterly report by the U.S. office overseeing Afghanistan's rebuilding confirmed an increase in civilian deaths.

The ministry did not provide a breakdown of who was responsible for the fatalities.

Civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. and other international forces are highly sensitive in Afghanistan, although the U.N. says the Taliban are responsible for most civilian casualties. Still, the backlash could undermine U.S. strategy ahead of a summer military operation in Kandahar, a key southern city that is the spiritual home of the Taliban.

The goal of the U.S.-led operation is to flood in troops, rout the militants and rush in new governance and development projects to win the loyalty of Kandahar's half-million residents.

Public outrage over civilian deaths prompted the top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal last year to tighten the rules on the use of airstrikes and other weaponry if civilians are at risk.

There are fears the problem could get worse with 30,000 U.S. and NATO reinforcements heading to Afghanistan as part of a military buildup to take on the Taliban in the south.

Several recent operations have sparked protests in Afghanistan.

On Thursday, the French military said its troops mistakenly killed four Afghan civilians and seriously injured one during a clash with insurgents east of Kabul on April 6. On April 20, NATO troops fired on a vehicle that approached their convoy in eastern Afghanistan, killing four unarmed Afghan civilians.

"Preventing Afghan casualties remains our goal despite recent setbacks," said Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a NATO spokesman in Kabul. He added that military operations have increased this year, with many taking place in population centers.

Also Sunday, NATO said a service member died after an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan. On Saturday, another service member was killed after an "indirect-fire attack" in eastern Afghanistan.

The victims' nationalities were not immediately released.

[bigron]

Pentagon paints bleak picture of Afghanistan war as more civilians die

By Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65579&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, 1 May 2010

A semi-annual report released by the Pentagon on the Afghanistan war recorded a sharp increase in attacks on occupation troops and scarce support for the corrupt US-backed puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

The progress report, mandated by the US Congress, presented a grim picture of the state of the nearly nine-year-old, US-led war, even as a series of incidents in which civilians were killed by US and NATO troops unleashed renewed popular anger against the foreign occupation.

The Obama administration’s dispatch of 50,000 more US troops to Afghanistan over the past year notwithstanding, the 150-page Pentagon report allowed that the country’s so-called insurgents considered 2009 their "most successful year," and that the resistance to the occupation had a "robust means of sustaining its operation."

"Its operational capabilities and organizational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding," the report said, citing the spread of resistance activity to several new areas over the last six months.

Violence in the country, according to the report, had increased by a staggering 87 percent between February 2009 and March of this year. Pentagon officials attributed the spike to the deployment of the additional troops in areas that have been strongholds of the Taliban and other groups opposed to the US presence.

Equally revealing is the report’s estimate of support for the Karzai government based upon its assessment of opinion in 92 districts. It found that not one district supported the US-backed regime. Forty-four districts were described as neutral and 48 as supportive of or sympathetic to the resistance, a significant increase over the 33 described as backing the anti-occupation fighters in December of last year.

It further acknowledged that the "strength and ability of shadow governance [by the Taliban and other anti-government groups] to discredit the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government is increasing."

The report gives rather short shrift to the decisive issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, devoting just two paragraphs to claiming that the number of civilians killed by US-led troops has fallen in relation to the size of the occupation forces, and blaming the resistance for "using civilians as human shields."

The McClatchy news agency, however, cited the military’s own figures indicating "a dramatic spike in civilian deaths in the first three months of this year." It reported that the Pentagon acknowledges that US-led forces killed 87 civilians in Afghanistan during that period, compared to 29 during the first quarter of 2009.

These figures are undoubtedly a gross underestimation of the real toll inflicted by US and other foreign occupation forces, given that the Pentagon and NATO routinely deny reports of civilian casualties, claiming that either it has no knowledge of the incidents or that those killed were "insurgents." Grudging admissions come only after undeniable proof that the victims were civilians is confirmed by Afghan authorities.

A series of recent incidents has underscored the grim and rising toll that the US-led occupation is inflicting upon the Afghan people.

Two women and a young girl were killed, and two others were wounded when NATO troops opened fire April 30 on a car in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

A spokesman for the Afghan authorities said that the occupation troops were defusing a roadside bomb when the car approached and failed to halt after a warning shot.

Witnesses to the incident disputed this version, however, saying that the foreign troops were conducting house-to-house raids in the area and opened fire on the vehicle without any warning.

The killings came a day after angry demonstrators took to the streets throughout eastern Nangarhar province to protest a Wednesday night raid on the home of an Afghan lawmaker in which US troops shot her brother-in-law dead.

The legislator, Safiya Sidiqi, was not at home during the raid. She said that her brother-in-law, who was visiting, thought the compound was being attacked by bandits and left his room with an old hunting rifle, when he was cut down by US troops.

"I was afraid of Taliban, and now I can say the Americans are the enemy of the women of Afghanistan," she said.

The top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, had announced orders last January restricting night raids because of the high number of civilian casualties that they have inflicted. Under the new rules of engagement, Afghan puppet forces were supposedly to take the lead when houses were entered.

Other members of the household, however, said that there was no evidence of Afghan troops when some 80 US soldiers entered the compound, rounding up 15 family members, including women and children, and handcuffing and blindfolding them.

The US military claimed that the operation was aimed at catching a "Taliban facilitator" in the area, but no such person was apprehended.

The incident confirmed charges that McChrystal’s earlier order was for show, and that the night raids and their attendant slaughter of innocents continue unabated.

In a separate development, the French military acknowledged Thursday that its troops had killed four children in an April 6 missile attack.

Warnings from top US and NATO officials suggest that the bloodletting will escalate sharply in the coming weeks and months.

Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the US Central Command, which is responsible for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, warned that there would be "tough moments in the weeks and months ahead" in the city of Kandahar, where the US-led occupation is mobilizing some 23,000 troops for an offensive expected to begin next month.

Excusing in advance the carnage that this US-led offensive will entail, he claimed that it would be the fault of the Afghan resistance, which he said was "going to take horrific actions to disrupt the progress that Afghan and coalition and military elements are working so hard to achieve."

Concern over rising violence in the city as well as the urban combat that the occupation’s offensive will entail, the United Nations shut down its Kandahar headquarters and withdrew its entire staff from the city.

Petraeus appeared to be providing another justification for the coming bloodshed, claiming that Kandahar was the city in which the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington were prepared in 2001.

A similar note was sounded by NATO’s senior civilian official in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, the former British ambassador to the country. He warned that the coming period would be "very tough" for the occupation forces and insisted, "We cannot allow judgment of success to be the absence of casualties."

Sedwill predicted that the US-led forces would be involved for up to four more years in combat operations in Afghanistan and would remain in the country for up to 15 years more training and "mentoring" Afghan puppet forces.

The military "surge" ordered by Obama is expected to be in complete by August, with some 100,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan, up from 32,000 when he took office.

The message contained in the Pentagon’s grim report, however, appears to be that US military commanders want still more American soldiers and Marines thrown into the colonial-style war.




 

[bigron]

Monday, May 03, 2010
12:54 Mecca time, 09:54 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/2010537322013276.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
CIA base targeted by suicide bomber  


Civilian deaths caused by fighting have sparked
 widespread protests in Afghanistan [AFP]
 
A suicide bomber has struck a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan, the same location where the US intelligence agency suffered the deadliest attack in its history several months ago.

The blast happened outside Camp Chapman, in Khost province, where seven CIA agents were killed in a suicide bombing in December.

One civilian was killed and two security guards were wounded on Monday when a car laden with explosives exploded outside the base, Afghan authorities said.

"The explosion was very strong and thick smoke covered the sky afterward," Wali Mohammad, 17, who was working at a construction site nearby told the AP news agency.

The Taliban issued a claim of responsibility for the attack shortly afterwards.

Bus blast fatalities

The blast comes a day after eight Afghan civilians were killed by a roadside bomb that hit their minibus in the eastern province of Paktia.

The explosion occurred in a Taliban-held area late on Sunday, killing women and children who were travelling on the bus, witnesses said.

Police sources told Al Jazeera that eight people were killed in the blast and 14 others wounded. Survivors were taken to the provincial hospital for treatment.

Hours earlier Afghanistan's interior ministry had warned that civilian deaths were on the rise in the country. New figures showed that there were 173 civilian deaths between March 21 and April 21 this year, a 33 per cent increase on the same period in 2009.

The statistics did not record who was responsible for the deaths but the UN has said that the Taliban are responsible for most civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

Anger over deaths

Deaths caused by international troops the country have caused widespread anger in the country.

The US revised its rules on using air attacks and other weaponry last year after facing criticism for accidently killing civilians during operations against the Taliban.

Last week, the French military admitted responsibility for the deaths of four civilians who were killed during a clash with Taliban fighters on April 6.

The attack was followed by a controversial incident on April 20 in which Nato troops fired on a vehicle that approached their convoy, killing four civilians.

A recent US report confirmed the jump in civilian deaths in recent months.
 
 

[bigron]

U.N. staff to remain in Kandahar

http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/02/u-n-staff-to-remain-in-kandahar/?hpt=T2

U.N. and Afghan officials on Sunday reached an agreement that would keep the world body's national and international staff in Kandahar, said Zaimai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the province's governor.

The deal comes a week after the United Nations announced it was pulling 200 of its staff out of the Kandahar area because of the security situation.

The Afghan government has offered more protection of U.N. guest houses and offices, Ayoubi said.

Kandahar is the traditional stronghold of the Taliban, the Islamic militia battling NATO and Afghan government forces, and allied commanders are planning a new push to drive Taliban fighters out of the city.

Violence there has escalated in recent months, with numerous bombings and assassinations of officials, spurring the United Nations to move to pull out its staff. Afghan officials had criticized the U.N. plans, however.

– CNN's Atia Abawi contributed to this report.

[bigron]

Push for Afghan role delays military building

Military construction delayed in Afghanistan by push to award contracts to Afghan firms

HEIDI VOGT
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/05/02/push-for-afghan-role-delays-military-building/

May 02, 2010 12:29 EDT

An effort to give construction projects to Afghan firms is leading to delays at a time when NATO is rushing to accommodate tens of thousands more international troops, U.S. officials say.

The Army Corps of Engineers is trying to award as many construction contracts as possible to Afghan companies to pump money into the local economy and win public support. New contracts are for NATO base expansions, Afghan police stations, Afghan army bases and other facilities.

But officials say the "Afghan First" effort is slowing down badly-needed construction projects. Even U.S. officers who support the goals acknowledge there's a trade-off.

"You can either have it done on time, or contracted to the Afghans," said Col. Kevin Wilson, the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the south and west. He says his own office building took longer to complete because it was Afghan-built.

The reasons for the delays are manifold.

Afghan companies often bid on projects that they don't have the money or skills to complete, Wilson said. Quality inspectors end up teaching the basics of drainage or safe electrical wiring.

Small Afghan companies are also under more pressure to pay bribes to local authorities than large international firms, Wilson said. The military has received invoices for as much as $40,000 from Afghan contractors for bogus building permits, he said. International companies either have the power to say no or don't even try to get their money back from the military.

On NATO bases, hours are also lost each day getting Afghan workers through security.

Despite the problems, Wilson says the "Afghan First" program is the right approach given the new focus on winning over the population. The problem is that this year, in the midst of a troop surge, there's just too much to build.

The Army engineers expect to award nearly 355 contracts in fiscal 2010, nearly three times the number awarded in 2009. The dollar value is increasing as well — $3.2 billion from $2.7 billion the year before, according to Army figures.

"The whole ramping up of the U.S. presence here has pushed a big requirement on us," said Col. Michael McCormick, who oversees engineering projects in the north.

And the delays are already piling up. Two Afghan army barracks being built by Virginia-based DynCorp International LLC to house 5,800 soldiers are behind schedule by 14 months to two years, according to a U.S. government report issued Friday.

In the past, most of the contracts would have gone to large international companies like Dyncorp. Many still do: more than 130 international construction companies were registered with the Afghan government in 2009, according to official figures.

But the military now demands that even the international companies incorporate training of Afghan workers and subcontractors. So in nearly every project now, the military is more deeply involved — dictating terms that previously would have been hashed out between prime contractors and subcontractors.

International construction companies and Afghan subcontractors have long had an uneasy relationship. The foreign firms say that they get cheated by fly-by-night Afghan firms. The Afghans say international companies unfairly withhold payment.

One Kabul construction company owner tells of a road he helped build as a subcontractor to a Turkish firm. Mohammad Jan Alikozay said the prime contractor skimped on cement for much of the road, which then started breaking apart within a year. The Turkish company, which he declined to name, had already left the country by then — without completing payments, he said.

"We lost $300,000. And we rebuilt the road," Alikozay said.

Abdul Razaq Asem, who started his Road & Roof Construction Co. with $300 in 2001, has hired a lawyer to explore suing in U.S. courts against an American company that didn't pay him for work on a project to build two Afghan army compounds. He says the company, California-based ECC Inc., snatched away his main subcontractor on the project, then withheld $4 million from him because the project was delayed while he looked for another subcontractor.

A spokesman for ECC said the company does not comment on issues with specific contractors.

Asem said when he started out he often bid too low on U.S. projects because he didn't understand the higher cost of equipment required to meet U.S. safety standards.

Light sockets that he could get for $5 in Turkey cost hundreds of times more when imported from the U.S. as required, Asem said. He blamed international contractors for not being clear about the requirements, then using the inaccurate pricing as a reason to withhold payment. He has since hired Western consultants.

For their part, international firms and inspectors complain of Afghan firms that pocket money and disappear or win contracts by using a name and logo identical to that of a more reputable firm.

In the United States, construction contractors are held to their promise to complete a project by a process known as "bonding," in which they pay a security deposit to be held until work finishes. In Afghanistan, the government has no such requirement, and many small Afghan companies do not have the money on hand anyway.

So when work isn't completed, or disputes arise between companies, there's no easy way to resolve them.

The legal system is so ineffective that no one wants to go to court, explains Aziz Taheer, who works to resolve business disputes for the government's Afghanistan Investment Support Agency.

"Once the case goes to court then it's a problem for both parties because our judicial system is not that clean," Taheer said. "Both sides will pay a lot of money in bribes and it will take a long time."

Instead, the agency tries to act as an impartial mediator, getting the two sides together to talk. However, the mediation usually fails because the agency holds no power to force an agreement, Taheer said.

The Army is trying to establish rules that solve some of these issues, such as requiring the company that wins the contract to do 15 to 25 percent of the work itself, depending on the size of the project.

Before, companies that were good at submitting bids would often subcontract out the entire project for a lesser amount, taking pure profit off the top, McCormick said. In addition, the Army holds the prime contractor responsible for making sure everyone working on the project is paid — even if they're employed by a subcontractor.

But some American firms said the changes mean they're now being treated unfairly. Paul "Tracy" Wright, the Afghanistan director of U.S.-owned AISG Construction, said his firm can lose all the cost savings of subcontracting if they have to monitor every action taken by companies they hire.

Wright already spends a couple days a week trying to screen potential subcontractors at his Kabul offices — asking them about their equipment and requiring photos of buildings they've completed.

"Often completely different companies come in with the same pictures," Wright said.

Source: AP News

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Behind the scenes with the men who deploy airstrikes

By David Axe |28 April 2010 |
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-04/28/behind-the-scenes-with-the-men-who-deploy-airstrikes


The enemy fighters have them surrounded. It's the worst possible time for Staff Sergeant Kevin Rosner's radio to stop working.

It's 26 March in the Chowkay valley in Afghanistan's mountainous Kunar province, along the Pakistani border. Able Company, from the US Army's 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, has darted into the remote farming valley for a brief meeting with village elders.

The Chowkay is a hub for illegal activity in the province. Lumber smuggling and, especially, poppy farming draw in a rogue's gallery of bad guys: common criminals, Taliban fighters, armed isolationists. The Army wants to uproot the worst characters, but that means drying up the outflow of semi-processed poppy paste. Convincing the Chowkay's farmers to switch to other crops was going to take a lot of talking.

Today's mission is meant to start the conversation. But to facilitate a meeting between a team of Army agricultural experts and the Chowkay elders, the company has had to run a gauntlet of armed groups entrenched in the valley. "There's a high chance of going kinetic," Rosner says, using the military's synonym for "combat."

More than for most troops, "going kinetic" is Rosner's job. The baby-faced, 20-something sergeant with the tired-seeming eyes has at his fingertips more concentrated firepower than the rest of the battalion combined -- in a military culture where killing prowess means status, Rosner occupies one of the loftiest posts.

In his gray camouflaged uniform, body armor and helmet, Rosner looks a lot like the soldiers all around him. But he's not a soldier; he's an airman in the US Air Force, a so-called Joint Terminal Air Controller or "JTAC". It's his responsibility to coordinate air strikes, usually as a last resort when NATO troops are outnumbered and cornered. "If I'm doing my job, it means the shit has hit the fan," Rosner says.

Reluctant Warrior

The March mission takes a turn for the worse when the soldiers spot three teams of enemy fighters scaling the mountaintops surrounding the patrol's position. Occupying the high ground on three sides, the enemy fighters will have the terrain advantage. Shit, meet fan. Rosner opens up a channel on his radio to ask his headquarters for a flight of F-15E Strike Eagle bombers.

He does so reluctantly. More than most troops, Rosner and his fellow JTACs understand the potential consequences of an air strike. According to NATO statistics, 72 Afghan civilians have died due to NATO action in just the first three months of 2010, compared to 29 in the same period last year, In all, NATO accidentally killed 596 Afghan civilians last year, most of them in air strikes. If the three-month trend continues, this year's civilian death toll could exceed 1,000. On his way into the Chowkay, Rosner saw innocent farmers working their fields along the valley floor; he doesn't want to add them to the rolls of the dead.

NATO troops are also at risk whenever a mission goes kinetic and jets swoop in. During one recent mission in Afghanistan's arid south, a pair of US Air Force A-10 attack jets mistakenly strafed a NATO patrol with their powerful 30-millimeter, tank-killing cannons. This despite there being a JTAC with the patrol, trying to direct the aircraft towards their intended target -- a group of Taliban fighters. Luckily, no NATO troops were hurt.

"We feel a big responsibility for the guys here," says Tech Sergeant Phoebus Lazaridis, Rosner's boss. "Five-hundred pound bombs, 200-pound bombs ... imagine the effect that can have on them and the people in this country."

Last year, NATO's American commander, General Stanley McChrystal, tightened up the procedures for approving air strikes. Civilian deaths from errant bombs were undermining public support for the international coalition, McChrystal explained. "Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly."

McChrystal's new rules meant that JTACs would have to be doubly sure of the identities of anyone targeted in an air strike. In Afghanistan's rugged valleys, with Taliban fighters who blend in with civilians, positive identification can be tricky. For men like Rosner, it's better not to have to attack anyone at all. Rosner trained more than three years to become a JTAC, but says he would be content being idle. "I love doing my job," he says, "but it's nice to not have to do it."

Today in the Chowkay, circumstances underscore that dilemma when Rosner discovers his radio isn't working. Electronic interference from systems installed on the patrol's vehicles has jammed the JTAC's special radio. Rosner's job, already one of the hardest in the US military, has just become a lot harder. Not for the first time, he's been stymied by what Air Force experts have described as the "electronic soup" that results from too many radios, data-links and jammers all operating in the same area.

Reluctant and hobbled by the jamming, the airman scrambles to find a way to talk to the F-15s. He might have just minutes, even seconds, before the Taliban open fire.

Battle Manager

Rosner is what the military calls a "battle manager." He and around 500 other NATO JTACS from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and other countries serve as liaisons and interpreters between ground troops and pilots. NATO is working hard to approximately double the number of JTACs available.

"Air power is one of those asymmetric advantages we have in Afghanistan," says Lieutenant Colonel Brad Lyons, commander of the US Air Force's 34th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, flying F-16 fighters from Bagram Air Field, outside Kabul. The squadron's primary mission is Close Air Support, or "CAS" -- that is, working in concert with ground troops.

"People think about CAS being a simple employment of ordnance from the air," Lyons says. "But CAS is all about coordination -- about rapidly sharing information so everyone understands the same problem."

Air Force pilots speak in Air Force terminology, use unique types of radios, fly high and fast and see everything from a God's-eye-view. Army soldiers have their own radios, move slowly, stay low and see everything from yards away.

It comes down to just one person to integrate those perspectives, and do it in an information-rich environment where the electronic "noise" from various radios and other systems can be virtually deafening, as Rosner discovered during the March mission. The JTAC's job is highly technical, unbelievably intense and at times intuitive to the point of being an art form. Rosner and his fellow JTACs are the military's "jet whisperers."

"They're the glue that holds this all together," US Air Force Brigadier General Steve Kwast, commander of air operations at Bagram, says of his air controllers. "What the JTAC does is have a conversation between the aircraft and the ground commander to makes sure our operations are sophisticated enough to solve problems without doing harm to the Afghan people."

That conversation Rosner is supposed to have depends on two things: an impressive suite of high technology, and Rosner's ability to quickly visualize and process data fed to him by this technology. Strapped to his chest, Rosner carries a handheld video player called a "Rover," built by L3 Communications, a New York-based defense contractor. The device, the size and shape of a PSP game console and costing tens of thousands of pounds, reads signals transmitted by the camera pods strapped to the underside of all NATO fighter aircraft. With his Rover, Rosner can see everything a pilot sees, from the pilot's perspective.

On his back he carries a radio programmed with secure frequencies that tie him directly to the pilots overhead and to his unit's headquarters, several miles away. At the headquarters, another JTAC monitors a bigger, more sophisticated video terminal that displays the same video Rosner sees, plus other data.

With his own eyes, Rosner sees the situation the soldiers are in. He sees the terrain and the apparent locations of enemy forces and civilians. Rosner must blend all of this, often in seconds' time, and answer several critical questions:

* Is what the ground commander is seeing actually an enemy force?
* Does the pilot also see the same enemy force?
* Are any civilians in harm's way?
* If not, would an aircraft's intervention help resolve a dangerous situation?
* Is so, does the aircraft need to use a weapon, or could its mere presence help deter the enemy?
* If weapons are necessary, exactly what ordnance -- guns, missiles or bombs -- should the pilot use to attack the enemy?
* Once weapons have been used, is the enemy neutralised, or is another attack necessary?

"You have to calculate so many different things with you and with the aircraft," says Airman 1st Class William Chandler, an apprentice JTAC studying under Rosner.

How does Rosner prepare for such a complex task? He does his homework, is how. The night before the Chowkay mission, he spends hours reviewing radio frequencies, map coordinates and aircraft flight schedules. And he lies in his bunk, eyes closed, sighing deeply, seeming to meditate on the mission to come. "As long as you have right tools, and coordinate with the pilots, you can have confidence," he says.

Quick Thinking
Back in the Chowkay, Rosner calls out to a nearby Army radio operator. He asks if he can borrow the soldier's portable satellite transmitter for a moment to route his request for CAS.

The plan works. Rosner's petition filters through to an Air Operations Center located at an undisclosed Middle Eastern country. Officers at the center approve the request. The F-15s are now available to Rosner, should they become necessary. They orbit somewhere up above and probably miles away, invisible to the naked eye.

By now the enemy fighters are in position, perfectly primed for an attack on Rosner and the soldiers. An intelligence report arrives indicating that the Taliban have asked their commander permission to open fire. Remarkably, the commander says no. When the fighters repeat the request, the commander again rejects it. As if to put an exclamation point on the Taliban's sudden, unexpected powerlessness, a pair of Army scout helicopters fires incendiary rockets into the mountaintops, cloaking them in white smoke.

At this moment, the Army agricultural team completes its meeting. Rosner and the soldiers pack up their equipment and sprint back to their armored vehicles, as the scout helicopters fire their machine guns to keep the enemy's heads down. "I can't believe we didn't get shot at," one soldier breathes.

For his part, Rosner is relieved. The F-15s with their 20-millimeter cannons and one-ton, satellite-guided bombs were at his disposal. With just a few expertly-worded commands, Rosner could have devastated the Chowkay. It would have made for a lopsided victory against the Taliban fighters, but a risky one. "Everything is so critical," Chandler says. Any mistake "can cost you a life."

For NATO's jet whisperers, that awful knowledge is a constant companion, as invisible and powerful as the aircraft they control, orbiting high overhead.



Above: Rosner on the mission in question

Photo Credit: The U.S. Army| Online Editor: Nate Lanxon.

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South Asia
May 4, 2010 
 
 
Pentagon map belies Taliban's sphere

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon was still trying to spin its report on the war in Afghanistan issued last week as holding out hope because the instability had leveled off, even as some news outlets were noting that it documents the continued expansion of Taliban capabilities and operations.

The most significant revelation in the report, however, is that General Stanley McChrystal and the United States-North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO) International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) joint command now acknowledge officially that the Taliban insurgents dominate a vast contiguous zone of heavily populated territory across southern Afghanistan that McChrystal regards as the most critical area in the country.

The report admits that the population in key districts across most southern provinces is sympathetic to or supportive of the insurgents.

The contiguous zone of Taliban political power stretches all the way across the 13 provinces from Farah province in the far west of the country through Helmand and Kandahar to Wardak, Logar, Paktia and Khost provinces west and south of Kabul.

The extent of Taliban political power in southern Afghanistan, which had not been acknowledged previously by ISAF, is documented in a map showing an "overall assessment of key districts" as of March 18.

The map shows for the first time the location and political and security status of 121 districts chosen late last year by planners on McChrystal's ISAF joint staff as the most important for a strategy of weakening the Taliban gains.

The contiguous Taliban zone includes but is not limited to 58 of the 121 key districts, of which seven have populations assessed as "supporting" the Taliban, 25 with populations "sympathetic" to the Taliban and 21 with populations that are "neutral".

Only five of the districts within that zone are shown as having populations that are "sympathetic to" the Afghan government and none that are "supporting" the government.

The degree of Taliban political dominance in the south is partly obscured, however, by an obvious effort to portray the attitudes of the population in Helmand and Kandahar provinces more favorably than is reflected in reports from those locations.



Eight of the "neutral" districts shown on the map are in Helmand province, where it has acknowledged in the past that the population was largely sympathetic to the Taliban.

The districts of Nad Ali, in which Marjah is located, Naw Zad, Lashkar Gah and Sangin are all shown as having "neutral" populations, even though it has been well documented that the populations of those heavily opium poppy-growing districts had turned decisively against the government and foreign troops over government eradication efforts and the abusive behavior of police associated with local warlords.

The population of Nad Ali had been shown in an assessment in late December as being supportive of the Taliban. Naw Zad and Sangin districts, on the other hand, had been assessed as "neutral" in December.

A report by The Guardian's Jon Boone last week quoted a recent British visitor to Sangin as remarking on the "intense hatred of people who hate everything you stand for" he had felt from people there.

McChrystal's staff apparently defined these as "neutral" so as to include populations in districts where US and NATO forces have carried out operations aimed at clearing the Taliban and are now the subject of attempts to change their political views.

Earlier this year, however, an ISAF official familiar with the assessment on which the command was basing its plans clearly included those same districts among those in which the Taliban were regarded as having gotten popular support. The official told Inter Press Service in an interview in late January, "We have a system of 80 districts where Taliban influence is strongest, where people support the Taliban for whatever reason."

That set of 80 districts that are the most pro-Taliban in the country is the same set of 80 "Key Terrain districts" defined in the new Pentagon report as "areas the control of (and support from which) provides a marked advantage to either the Government of Afghanistan or the insurgents”.

The ISAF official also said that "about one-fourth" of the 80 districts in which the Taliban had the strongest support would be in the "contiguous security zone" that ISAF was planning to establish in Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year. That coincides with the 19 districts in those two provinces that are shown on the December 24 assessment map as "neutral", "sympathetic" or "supportive" of the Taliban.

If the districts labeled on the map as "neutral" are understood to be pro-Taliban as well, the districts in all three categories form an almost unbroken chain of territory with populations leaning toward the Taliban across the full length of the Pashtun south.

The 80 districts described by the ISAF official in January as providing the strongest support to the Taliban apparently included only those pro-Taliban districts that had the largest population and were closest to the major lines of communications. The list does not include a large number of other districts in several Pashtun provinces of the south where the Taliban insurgents predominate but which are farther from the major roads.

The evidence of a coherent Taliban zone of political control in the new Pentagon assessment is consistent with an Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) Provincial/District Threat Assessment as of April 23, 2009, which was reported by BBC last August. An ANSF security map reflecting the ASNF assessment showed almost every district in the Pashtun south except for Nimruz province as being either "high risk" or Taliban-controlled.

Although McChrystal seemed to reject the idea that the Taliban had broad political support in his initial assessment last August, an "integrated campaign plan" jointly agreed by McChrystal and the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, that same month hinted strongly at such support in Pashtun areas.

The campaign plan document concluded, "Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided."

McChrystal's announcement earlier this year that ISAF would establish a "contiguous security zone" which would include the bulk of the population of Helmand and Kandahar provinces may have been a response to the recognition that the Taliban had formed its own zone of political dominance in southern Afghanistan.

However, given recent evidence that foreign troops have been unable to clear insurgents from Marjah, and that local leaders and elders in Kandahar are opposing US military operations in and around the city, that objective now appears to be well beyond the reach of US and NATO troops.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US 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.

(Inter Press Service) 
 
 

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Middle East
May 4, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LE04Ak01.html

General Petraeus' Thirty Years War

By Spengler

Memo to heads of state: beware the clever general who turns up at a tough moment, and says "Leave it to me: I can fix it for you." Two examples come to mind. The great field marshal of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Albrecht von Wallenstein, taught armies to live off the land, and succeeded so well that nearly half the people of Central Europe starved to death during the conflict.

General David Petraeus, who heads America's Central Command (CENTCOM), taught the land to live off him. Petraeus' putative success in the Iraq "surge" of 2007-2008 is one of the weirder cases of Karl Marx's quip of history repeating itself first as tragedy second as farce. The consequences will be similar, that is, hideous.

Wallenstein put 100,000 men into the field, an army of terrifying size for the times, by turning the imperial army into a parasite that consumed the livelihood of the empire's home provinces. The Austrian Empire fired him in 1629 after five years of depredation, but pressed him back into service in 1631. Those who were left alive joined the army, in a self-feeding spiral of destruction on a scale not seen in Europe since the 8th century. Wallenstein's power grew with the implosion of civil society, and the Austrian emperor had him murdered in 1634.

Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money. Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use them.

Petraeus' "surge" of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the available Sunni fighters into an American-financed militia, the "Sons of Iraq," or Sunni Awakening. With American money, weapons and training, the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime have turned into a fighting force far more effective than the defunct dictator's state police. And now the American military is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and, under General Keith Dayton, in Palestine. America is pouring money - which is to say weapons - into disputed areas of Afghanistan, and building the core of a Palestinian army. The latter's mission is to impose a pro-Western Palestinian government on a population of whom two-thirds oppose the two-state solution. It more likely will end up fighting Israel.

Petraeus created a balance of power between Sunnis and Shi'ites by reconstructing the former's fighting capacity, while persuading pro-Iranian militants to bide their time. To achieve this balance of power, though, he built up Sunni military power to the point that - for the first time in Iraq's history - Sunnis and Shi'ites are capable of fighting a full-dress civil war with professional armed forces. "Nation-building" in Iraq failed to construct any function feature of civil society - a concept hitherto unknown to Mesopotamia - except, of course, for the best-functioning organized groups of killers that Iraq ever has had.

The Iranians had no interest in disrupting the surge. If they had, the American military would have made short work of their local proxies, who never could outfight the US Marines. Iran is patient, playing for time, possibly to acquire nuclear weapons - which Washington has all but conceded - and until the Americans withdraw, which they must sooner or later.

An old Israeli joke says that you can't buy an Arab, but you can rent one. An October 16, 2007, report describes the first meeting between the then commander of American forces in Iraq, Major General Rick Lynch, and his superior, Petraeus, with Sunni tribal leaders:
One mentions weapons, but the general insists: "I can give you money to work in terms of improving the area. What I cannot do - this is very important - is give you weapons."

The gravity of the war council in a tent at the US forward operating base at Camp Assassin is suspended for a few moments as one of the local Iraqi leaders says jokingly but knowingly: "Don't worry! Weapons are cheap in Iraq."

"That's right, that's exactly right," laughs Lynch in reply.
That was then. American forces now are trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan, except that they are unable to distinguish between tribesmen-for-rent and the Taliban itself. The New York Times reported April 3:

Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marjah with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support. The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marjah, where the Taliban seem to know everything - and most of the time it is impossible to even tell who they are - they have already found ways to thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some who take the Marines' money, or pocketing it themselves.

Having armed all sides of the conflict and kept them apart by the threat of arms, the United States now expects to depart leaving in place governments of national reconciliation that will persuade well-armed and well-organized militias to play by the rules. It is perhaps the silliest thing an imperial power ever has done. The British played at divide and conquer, whereas the Americans propose to divide and disappear.

At some point the whole sorry structure will collapse, and no-one knows it better than Petraeus. There are many possible triggers. The Iraqi government might collapse, leaving the political agenda to the men with guns. Iran might acquire a deliverable bomb and turn its dogs lose in Iraq after the Americans withdraw. Iran and Pakistan might come to blows over the fractious province of Balochistan on their mutual border, or over Iran's covert support for Pakistan's Shi'ites, who comprise a fifth of the country's population. Or the Israelis might strike Iran's nuclear program, or Syria, or the Hezbollah clients of Syrian and Iran in Lebanon.

Petraeus made his reputation on the surge, and needs someone to blame for its prospective failure. His choice is Israel. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Petraeus' March 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which the CENTCOM commander blamed the Israel-Palestine conflict for inflaming Muslim sentiment against the United States. Petraeus stated in his written testimony:

Enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to advance our interest in the AOR (Area of Responsibility). Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas.
As a National Review columnist wrote in an April 8 essay:

The upshot of this could not be clearer: Petraeus is echoing the narrative peddled incessantly by leftists in the government he serves and by Islamists in the countries where he works. According to that narrative, Israel's plight is not a struggle for survival against immovable foes spurred by an Islamist ideology that must be discredited and defeated. To the contrary, this view holds, it is the result of a mere political conflict. It could be resolved, so the theory goes, if only Israel weren't so intransigent - ie, if it would just stop taking so seriously its need to secure its citizens against enemies pledged to its destruction. Israel's stubbornness (which is to say, its insistence on existing as a Jewish state in what Muslims regard as Islamic land) creates tensions that "flare into violence" (Palestinian terrorist attacks undertaken with the approval and encouragement of the region's most influential Islamic authorities).
 
Because Petraeus sold the "surge" to former president George W Bush, allowing the Republicans to claim a certain degree of success for the largely unpopular Iraq War, his influence vastly exceeds that of a career officer. He became a Republican hero for pulling the party's political chestnuts out of the fire. American conservatives lionized him; this month the American Enterprise Institute will give him its Irving Kristol award, named after the intellectual architect of modern conservatism. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary magazine and the dean of Jewish conservatives, wrote in his book World War IV, "It took Lincoln three years to find Sherman and Grant. It took George Bush three years to find Petraeus."

The Republicans are like investors involved in a Ponzi scheme; if any of them disavows it, everyone will, and the scheme will collapse. In order to justify their past support of nation-building in Iraq, they have difficulty disowning Petraeus - even when Petraeus puts the onus for the failure of American policy on Israel. Petraeus, to be sure, attempted to qualify his March 16 statements (in what Andrew McCarthy qualified as "Clintonesque doublespeak"), but without convincing any but analysts who have a reputational stake in the game. This is particularly painful for some Jewish conservatives. Between Petraeus and Bernie Madoff, they have had a bad year.

No matter: what is now commonly called "linkage" between the Israel-Palestine conflict and America's strategic morass in Central Asia is the official view of the Barack Obama administration. Petraeus' formulation lends respectability to the fanciful idea that Iran would listen to reason if only Israel would stop building apartments in East Jerusalem. Echoing Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on April 27, "Heretofore, the lack of progress in the peace process has provided political ammunition to our adversaries in the Middle East and in the region, and that progress in this arena will enable us not only to perhaps get others to support the peace process, but also support us in our efforts to try and impose effective sanctions against Iran."

Like Alice in Wonderland, the US administration is trying to play croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs. If only the hedgehog would hold still, Gates complains, Washington could hit it with a flamingo.

There is not a government in the world that believes that "effective sanctions against Iran" are anything more than a euphemism for the catastrophic failure of American policy. That is why the Chinese continue investment in Iranian oil and the Russians are moving ahead with a deal to sell the Iranians a nuclear reactor. If the United States merely is going through the motions, why should the Russians or Chinese prejudice their commercial interests in order to assist the face-saving inanities of American diplomacy?

Put the American military in charge of nation-building, and it will do the only thing that soldiers know how to do, namely, train more soldiers. The strangest case of all is the Palestine Authority, which consists of a prime minister imposed by the Western donors who pay $1.8 billion a year for its maintenance, supported by an American-trained and armed military force. As Jonathan Spyer wrote in the Jerusalem Post May 2:

The key Palestinian leader in the West Bank today is Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Fayyad is not a Fatah member, and his government holds power not as a result of that movement's authority. Rather, Fayyad is in effect an appointee of the West. The security forces led by Gen Keith Dayton, which keep him in place, are Western organized and financed, and not beholden to any political faction. His gradualist approach is quite alien to Palestinian political culture, and despite the undoubted improvements this approach has brought to daily life in the West Bank, the level of his support is uncertain. It remains widely believed that without the presence of the "Dayton" forces and more importantly without the continued activities of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] in the West Bank, the area would fall to Hamas in a similar process to that which took place in Gaza.

The Israeli view is that there is no Palestinian partner with whom to make peace, and the fact that General Dayton has spent $100 million to train 30,000 Palestinian soldiers reinforces that impression. It is quite possible that President Obama at some point will order the Israelis to make peace and that the Israelis simply will refuse. American aid to Israel now amounts to only 2% of the country's Gross Domestic Product, or about a third of the annual GDP growth, such that even the threat of a complete cessation of American aid would not persuade the Israelis to sacrifice their own perceived security interests. And the ties between American and Israeli civil society are far too strong for any American government to isolate Israel diplomatically.

That will put the proprietors of the Palestinian Authority Potemkin Village in an untenable position. For the two-thirds of Palestinians who, according to the most recent polls, oppose a two-state solution, it will be a double humiliation: Fayyad's government will be exposed as the puppet of an American government with no teeth. At this point Dayton's Palestinian force may turn into a more effective source of violence against Israel than the Palestinians ever have put into the field. And that in turn may elicit a tougher response from Israel. "The possibility that forces being trained by the US now will eventually turn on the IDF, using enhanced skills and equipment, is exceedingly high," wrote David Bedein and Arlene Kushner in a 2009 study for the pro-Israeli Center for Near East Policy Research. "There is strong precedent for this, as PA security forces trained by the CIA have several times turned on Israel, in particular in 1996 and following, and again during the second intifada that began in 2000."

Dayton echoes these warnings. He hailed his trainees as the founders of a Palestinian state, but warned in 2009, "With big expectations, come big risks. There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you're creating a state, when you're not."

All this leaves the region in an icy calm, as all the players wait to see who will make the first move. Thanks to American money and American training, the next round of the game in Iraq will be played for keeps. And if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon - as it could do in the absence of military intervention - the doll's-house balance of power built by the United States will disappear.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things (www.firstthings.com).

 
 

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Exclusive: In Kunar province, civilian deaths from Special Forces turn some Afghans against US


By James Foley
Monday, May 3rd, 2010 -- 10:22 am
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0503/effects-civilian-deaths-kunar-decided/

KUNAR PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN - It was two nights after Christmas on a fortified dirt hill called Combat Outpost Badel.

2nd Platoon, Able Co. 2-503rd soldiers had strung Christmas lights along the improvised roof beams of their sandbagged bunkers. They munched homemade cookies sent in care packages. Their platoon had just taken over running the outpost from the previous unit, but there was little holiday cheer.

The young soldiers were mostly sleep deprived. The privates pulled hours of guard shift. At dusk, all heads scanned the mountains outlined in the distinct green of their night vision goggles. They got shot at about every third day. In fact, Christmas marked the rookies' first firefight. Their helmet cams recorded the staccato of automatic guns and red tracers and shouts. Afterwards, they collected and replayed the shaky video and laughed at the things they’d said during their first unforgettable minutes under fire.

2nd Platoon's leadership shook their heads at all the enthusiasm. They were sergeants, most younger than twenty-five, but already veterans of a bloody 2008 tour to Kunar where they'd logged over 1,100 sustained shooting matches with the Taliban. They'd lost friends to ambushes; steel bracelets bore the engraved names of those who didn't come back.

(Above right: Narang High School teacher Rahman Jan Ehsas, a teacher of 40 years, who says his students were killed.)


New rules for a new fight

But Dec. 27th saw a different kind of contact. Soldiers on guard observed a convoy of strange vehicles passing through their checkpoint. They were neither regular Army nor Afghan Army, but clearly military. The platoon leader, Lt. Richard Hill, heard news on the radio inside the rock and sandbagged bunker that served as his command center and sleeping quarters. A combined force of U.S. and Afghan soldiers had entered the Badel Valley under the cover of night.

Regular Army units, even those as rugged as 2nd Platoon of 2-503rd, are not allowed by their command to venture up toward the village of Badel unless a combat operation has been approved at the highest levels. It is deemed too great a risk without the coverage of helicopter guns and rockets. But this unit was headed there, and under cover of night. To the soldiers it meant one thing -- Special Forces (SF).

The Badel Valley leads to a village of the same name. While the lower valley area has seen increased trade and fewer bombs as a result of the paved highway connecting Jalabad to Asadabad, the higher valleys like Badel are rife with wood smuggling operations, whose proceeds are said to benefit Taliban weapons movement along the Pakistani border, less than 10 miles away. By all accounts it's not in these villages' interests to work with the coalition or government. An Apr. 10 Wall Street Journal article exposed how a central government ban on wood cutting in the name of conservation has led to a Taliban-controlled wood smuggling economy, much as poppy cultivation is supporting the Taliban in the South.

That night Special Forces were conducting a raid in Badel. 2nd Platoon, which was closest, would learn this over their radio, but had no involvement in the actual operation. However, 3rd Platoon was called from Base Fortress to provide outer security. According to one of 3rd’s sergeants, the Platoon traveled the more difficult Route Brown into the valley, but by the time they closed in on Badel they were stalled by gunfire coming from the village. By then the Special Force mission had already been completed.

They had surrounded the target compound in the early morning hours. They ordered the occupants out of the house. None came out. Then shots were allegedly fired at the Special Forces. They responded with heavy fire. After the shooting ended, the Special Forces were lifted out of the valley in helicopters.


(Lt. Richard Hill questions some Afghans possibly smuggling wood from the Badel Valley area.)

Aftermath of the raid

"There are at least five different versions of what happened that night," said. Lt. Richard Hill, 2nd Platoon of Able Co.

From Able Company’s end, reliable intelligence reported a Taliban commander had been holding a recruiting session inside the compound. They say Special Forces missed the commander by 30 minutes. The local government says the intelligence was right, but the wrong compound was targeted. Villagers say ten innocent students were killed.

NATO sources said the compound housed known bomb makers. A carefully researched London Times Online article from Feb. 25th reported, "NATO’s statement, issued four days after the event, said that troops were attacked 'from several buildings' as they entered the village. Yesterday it said that, 'ultimately, we did determine this to be a civilian casualty incident'."

The New York Times reported in a March 15th article that nine students had been killed at a religious school, and cited it as one of three examples of why Special Forces command would be brought under more centralized control, under ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Conflicting perspectives

Even though top coalition officials conceded the raid was a mistake, officers and intelligence sources on the ground still disagree, and local villagers still blame them.

"That intelligence would have been very good if it was thirty minutes sooner," said Mike, a military intelligence gatherer who works with Able Co. "Thirty minutes is a world. ... It's the difference between right and wrong, good and bad here."

"If we could spin up operations in thirty minutes, we could act on intel," Mike said. "Unfortunately, 'Big Army' has hampered us a lot. We have to spin up a patrol request. It has to be approved."

Special Forces, Mike said, is the only Army unit able to coordinate patrols in short enough time spans to act on the intelligence. But even they weren't quick enough this time.

The Afghans in the valley are bound to believe the worst. The further one travels into the mountains, the less the villages have any use for the provincial government. Americans offer projects with a handshake, but there are so many requests and a budget now limited to working directly with the district government.

I've ridden with 2nd Platoon in Humvees up to the village of Subagar, several villages closer than Badel, to meet with key leaders. Instead of a meeting, after they helped distribute sacks of rice and flour, we were pinned down by sniper fire for the better part of an hour.



(Students from Narang High School, where the killed students were enrolled.)

"They were my students"

The local population's opinion, according to two Army interpreters who live and work with 2nd Platoon at Badel, is that nine students were killed because bad information was given to U.S. and Afghan Special Forces.

Rahman Jan Ehsas, a teacher of 40 years, originally from Badel village, knew all of the young men killed. They were his students. Six were family members, he says. Mr. Ehsas said all the students were in class that day at Narang High School. The raid occurred around 2:30 A.M. the following morning.

"Someone called from Badel to say some of your relatives are dead. I saw a lot of Apache helicopters moving over Badel… When I got there, the parents brought them out from the houses. I saw the dead bodies. All nine lived in Badel."

(Mr. Rahman said the young men killed ranged from 8th to 12th grade -- Rahimullah, 18; Matiullah, 17; Ataullah, 16; Subhamullah, 17; Atiqullah, 16; Najeedullah, 17; Samiullah, 13; Ismail, 13; Abdul Khaliq, 20, a farmer; and Smar Gul, 13. According to locals, all these students were sleeping in the same room, which in Afghan culture, is not that uncommon, when the attack occurred.)

"The whole family works in the government," Mr. Ehsas said. "Every day they were present in school."

After the shooting, he led a group that went to the Kunar governor. The governor called President Hamid Karzai. Karzai confirmed the intelligence was wrong. He promised to get the U.S. to surrender the source. (Considering how Special Forces operate and that much of the source information was said to be electronic monitoring, this seems doubtful.) The family of the students was invited to Kabul, where Mr. Ehsas says Karzai spoke to them directly and 100,000 Afghanis (approx. $2,000) was given for each student killed.

The Narang Sub-governor, Gulam Nabi, has a slightly different version of the story. He was appointed by Governor Falzullah Wahidi, who was himself appointed by President Karzai in 2007.

Sub-governor Nabi said 10 guys were killed -- eight students and two guests. He said that Americans received information that Taliban leaders were conducting a shura (meeting) in the village that night, but the shura was actually in a different house, and the "bad guys" had already left by the time they arrived. Special Forces returned fire at the wrong house, he said, weaving a politically expedient answer -- neither disagreeing with the villagers nor fully agreeing with U.S. Forces.

"Whenever it happens, a U.S. General comes to discuss it with us," Sub-governor Nabi said. "The people were starting protests (the following day), and we sent the village elders to talk with the General who came from Bagram (Air Base). The General asked if they got the right guys. We said, No, they were students, they were innocent."



(2nd Platoon soldier returning fire in the Badel Valley.)

Interpreters' interpretation

"You know, sometimes they give bad intel to get revenge," said the interpreter, who declined to be named, citing the common belief that some Afghans give false intelligence to coalition forces in order to resolve their own blood feuds or rivalries.

The interpreter described the flood of local anti-coalition media reports stemming from the raid in the following days. "The news said that 14-15 year olds had been killed. There were protests all over the Narang district. They showed the student's teacher crying. ... Local TV went to the site of the killings. They interviewed Capt. Snowden, commander of Able Co. The Captain told the news stations the occupants refused to come out of the house when they ordered them to, and that they shot at the Special Forces."

"The intel was right, but we lost the PR war," said Able Co. Commander, Capt. Joseph Snowden. "I'm confident they hit the right target," Capt. Snowden said. "We had intel stacked in three ways." Although he didn't elaborate, he probably meant that in addition to human sources, the U.S. military had telecommunications and remote visual monitoring of the target house.

Captain Snowden's Able Company has been engaged in the most firefights in the battalion. Many of his non-commissioned officers are going to have slogged 27 months in Kunar when they finally leave Afghanistan. They are frustrated they can't go further into the mountains and raid suspected enemy compounds as they could in '07-08.

"Last deployment I felt like I was doing something," Sgt. Aaron Dawson, 22, said. "This deployment I don't, and it bothers me."

Special Forces have wider latitude, and this is considered by critics to be part of the problem. Regular Army units are now directed to operate in counter-insurgency mode, to win the hearts and minds of people by ensuring security and promoting good governance, but a single Special Forces raid, like the one in Badel, can turn whole villages against them.

"I tried to explain to the people that Special Forces did this," the interpreter said. "They say Special Forces are Americans too."

Able Co. was told to help manage the scene. Snowden described 40 or so angry, grieving people in the vicinity of one of his other platoons.

"I don't know if you've ever been in that situation of being first on the scene after a targeted hit," Snowden asked me. "We experienced it in Iraq. Women beating their faces, men yelling... We were lucky. We pulled back, or there might have been an incident," he said, implying the emotions were so high, villagers might have provoked his soldiers, or vice versa.

Capt. Joseph Snowden also attempted to quell the villagers' anger at the meeting arranged by the Sub-governor. According to the interpreter, the elder selected to speak for the village said, "Give us the source of the bad intel. We want to kill him."

There's also some history of civilian casualties in the Badel Valley. According to the same interpreter, during 1-10th Mountain's deployment last year, a mortar accidentally hit a house close to the Badel Outpost, killing two occupants. "Everyone was pissed off," he said. "The unit promised to build them a well, but the contractors only half completed it."

An incident like this leads villagers, who get most of their information via word of mouth or from their local Mullah, to paint every American unit with a broad brush.

"They (SF) made the right target, but it may not have helped us," Snowden said. Lt. Hill also agrees the raid may have set back his platoon's counter-insurgency operations. "They were in and out, and we were stuck holding the check," Hill said.

Sustained attacks

In March, I accompanied 2nd Platoon on three missions into the Badel valley. Each time they were ambushed with fire from more than one direction, with the kind of accuracy, or maybe proximity, of fire that makes one feel an enemy is actually trying to kill and not just harass them.

But the Special Forces raid and attacks in the valley don't necessarily share any causality. This is Kunar province, after all. Kunar has always had a tribal identity. Its people revere former Mujahadeen commanders who fought the Soviets to a standstill shooting from mountain ambushes and then blending back into the population. The Pashtuns are deeply tribal and removed from the capital's social and political influences. One might say fighting foreign governments, even Kabul's, is a part of their identity.

Mr. Ehsas has seen many phases of U.S. operations here. "At first, when the U.S. came we were happy to see them," he said. "But after two or three bad things -- first, the U.S. captured 14 guys during Ramadan ... This time 10 guys were killed. Now people from the valley are upset. Now no one believes that U.S. guys come here to help."

"We need to include the Taliban in the big Jirga (all-important meeting)," he said -- a suggestion that is not far off from what seems to be happening at the highest levels- a political, not combat solution.

"It's better to have a Jirga with the bad guys. There would be no killing."

James Foley, currently embedded with US forces in Afghanistan, is an international correspondent for Raw Story.

[bigron]

No One Cares

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_one_cares_20100503/

Posted on May 3, 2010
By Chris Hedges


U.S. troops board an airplane headed for Afghanistan.


We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics.

Last Thursday I traveled to Washington to join Rep. Dennis Kucinich for a public teach-in on the wars. Kucinich used the Capitol Hill event to denounce the new request by Barack Obama for an additional $33 billion for the war in Afghanistan. The Ohio Democrat has introduced H. Con Res. 248, with 16 co-sponsors, which would require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the Afghanistan war. Kucinich, to his credit, is the only member of Congress to publicly condemn the Obama administration’s authorization to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and cleric living in Yemen, over alleged links to a failed Christmas airline bombing in Detroit. Kucinich also invited investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, writer/activist David Swanson, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and Iraq war veteran Josh Stieber to the event.

The gathering, held in the Rayburn Building, was a sober reminder of our insignificance. There were no other Congress members present, and only a smattering of young staff members attended. Most of the audience of about 70 were peace activists who, as is usual at such events, were joined by a motley collection of conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was an inside job or that former Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash, was assassinated. Scahill and Swanson provided a litany of disturbing statistics that illustrated how corporations control all systems of power. Corporations have effectively taken over our internal security and intelligence apparatus. They run our economy and manage our systems of communication. They own the two major political parties. They have built a private military. They loot the U.S. Treasury at will. And they have become unassailable. Those who decry the corporate coup are locked out of the national debate and become as marginalized as Kucinich.

“We don’t have any sort of communications system in the country,” said Swanson, who co-founded an anti-war coalition (AfterDowningStreet.org) and led an unsuccessful campaign to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. “We have a corporate media cartel that overlaps with the war industry. It has no interest in democracy. The Congress is bought and paid for. It is absolutely corrupted by money. We kick ourselves for not being active enough and imposing our demands, but the bar is set very high for us. We have to try very, very hard and make very, very big sacrifices if we are going to influence this Congress prior to getting the money out and getting a decent media system. Hypocritical Congress members talk about money all the time, how we have to be careful about money, except when it comes to war. It is hypocritical, but who is going to call them on that? Not their colleagues, not their funders, not the media, only us. We have to do that, but we don’t in large part because they switch parties every number of years and we are on one team or the other.”

Scahill—who has done most of the groundbreaking investigative reporting on private contractors including the security firm Blackwater, renamed Xe—laid out how the management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is being steadily transferred by the Pentagon to unaccountable private contractors. He lamented the lack of support in Congress for a bill put forward by Rep. Jan Schakowsky known as the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, H.R. 4102, which would “responsibly phase out the use of private security contractors for functions that should be reserved for U.S. military forces and government personnel.” 

“It is one of the sober realities of the time we are living in that you can put forward a bill that says something as simple as ‘we should not outsource national security functions to private contractors’ and you only get 20 members of Congress to support the bill,” Scahill said. “The unfortunate reality is that Rep. Schakowsky knows that the war industry is bipartisan. They give on both sides. For a while there it seemed contractor was the new Israel. You could not find a member of Congress to speak out against them because so many members of Congress are beholden to corporate funding to keep their House or Senate seats. I also think Obama’s election has wiped that out, as it has with many things, because the White House will dispatch emissaries to read the riot act to members of Congress who don’t toe the party line.”

“The entire government is basically privatized,” Scahill went on. “In fact, 100 percent of people in this country that make $100,000 or less might as well remit everything they owe in taxes to contractors rather than paying the government. That is how privatized the society is, that is how much of government has been outsourced in this society. There are 18 U.S. intelligence agencies on the military and civilian side and 70 percent of their combined budget is outsourced to for-profit corporations who simultaneously work the United States government as well as multinational corporations and foreign governments. We have radically outsourced the intelligence operations in this country because we have radically outsourced everything. Sixty-nine percent of the Pentagon’s entire work force, and I am not talking only about the battlefield, is now privatized. In Afghanistan we have the most staggering statistics. The Obama administration is infinitely worse in Afghanistan in terms of its employment of mercenaries and other private contractors than the Bush administration. Right now in Afghanistan there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors alongside 68,000 U.S. troops. There is almost a 2-to-1 ratio of private-sector for-profit forces that are on the U.S. government payroll versus the active-duty or actual military forces in the country. And that is not taking into account the fact that the State Department has 14,000 contractors in Afghanistan.”

“Within a matter of months, and certainly within a year, the United States will have upwards of 220,000 to 250,000 U.S. government-funded personnel occupying Afghanistan, a far cry from the 70,000 U.S. soldiers that those Americans who pay attention understand the United States has in Afghanistan,” Scahill said. “This is a country where the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, said there are less than 100 al-Qaida operatives who have no ability to strike at the United States. That was the stated rationale and reasoning for being in Afghanistan. It was to hunt down those responsible for 9/11.”

Josh Stieber spoke at the end of the event. Stieber was deployed with the Army to Iraq from February 2007 to April 2008. He was in Bravo Company 2-16, which was involved in the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians depicted on the video recently released by WikiLeaks. Stieber, who left the Army as a conscientious objector, has issued a public apology to the Iraqi people.

“This was not by any means the exception,” he said of the video, which showed helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down civilians, including a Reuters photographer and children, in a Baghdad street. “It is inevitable given the situation we were going through. We were going through a lot of combat at the time. A roadside bomb would go off or a sniper would fire a shot and you had no idea where it was coming from. There was a constant paranoia, a constant being on edge. If you put people in a situation like that where there are plenty of civilians, that kind of thing was going to happen and did happen and will continue to happen as long as our nation does not challenge these things. Now that this video has become public it is our responsibility as a people and a country to recognize that this is what war looks like on a day-to-day basis.”

I was depressed as I walked from the Rayburn Building to Union Station to take the train home. The voices of sanity, the voices of reason, those who have a moral core, those like Kucinich or Scahill or Wright or Swanson or Stieber, have little chance now to be heard. Liberals, who failed to grasp the dark intentions of the corporate state and its nefarious servants in the Democratic Party, bear some responsibility. But even an enlightened liberal class would have been hard-pressed to battle back against the tawdry emotional carnivals and the political theater that have thrust the nation into collective self-delusion. We were all seduced. And we, along with thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond, will all be consumed.

visit page for very interesting comments
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/no_one_cares_20100503/

[bigron]

May 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?pagewanted=print


Afghans Die in Bombing, as Toll Rises for Civilians


By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

KABUL, Afghanistan — Seven people were killed Sunday evening when a bus struck a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, the latest casualties in Afghanistan’s rising toll of civilian dead.

As many as 14 other Afghans were wounded in the blast in Paktia Province.

“Most of the victims were children and women,” an Afghan police spokesman, Mohammed Usman, said.

The bomb exploded hours after a gun battle between Taliban guerrillas and Afghan security forces in the area, Mr. Usman said.

The rate at which Afghan civilians are being killed in the fighting there is increasing. This year, 173 were killed between March 21 and April 21, mostly from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, one-third more than in the same period in 2009, said Zemary Bashary, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry. At least 380 Afghans were wounded in the same period this year.

Total militant attacks rose nearly one-third, to 500, in the same period — most of them in Kandahar, Helmand, Khost and Ghazni Provinces. Seventy-three Afghan police officers were killed and 150 wounded.

Insurgents are causing most civilian deaths, Afghan officials say. But stepped-up military campaigns and a huge increase in the number of Western troops are also taking a rising toll: At least 72 Afghans were accidentally killed by American and NATO troops in the first three months of this year, compared with about 30 in the same period last year, NATO officials say.

The numbers are certain to grow during the summer, normally the period of the bloodiest fighting. This year a huge American and NATO offensive is planned for Kandahar, the large southern city that was the center of power when the Taliban led the country.

Already, at least 173 American and NATO troops have been killed here in 2010, an increase of almost 90 percent compared with the same period last year, according to figures compiled by icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths.

The latest came Sunday: A British soldier was killed in an explosion near a patrol base in Sangin, one of the most volatile regions of Helmand Province. A British military spokesman said the man was killed while “providing protection to his fellow soldiers who were returning from a patrol.”

[bigron]

PLEASE DEVULGE FOLLOWING :

Is the War in Afghanistan Justified by 9/11  ?

By David Ray Griffin

Posted May 03, 2010

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25365.htm

“Whereas it is widely recognized that the US-led war in Afghanistan is illegal under international law, because it was never authorized by the UN Security Council, most Americans have believed that it was morally justified as a response to the 9/11 attacks, and many believe it is still justified as a necessary means to prevent another attack originating from that region. My lecture will present evidence showing that both of these beliefs are untrue, so that the 9/11 Truth Movement and more traditional Peace and Anti-War groups should be able to combine forces to oppose this illegal and immoral war.” - David Ray Griffin

David Ray Griffin speaks to a full house in Chicago, IL on April 27, 2010

(Part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQV9eG0zlrY&feature=player_embedded

(Part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbb8ZVtK3PA&feature=player_embedded

(Part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddof-D5D_Ns&feature=player_embedded

(Part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPHifiC7sfM&feature=player_embedded

(Part 5)

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

(Part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtDRY3Hh2ps&feature=player_embedded

(Part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuqdpg9QenI&feature=player_embedded



 

 

[bigron]

South Asia
May 5, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE05Df01.html 
 
West's cover-ups belie its Afghan strategy

By Fouad Pervez

In the past nearly 10 years, the United States has expended substantial blood and treasure to try and stabilize Afghanistan. However, recent events suggest US efforts are problematic in themselves and that the chaos will only worsen. There are critical problems with accountability, transparency, and public scrutiny, all of which not only make it harder for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to shift away from unproductive policies. These also create serious domestic political issues in Afghanistan.

The news about the women killed in a botched raid on February 12 is emblematic of all the current woes in Afghanistan. The military finally admitted that US Special Operations Forces were responsible for the deaths of three women, two of whom were pregnant, in a nighttime raid. They already admitted the same raid resulted in the deaths of two men, a policeman, and a prosecutor. More troubling is the accusation that the troops dug the bullets out of the women's bodies to cover up the evidence. General Stanley McChrystal, the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is now ordering an investigation of the raid.

The incident is a prime example of the current problems in the Afghanistan strategy. First, McChrystal launched an investigation only after the story of the alleged cover-up gained widespread media coverage. Officials from the US-led NATO command have denied the tampering charge, though Afghan officials pointed out that NATO officials were perplexed by the evidence precisely because of the tampering. Afghan officials were unable to perform an autopsy on the bodies and were denied access to the bodies at the scene. There were also several bullets missing from the scene. Given the oddities surrounding the case in the first place, the Pentagon should have launched an investigation much earlier.

The initial Pentagon report claimed the men were insurgents, and that the women were found already dead, bound and gagged, possibly from an honor killing. Thus, it was filled with inaccuracies, if not outright lies. More than a dozen survivors, witnesses, and local investigators strongly disputed the Pentagon's initial claims, too, but there was no investigation until the story finally got wider media coverage in the past week.

This incident follows the pattern of others. Many nighttime raids conducted in Afghanistan are based on poor intelligence and result in the deaths of many civilians. Yet there is little in the way of public accountability. No information is available about reprimands handed out to troops who kill civilians, intelligence officers who obtain poor information, or higher-up commanders who plan these botched raids. This incident is one of the few where any information about an investigation is even public. If they find the soldiers did indeed commit a crime, will they be punished? Given the track record, it seems unlikely. We may never even hear about the results.

Public accountability

Public information does matter here. Despite his statements, McChrystal has actually increased nighttime raids, even after they triggered angry protests in Afghanistan. Although these raids cause over half of all civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and despite political pressure to curb them, he has consistently backed such missions. In addition, since last summer, American and NATO troops have also killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 more when firing at convoys and checkpoints - few, if any, were real threats. These attacks have turned villagers against the foreign troops. Many of those detained at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency in response to these attacks. In addition, the numbers don't include civilian fatalities at the hands of private security contractors.

Given this information, public accountability for these civilian fatalities is quite important. Doling out punishment to those whose mistakes led to civilian deaths signals to Afghanis that the US is committed to limiting what has been a huge problem over the past nine years. It suggests that Americans are legitimately trying to change military behavior, and will punish those who do not comply. However, this commitment is not credible if there is no accountability.

True, civilian casualties have declined overall because of fewer aerial bombardments. But ground raids and checkpoint firings have not declined, and the United States and NATO are not publicly reprimanding soldiers for their actions.

McChrystal certainly understands the issue. He went so far as to say that the troops "have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat". This trend runs counter to the emphasis on counterinsurgency (COIN) in Afghanistan. McChrystal has frequently noted that winning hearts and minds, and minimizing civilian casualties, is crucial to the mission. However, shooting deaths of civilians related to convoys, checkpoints, and nighttime raids have all either increased or remained the same. NATO and the US keep killing civilians at a high rate, turning the population against them. Part of the issue is the United States continues to rely on locals without any understanding of political realities on the ground. Tribal leaders and warlords remain a key source of repeatedly poor intelligence. After all, these are self-interested actors playing local politics. Yet the United States not only refuses to admit this is a failing strategy, it continues to use it for the raids.

The press hasn't helped matters much. Coverage of Afghanistan tends to focus solely on President Hamid Karzai's intransigence against the United States and general instability in the country. There is very little mention of civilian deaths or the lack of accountability for these deaths, both of which are driving the public outrage. These incidents should be major stories - the February 12 raid deserved much more coverage. The press initially echoed the Pentagon's words about the incident, making no effort to check any of the information, even though this view was challenged from the beginning. The Times of London exposed the incident after a detailed investigation, its damning article came out on March 13 - about a month before The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times covered the story.

This pattern has repeated itself with other shooting deaths. The Pentagon denies everything and the press follows along until somebody else does some real research. This happened with the 2008 Azizibad raid that killed almost 100 civilians. The Pentagon denied the civilian casualties, and the coverage repeated those lies, until a video surfaced that disproved those claims. NATO officials reportedly intimidate, censor, and punish reporters who call them on their lies as well, making matters even worse. Thus there is a general lack of public and media scrutiny of Afghanistan, coupled with the lack of military or political accountability for actions on the ground.

Karzai's concerns

These issues have all created serious domestic issues in Afghanistan. Karzai has, not surprisingly, lashed out at the United States in the past few weeks. Although he is a corrupt and ineffective leader, handpicked as America's "guy" in Afghanistan, he actually has legitimate gripes this time. As the civilian deaths continue, anger is growing in the streets throughout Afghanistan. Even if mounting fatalities didn't bother him, Karzai has little choice but to harshly attack these American and NATO activities. He would face serious domestic costs if he did not come down strongly against the United States on this issue. Given how unpopular Karzai is, particularly after the almost certainly fraudulent elections, he may have a difficult time reversing his hard line against America lest he lose power. "Moderates" will have a hard time as well. US actions are undoubtedly increasing the political power of hardliners.

The lack of accountability undermines the credibility of the US and NATO commitment to winning hearts and minds. The lack of scrutiny over the military policy in Afghanistan, largely from the media, allows leaders to continue actions that are failing. And the continuation of these policies, particularly nighttime raids relying on poor intelligence from warlords and tribal leaders, coupled with a lack of accountability when these policies go wrong, is turning the populace increasingly against US and NATO forces. Not surprisingly, American and NATO troops are being attacked more frequently, especially with IEDs.

Another consequence of these policies is the limitation of political space in Afghanistan, essentially forcing Afghani political leaders into a box where they have to take a hard line against America. This is a dangerous combination that threatens to destabilize Afghanistan even more, if that is even possible. If the United States and NATO are determined to stay the course, something President Obama certainly seems committed to, they needs to address these particular issues immediately.

Increased accountability might be the easiest, and most important, first step. It would provide Afghanis a strong signal that the United States is committed to pursuing a more transparent and responsible military policy.

A very public process punishing those responsible for civilian deaths, particularly for the troops involved in the February 12 raid, would be a positive development. Limiting nighttime raids, or at least accounting for realities on the ground when gathering intelligence, would also make a big difference. Pressure on the mainstream American media to cover the story from the Afghani perspective, thus focusing on the civilian fatalities and trying to understand the anger without falling back on the simplistic and inaccurate cultural/religious angle, which has been the dominant narrative over the past nine years, could make a substantial difference, too.

Not surprisingly, a recent Pentagon report on Afghanistan paints a grim picture. The insurgency is growing stronger and deeper. In 92 of 121 districts the US military identified as strategically important for stabilizing the country, the populace is sympathetic to the insurgents. Violence increased 87% from the same time period last year.

However, if none of these key problems are addressed, there is little reason to expect the situation in Afghanistan to improve anytime soon.

Fouad Pervez is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, where he writes on US foreign policy and security issues in South Asia. He is currently pursuing his PhD in international relations. He is a writer and policy analyst, and occasionally blogs on There is No Spoon. He can be reached at fouad0@gmail.com.

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
 
 

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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
13:57 Mecca time, 10:57 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/20105574621920664.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban hits government compound 
 

 

 
 
At least eight attempted suicide bombers have been killed during a gun battle with police in southwestern Afghanistan, the interior ministry said.

Ministry officials said at least two Afghan policemen were also killed and five others wounded before the fighting ended in Nimroz province on Wednesday.

One witness said a female local council member was also killed in the attack.

Musa Rasooli, a senior police official in Nimroz, said the fighters were targeting the provincial governor's compound and had entered the governor's office.

He said two suicide bombers had blown themselves up outside the compound.

'Taliban responsible'

The interior ministry said the fighters had also targeted civilian buildings in Zaranj, the provincial capital.

"A group of terrorists attacked some civilian and government buildings this morning in Zaranj," Zemarai Bashary, an interior ministry spokesman, said.

In depth :

-  Video: Fears over US Kandahar offensive
-  Video: Interview with US commander in Helmand
-  Focus: To win over Afghans, US must listen
-  Timeline: Afghanistan in crisis
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/20105574621920664.html
 
"The police response was very quick and strong.

"They entered the governor's office first, but police killed all those attackers instantly."

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was aimed at government officials.

"Seven bombers and two gunmen are involved in the attack. Two of the bombers have set off their explosives and the others are locked in a gunbattle," Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said, before police announced the fighting had ended.

The Taliban has launched a series of attacks in the south of the country in recent weeks, ahead of a planned military offensive in nearby Kandahar province.

US forces have gathered on the outskirts of Kandahar city ahead of the Nato operation, which is to be the largest military offensive so far against the Taliban.

The US build-up around Kandahar is a key part of the additional deployment of 30,000 troops ordered by Barack Obama, the US president, in an effort to turn the tide in the Afghan war, now into its ninth year.

By August there will be around 100,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan, more than three times as many as when Obama took power.
 
 

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Associated Press
 - May 05, 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/05/refugee-chief-security-worse-afghanistan-foreign-staff-access-half-country/


UN refugee chief: Security worse in Afghanistan, foreign staff can't access half of country

GENEVA




GENEVA (AP) — Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated in recent months to the extent that foreign staff of the U.N.'s refugee agency are unable to travel to half of the country, its top official said Wednesday.

The agency has to rely on local staff or Afghan partner organizations to reach tens of thousands of displaced people and returning refugees it is trying to aid, said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.

"There was a worsening security situation in the recent past," he told reporters in Geneva. "Access of our international staff to the territory is now limited to about 50 percent."

Last month the United Nations announced it had relocated several foreign employees from the southern city of Kandahar to Kabul and told more than 200 Afghan workers to stay home after security threats.

Guterres said aid workers have become targets for violence in part because the distinction between the foreign military and humanitarian groups has been blurred.

Military 'hearts and minds' campaigns intended to win the support of the local population by building bridges and digging wells could easily be confused with similar work carried out by aid groups, making it difficult for villagers to draw the line between foreign soldiers and humanitarian workers, he said.

Guterres said the agency has "completely reshaped" its operations in Afghanistan in response to growing threats, including by moving administrative staff to its regional office in Bangkok and investing in security hardware.

But he added that more barbed wire, blast walls and armed guards alone wouldn't be effective unless the local population could be convinced that agencies such as UNHCR are independent from U.S.-led international military presence in Afghanistan.

Separately, Guterres said he has held talks with United States officials about the reform of U.S. migration laws, which he hoped could help improve the "general environment" for immigrants. Guterres declined to comment specifically about Arizona's new immigration law that would make it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally, saying it was not part of the agency's refugee mandate.

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Warmongers of the world, unite

by John Pilger

Is there any difference between Australia’s leaders and the three front-runners in Britain’s election when it comes to attitudes to war?

May 4, 2010
http://uruknet.com/?p=m65677&hd=&size=1&l=e

Staring at the vast military history section of the airport shop, I had a choice: the derring-do of psychopaths or scholarly tomes with their illicit devotion to the cult of organised killing. There was nothing I recognised from reporting war. Nothing on the spectacle of children's limbs hanging in trees and nothing on the burden of shit in your trousers. War is a good read. War is fun. More war, please.

On 25 April, the day before I flew out of Australia, I sat in a bar beneath the great sails of the Sydney Opera House. It was Anzac Day, the 95th anniversary of the invasion of Ottoman Turkey by Australian and New Zealand troops at the behest of British imperialism. The landing was an incompetent stunt of blood sacrifice conjured by Winston Churchill, yet it is celebrated in Australia as an unofficial national day. The ABC evening news always comes live from the sacred shore at Gallipoli, where, this year, as many as 8,000 flag-wrapped Antipodeans listened, dewy-eyed, to the Australian governor general, Quentin Bryce, who is the Queen's viceroy, describe the point of pointless mass killing. It was, she said, all about a "love of nation, of service, of family, the love we allow ourselves to receive. [It is a love that] rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it never fails."

You'll be a man, my son

Of all the attempts at justifying state murder I can recall, this drivel of DIY therapy, clearly aimed at the young, takes the blue riband. Not once did Bryce honour the fallen with the two words that the survivors of 1915 brought home with them: "Never again." Not once did she refer to a truly heroic anti-conscription campaign, led by women, that stemmed the flow of Australian blood in the First World War, the product not of a gormlessness that "believes all things", but of anger in defence of life.

The next item on the TV news was the Australian defence minister, John Faulkner, with the troops in Afghanistan. Bathed in the light of a perfect sunrise, he made the Anzac connection to the illegal invasion of Afghanistan in which, on 12 February last year, Australian soldiers killed fivechildren. No mention was made of them. On cue, this was followed by an item that a war memorial in Sydney had been "defaced by men of Middle Eastern appearance". More war, please.

In the bar of the Opera House, a young man wore campaign medals that were not his. That is the fashion now. Smashing his beer glass on the floor, he stepped over the mess, which was cleaned up by another young man who the TV newsreader would say was of Middle Eastern appearance. Once again, war is a fashionable extremism for those suckered by the Edwardian notion that a man needs to prove himself "under fire" in a country whose people he derides as "gooks" or "ragheads" or simply "scum". (The current public inquiry in London into the torture and murder of an Iraqi hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa, by British troops has heard that "the attitude held" was that "all Iraqis were scum".)

There is a hitch. In this, the ninth year of the thoroughly Edwardian invasion of Afghan­istan, more than two-thirds of the home populations of the invaders want their troops to get out of where they have no right to be. This is true of Australia, the United States, Britain, Canada and Germany. What this says is that, be­hind the media façade of politicised ritual - such as the parade of coffins through Wootton Bassett - millions of people are trusting their own critical and moral intelligence and ignoring propaganda that has militarised contemporary history, journalism and parliamentary politics - Australia's Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, for instance, describes the military as his country's "highest calling".

Here in Britain, Polly Toynbee anoints the war criminal Tony Blair as "the perfect emblem for his people's own contradictory whims". No, he was the perfect emblem for a liberal intelligentsia prepared cynically to indulge his crime. That is the unsaid of the British election campaign, along with the fact that 77 per cent of the British people want the troops home. In Iraq, duly forgotten, what has been done is a holocaust. More than a million people are dead and four million have been driven from their homes. Not a single mention has been madeof them in the entire campaign. Rather, the news is that Blair is Labour's "secret weapon".

All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the darling of former Blair lovers, says that, as prime minister, he will "participate" in another invasion of a "failed state" provided there is "the right equipment, the right resources". His one reservation is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandal­ised by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.

For Clegg, as for Brown and Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as cluster bombs, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims' lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone, Britain will spend £4bn on the war in Afghanistan. That is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the health service.

Edward S Herman explained this genteel extremism in his essay "The Banality of Evil". There is a strict division of labour, ranging from the scientists working in the laboratories of the weapons industry, to the intelligence and "national security" personnel who supply the paranoia and "strategies", to the politicians who approve them. As for journalists, our task is to censor by omission and make the crime seem normal for you, the public. For, above all, it is your understanding and your awakening that are feared.





 

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US Scrapped Kandahar Attack, Citing Lack of Afghan Leadership

Helicopter Assault on Kandahar Meant to Prepare Invasion

by Jason Ditz, May 04, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/04/us-scrapped-kandahar-attack-citing-lack-of-afghan-leadership/



NATO commanders forced the US to scrap a planned helicopter attack on western Kandahar City last week, citing the lack of Afghan leadership in the raid. The attack was meant to send three companies of US troops and another company of Afghan troops into the city to “prepare the ground” for the June invasion.

US officials expressed annoyance over the blocking, saying that the Afghan rank and file forces were fine for the operation, but their leadership simply isn’t up to the task.

The cancellation raises serious doubts not only over the timetable of the June invasion, but also the planned “handover” of certain provinces to Afghan security forces in the coming year, an effort to sell Western voters on the idea that progress is being made.

The invasion of Kandahar is being touted as the most significant NATO offensive of 2010, aimed at removing the Taliban from one of their most important strongholds. The idea that they are going to replace Taliban forces with Afghan military forces, however, seems increasingly unlikely.

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NATO Civilian Chief: Taliban a ‘Strong Opponent’ in Kandahar

Summer Invasion 'Will Be a Series of Efforts'

by Jason Ditz, May 04, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/04/nato-civilian-chief-taliban-a-strong-opponent-in-kandahar/


In a press conference in Islamabad today, NATO’s top civilian representative in Afghanistan Mark Sedwill conceded that the Taliban would be a “strong opponent” in the upcoming invasion of Kandahar.

“It will be a series of efforts, not really operations but efforts to reinforce and improve security in an incremental way across the city,” Sedwill noted. NATO initially tipped June as the date for starting the invasion of Kandahar.

But the failure to launch a much smaller incursion last week, not to mention the ongoing political row with the Karzai government over the offensive, has made the plan going forward unclear.

Both sides have been building up for months, and are setting up for what could well be the largest battle since the 2001 US invasion. Neither side is holding a lot of support within the city, however, and the prospect of either coming up with anything resembling victory seems remote.

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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
15:48 Mecca time, 12:48 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/20105511408450623.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban hits government compound 

 
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Nimroz in which 12 people were killed [File AFP]
 
At least 12 people have been killed, including a provincial council member, during a Taliban attack on a government compound in southwestern Afghanistan, officials said.

Nine fighters armed with guns and suicide vests launched the attack in the town of Zaranj, the capital of Nimroz province on Wednesday, police and local officials said.

Eight of the attackers managed to detonate their explosives at three separate locations in the town - the governor's compound, the justice department and the court house, Abdul Jabar Pordeli, the provincial police chief, said.

The attack sparked a nearly two-hour-long gun battle with security forces, in which a ninth fighter was shot dead by police, he said.

"One female provincial council member and two soldiers were killed in the attacks."

He said 11 people, including four civilians, had been wounded.

Gul Maki Wakhali, a female member of the Nimroz provincial council, was killed by crossfire, Sadeq Chakhansori, a member of the Afghan parliament who was in Nimroz for a meeting, said.

"It was very heavy fighting. Very bad conditions," The Associated Press news agency quoted him as saying.

"There was one-on-one fighting."

'Taliban responsible'

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was aimed at government officials.

In depth

  Video: Fears over US Kandahar offensive
  Video: Interview with US commander in Helmand
  Focus: To win over Afghans, US must listen
  Timeline: Afghanistan in crisis
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/20105511408450623.html
 
"Seven bombers and two gunmen are involved in the attack. Two of the bombers have set off their explosives and the others are locked in a gunbattle," Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said, before police announced the fighting had ended.

He said his group carried out the attack because provincial officials were trying to persuade Afghans to turn against the Taliban.

The Taliban has launched a series of attacks in the south of the country in recent weeks, ahead of a planned military offensive in nearby Kandahar province.

US forces have gathered on the outskirts of Kandahar city ahead of the Nato operation, which is to be the largest military offensive so far against the Taliban.

The US build-up around Kandahar is a key part of the additional deployment of 30,000 troops ordered by Barack Obama, the US president, in an effort to turn the tide in the Afghan war, now into its ninth year.

By August there will be around 100,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan, more than three times as many as when Obama took power.
 
 

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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
16:49 Mecca time, 13:49 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/20105565825857209.html
 
FOCUS: OPINION 
 
Why Karzai cannot choose his family 
 
 By Robert Grenier

 
Karzai has described India as a "friend" of Afghanistan but Pakistan as a "brother" [EPA]

The scene was in Kandahar, in January, 2003. I rather unexpectedly found myself addressing a group of Pashtun elders from Helmand, who were paying a visit to the former Taliban capital, which had been abandoned by its former rulers less than a month before. 

These elders had seen Americans come and go over the previous decades, and they were curious as to what the outsiders' presence would bring them this time.

They sat quietly and impassively, as is their way, cannily judging our answers as a US Army Special Forces colonel and I answered their questions.

After some time, a particularly wizened gentleman, who had long sat silently at the back of the group, rose to speak.

With the departure of the Taliban, he said, representatives of the Iranians had come to his area. They were offering money and assistance; what should he and the other leaders in his area do?

I took the question to be something of a test; but before I could open my mouth to respond, the colonel stepped forward to denounce the Iranians, admonishing the elders not to have anything to do with them.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw a knowing look pass over the elder's face as he sat down; he certainly did not seem convinced.

Not wanting to publicly contradict my counterpart, I said nothing; but later, I had an opportunity to speak with the elder and several others who had travelled with him. 

"Look," I said, "if the Iranians offer you money, go ahead and take it. But remember, their assistance is likely to come at a price. And when they ask for your help, remember where your real interests lie."

Counter-weight to Pakistan


IN depth
More from Robert Grenier:
 
  Remembering Operation Eagle Claw
  US leadership in non-proliferation
  Follow the chain of command
  Talking to the enemy
  Striking at Afghanistan corruption
  Pakistan needs friendly Afghanistan
  Political umbrage in Washington?
  Iraq 'condemned' to democracy
  Israel's cost-benefit calculation
  Making room for the Taliban
  Interview on America's battles abroad
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/20105565825857209.html
 
This scene came to mind as Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, made a brief visit to India last week.

I am long familiar with the Pakistani reaction - bordering at times on hysteria - to the Indian presence and growing influence in Afghanistan.

Preoccupied as I and others are with Pakistan's ambivalent attitude toward the Taliban, whose leaders find refuge east of the Durand Line, and with its deep-set distrust of the Kabul government, it has often seemed to me that the benefits of Afghanistan's relationship with New Delhi are greatly off-set by its disadvantages.

One can hardly blame the Afghans, however, if they see the situation quite differently.

Like my Pashtun elder in Helmand, why shouldn't they accept assistance when it is offered?

The Tajiks, in particular, have long-standing ties with India; and by any measure, the Indians have been quite munificent: Since the fall of the Taliban, they have provided some $1.3bn in economic and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, and currently offer some 1,000 scholarships per year.

Understandably wary of Pakistani meddling in their country and legitimately angry and suspicious of Islamabad's complicated relationship with their deadly enemies, it hardly seems reasonable, or prudent, that the Karzai government should turn its back on a potential counter-weight to Pakistani influence, and a generous one at that.

Negotiating with insurgents


As the visit to New Delhi made clear, however, the Afghan relationship with India is not without its own complications.

First, the Indians are expressing strong concern for the safety of their diplomatic establishments - twice the target of deadly attacks in which even knowledgeable and impartial observers claim a large degree of Pakistani complicity - and of the 2,000-strong contingent of Indian workers engaged in Afghanistan.

Indeed, for all that the Indians have committed to a robust programme of development projects, they are said to be holding back on more until their security concerns are met.

It is hard to see how they will be satisfied, given Karzai's current enthusiasm for a negotiated solution to the Afghan insurgency.

As he prepares to host some 1,400 of his countrymen in a so-called "Peace Jirga" next month, his Indian hosts have expressed severe reservations.

They do not wish to see a political accommodation with the Taliban which will leave a viciously intolerant band of religious obscurantists with an enhanced - and legitimised - influence in the country.

India, on the contrary, has an interest in seeing religious extremists isolated, whether in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and their "sponsors" (read:  Pakistan) internationally isolated as well.

For although Karzai has cleverly stressed the benefit of reaching out to the traditional Pashtun leadership as a means of luring fighters and political support away from the insurgency, the Indians know that the reconciliation process, if successful, is as likely to include at least some of the leadership of the Taliban and other elements of the current insurgency, and thus likely to enhance Pakistani influence as well.

Afghan destiny

Afghan president will try to balance the interests of both India and Pakistan [GETTY]


Karzai will no doubt continue to try to balance his country's interests in maintaining effective relations with both his larger neighbours.

This brand of political slight-of-hand plays to his strengths, though it is still an open question as to whether he can successfully manipulate the two rivals, and not be mastered by their proxy competition.

In the end, however, as he prepares to face the day when his Western backers pack up and leave, it is clear where Afghan destiny, and the balance of its international interests, will lie.

Like my friend in Helmand, the Afghan president will be best advised to pay heed. For if he is to succeed in his political ambitions and bring an end to an insurgency which his foreign patrons seem incapable of quelling for him, Karzai will need the active cooperation of Pakistan.

During his last official visit to that country, Karzai employed a clever metaphor:  "India," he said, "is a close friend of Afghanistan; but Pakistan is a brother of Afghanistan."

The line was doubtlessly an attempt to flatter his hosts and assuage their concerns, but it may have been more true than the Afghan president intended at the time: For while we can choose our friends, we cannot choose our relatives; and while our friends can turn away or be replaced, from family we can never escape.

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of CIA's counter-terrorism centre.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
 
 

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 South Asia
May 7, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE07Df01.html 
 
 Losing Afghan hearts and minds

By Julien Mercille

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan, according to a report by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) that gives a clear signal of the dangers of the military operation against Kandahar planned for this summer.

Contrary to its stated objectives of protecting the population from insurgents, NATO is actually raising the likelihood that poor Afghans will join the Taliban - not a great report card for General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, whose strategies seem to be backfiring.

The report, entitled Operation Moshtarak: Lessons Learned [1], is based on interviews conducted last month with over 400 Afghan men from Marjah, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar to investigate their views on the military operation to drive out the Taliban, launched in February in Helmand province, and its aftermath.

It corroborates previous assessments, such as one from the Pentagon released last week which concluded that popular support for the insurgency in the Pashtun south had increased over the past few months. Not one of the 92 districts that are deemed key to NATO operations supported the government, whereas the number of those sympathetic to or supporting the insurgency increased to 48 in March, from 33 in December 2009. [2]

There is no doubt Operation Moshtarak has upset Afghans: 61% of those interviewed said they now feel more negative about NATO forces than before the offensive. This plays into the insurgents hands, as 95% of respondents said they believed more young Afghans are now joining the Taliban. In addition, 67% said they do not support a strong NATO-ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) presence in their province and 71% said they just wanted foreign troops to leave Afghanistan entirely. Locals don't have much confidence in NATO "clearing and holding" the area, as 59% thought the Taliban would return to Marjah once the dust settled, and in any case, 67% didn't believe NATO and the Afghan security forces could defeat the Taliban.

The anger is easy enough to understand. Whereas aid agencies and human rights groups have estimated the number of civilian killed during Operation Moshtarak at fewer than 50, the great majority of respondents believe the toll to be about 200, or roughly a third of the number of insurgents killed; a "collateral damage" clearly too high to "win hearts and minds" - if such damage can ever be justified at all. Moreover, the operation against Marjah displaced about 30,000 people, many forced into refugee camps nearby with inadequate food, medical services or shelter. Such camps are good recruitment sites for the Taliban.

Locals say the main reason why their young men join the Taliban is for the job or money it provides, even if they don't necessarily share the leaders' ideological convictions. Indeed, the majority of those who join the ranks of the insurgency are often unemployed and disenfranchised. One solution could therefore be to spend more funds on reconstruction and development to generate employment. But this has never been a NATO priority: the US alone has spent US$227 billion on military operations in Afghanistan since 2001, while international donors together have spent less than 10% of that amount on development aid.

To make things worse, NATO seeks to eliminate the drugs industry, which makes up about 30% of the country's total economy, often the best source of income for poor farmers. According to the ICOS report, eradication was opposed by 66% of those interviewed, not a surprising finding given that Helmand province cultivates over half the country's poppies and produces about 60% of its opium, with Marjah dubbed by many to be Helmand's “opium capital”. Even NATO's new policy of paying farmers as an incentive for them to eliminate their own crops undermines the economy because sustainable alternative livelihoods are not offered.

The survey also points to a paradoxical finding: notwithstanding their negative perceptions about NATO, two-thirds of interviewees said foreign troops should clear the Taliban from the road linking Lashkar Gah to Kandahar and Kabul and start an operation against insurgents in Kandahar.

This apparent contradiction can be explained in immediate terms by the fact that locals wish to travel and conduct business more easily. From a broader perspective, it suggests that locals simply dislike both the Taliban and foreign troops. As summarized concisely by a major tribal leader from Kandahar, "Ten percent of the people are with the Taliban, 10% are with the government and 80% of the people are angry at the Taliban, the government and the foreigners."

The roots of the dire situation of insecurity faced by many Afghans were explained by the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, who stated. "It was the international community that went to the warlords after the Taliban and brought them back," with appalling consequences up to this day. [3]

Those views reflect those of democratic-minded Afghans such as member of parliament Malalai Joya and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who have been campaigning for years against both the Taliban and the warlords and their NATO backers. Yet, their views have been completely ignored by coalition governments.

Rather, NATO and US forces have specialized in (botched) night raids that kill civilians, including pregnant women as happened in February in Paktia province. McChrystal has increased those Special Operations Forces raids since he became the top commander in Afghanistan, skills he had previously honed as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008. Even though civilian deaths from air strikes have declined, those caused by night raids have increased, so much that the UN now estimates they account for half the civilians killed by foreign troops. This has contributed to the 33% increase in civilian deaths last month compared to the same period last year, adding to Afghans' anger. [4]

Finally, 74% of those interviewed by ICOS support negotiations and dialogue with the Taliban, a clear sign that Afghans are tired of war. Bringing Taliban leaders in a political process already dominated by actors whose human rights record is atrocious might not be the ideal solution, but since in practice it is unlikely that NATO will push to have the warlords it allied itself with taken to court, it might be the best political alternative in the short term.

Notes
1. The International Council on Security and Development, formerly known as The Senlis Council, is an international think-tank known for its work in Afghanistan and other conflict zones such as Iraq and Somalia. It is a project of the Network of European Foundations' Mercator Fund. ICOS currently runs three programs: Global Security, Public Security and Public Health and Drug Control.
2. Alissa J Rubin, US report on Afghan war finds few gains in six months. New York Times, April 29, 2010; Gareth Porter, Pentagon map shows wide Taliban zone in the South. Inter Press Service, May 1. 2010.
3. Kathy Gannon, Afghans blame both US, Taliban for insecurity. Associated Press, April 16, 2010.
4. Gareth Porter, Pentagon map belies Taliban's sphere. Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.

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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Move Over Ideology, the Taliban is Now Home of the Angry Young Man


BY Virginia M. Moncrieff

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65699&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 5, 2010

Rather than a zealous religious belief, anger is the main reason young men in Afghanistan join the Taliban, according to new research by the International Council on Security and Development.

"The majority of Taliban recruits aren't motivated by ideological concerns," the president of ICOS, Norine MacDonald QC, told Huffington Post. "Most of them are what we characterise as "angry young men" - disenfranchised youths who lack opportunities and have serious legitimate grievances against their government and the international community."

Ms MacDonald says that because many of the young Taliban recruits lack any genuine ideology they can be "drawn away from the insurgency with the right social and economic tools. There is incredibly high unemployment in Afghanistan, a large part of the population is men under the age of thirty, and marriage is very expensive," she says. "It's a bad mix".

Researchers interviewed a wide range of Afghan men for the report. "There was a lot of emotion during the interview process," says Ms MacDonald. "We focused on men from Marjah, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar as we felt that was the most interesting and relevant group to interview. Yes, there is a definite feeling of hopelessness in that community, but anger is the predominant emotion."

ICOS latest research underlines the ongoing fears of many Afghans about their future, and their inability to see their way past the February surge of Operation Moshtarak in Marjah (Helmand province) and NATO/ISAF activity and presence across the country. The report also decries what Ms MacDonald calls a "piecemeal approach". She says that without integrating pressing humanitarian concerns, the surge will never work.

"We propose this new counter insurgency equation - balance every negative impact with a positive impact. (The) positive impact must be greater than negative impact. We are dealing with major blowback on the hearts and minds campaign, from the impact of the military efforts."

General Stanley A. McChrystal, ISAF Commander, successfully promoted the humanitarian /military approach in the Iraq surge, but in Afghanistan (and over the border in Pakistan) he is dealing with quite literally a different landscape and, the Taliban.

The majority of Afghanistan loathe and fear the Taliban and according the ICOS research, 95% of Afghans interviewed believe that the Taliban have been successful in attracting more members in the last year than previously, are stronger than ever and will just flow back into the areas of Helmand province (such as Marjah) that have been targeted in Operation Moshtarak. Despite not having access to reliable "recruitment" statistics, Ms MacDonald argues that even a perception of a strong and growing Taliban is dangerous.

"The fact that so many Afghans "believe" that Taliban recruitment has increased suggests the insurgency is indeed getting stronger and strengthening their ability to recruit," she says. "It's not good news."

Working within the traditions of Afghan society is essential, according to Ms MacDonald. "We want these young, unmarried men turned into married men, with a family and land of their own: a sense of identity that can inoculate them from recruitment and give them a stake in building peace there. We say from a policy point of view this type of "social actions" should be considered "security instruments" and given the same political and financial support as military and police actions. Our military effort is very expensive, not calming the insurgency, and not sustainable."

 

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GAO report casts new doubt on Afghanistan policy


By NANCY A. YOUSSEF
McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON -- An independent government report on Wednesday raises new questions about the likelihood of success for President Barack Obama's Afghanistan policy, which nearly doubles the number of U.S. troops there before a planned drawdown begins in July 2011.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, found the Taliban remain a resilient fighting force, despite the boost in U.S. troops, and suggested many factors remain in place that will allow the Taliban to survive U.S. efforts to eradicate them.

The report noted that Taliban-initiated attacks in Afghanistan rose 75 percent between 2008 and 2009 and that civilian casualties rose 72 percent between last September and March, compared with the comparable period a year earlier.

The report, released just days before Afghan President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to visit Washington amid strained relations with the Obama administration, buttressed last week's downbeat Pentagon assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. That report found that overall levels of violence rose 87 percent between February 2009 and March 2010.

The GAO report said the rising levels of violence in Afghanistan had made it harder for U.S. and international aid agencies to build development projects there - a key aspect of the U.S. policy to undercut Taliban influence in the country. United Nations development teams have only limited ability to visit much of the country, the GAO reported.

The GAO also disputed Pentagon assertions violence is rising because the Taliban if fighting back against the surge of U.S. troops and because of U.S. offensives to push the Taliban from strongholds around Marjah in the southern opium-producing province of Helmand.

The GAO, citing an unnamed official from U.S Central Command, said the Taliban are proving resilient as a result of several factors, including "the porous nature of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, the ineffective nature of governance and services in various parts of Afghanistan, assistance from militant groups out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and continued financial support in the form of narcotics trafficking revenue and funds from outside of the region."

There are currently about 87,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The remaining Afghan surge troops are expected to all arrive by the end of the summer, bringing the total U.S. presence to 98,000.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/05/1615349/gao-report-casts-new-doubt-on.html?story_link=email_msg#ixzz0n9XbmtZu

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May 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/world/asia/06baradar.html?hp


Captured Leader Offers Insight Into the Taliban

By ERIC SCHMITT


A 1998 photo provided to The New York Times is thought to show Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar


WASHINGTON — Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Afghan Taliban leader in custody in Pakistan, is providing important information to American officials on the inner workings of the Taliban, pivotal insights as the United States looks ahead to negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan, according to senior American intelligence and military officials.

Mullah Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader, was arrested in January outside Karachi, Pakistan, in an operation by American and Pakistani intelligence agents. His Pakistani captors initially limited American interrogators’ access to him, but American officials say they have had regular, direct contact with Mullah Baradar for several weeks.

For now, officials say, Mullah Baradar is not revealing details of Taliban combat operations, yielding little that American commanders would like to know as they prepare for a military operation around Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual base and Afghanistan’s second largest city.

But the officials said he had provided American interrogators with a much more nuanced understanding of the strategy that the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is developing for negotiations with the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who is visiting Washington next week.

Mullah Baradar is describing in detail how members of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership council, or shura, based in Pakistan, interact, and how senior members fit into the organization’s broader leadership, officials said.

He is also offering a more detailed understanding of what prompted Mullah Omar to issue a new code of conduct for militants last year that directed fighters to avoid civilian casualties. American officials say the code was meant to project a softer image to the Afghan people.

“He’s provided very useful but not decisive information,” an American counterterrorism official said on Wednesday.

Four American military, intelligence and diplomatic officials provided details of Mullah Baradar’s cooperation, but requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the delicate intelligence interrogations.

Mullah Baradar, in his early 40s and said by most officials to belong to the same Popalzai tribe as Mr. Karzai, is believed to be one of a handful of Taliban leaders who were in periodic contact with Mullah Omar, the reclusive founder of the Taliban.

Mullah Baradar’s capture was followed by arrests of two Taliban “shadow governors” in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., they also illustrated how the Afghan Taliban leadership has relied on Pakistan as a rear base.

Many questions remain about Mullah Baradar’s capture and Pakistan’s motivations. It appears, for instance, that Pakistani authorities did not realize at first their captive’s significance. But they have tried to turn his arrest to their advantage and are poised to use him as a chip in bargaining between the Afghan government and the Taliban and, conceivably, even as a negotiator.

“The key issue is, we should decide jointly how we are going to benefit from his presence,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad said recently. “When we agree on how we can use him for peace talks in Afghanistan then we would not hesitate a second, but there has to be some negotiations.”

Conspiracy theories abound as to who may have tipped off American and Pakistani spies about Mullah Baradar’s location at a house outside Karachi. One theory is that he ran afoul of more hard-line elements in the Taliban. Another is that the Pakistani military seized him because he was freelancing negotiations with Afghan interlocutors, a theory senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials reject.

Initially, some American military officials said that taking Mullah Baradar off the battlefield, and exploiting information he might provide, could deal a blow to Taliban military capacity.

But Mullah Omar has replaced Mullah Baradar, his top deputy, with Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is believed to be in his mid-30s and has a reputation as a tough fighter with few political skills.

“In general, operations in the south, except perhaps for the more spectacular ones, don’t need much outside directions,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia intelligence analyst for the State Department.

And senior Taliban officials have sought to discount the impact of Mullah Baradar’s detention on their bargaining position.

“The Taliban would be ready to negotiate but under our own conditions,” a member of the Afghan Taliban’s supreme command said in an interview. “To assume that they would hold the Taliban leadership hostage because of Mullah Baradar’s arrest is not something that would cross our mind.”


Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt.

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Afghan resistance statement

Rejoinder of the Cultural Commission of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan About the Issuance of the Black List Issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists.


Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan



May 5, 2010
http://uruknet.com/?p=m65704&hd=&size=1&l=e


Yesterday, on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a black list of entities which are allegedly against press freedom. They have included name of the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) in this list and have claimed that IEA is against the freedom of the press and that its influence has now reached Pakistan.

The Cultural Commission of the Islamic Emirate considers this allegation against the leaders of the Islamic Emirate, leveled by the journalist without borders as baseless and futile. The Cultural Commission believes this accusation is a flagrant violation of the journalistic regulations and therefore, announces as follows:

1. The writ of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is only limited to areas of its influence for activities including military, cultural, administrative, political and judicial. The Islamic Emirate is responsible for conducts of its official organs only in these areas. and can’t be held accountable for activities that occur outside the areas of its control.

2. Any reporter who intends to enter areas under the control of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan for filing their reports should obtain prior permission from local administration of the Islamic Emirate. Those foreigners who fail to obtain the prior permission are dealt with as being violators of the legal prevalent regulations. They would not be considered as genuine journalists and for that, they themselves bear the responsibility.

3. The Cultural Commission of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan urges the Committee to Protect Journalists not to pander to the wishes, ambitions and instructions of the arrogant powers and while preparing these blacklists, should not condone the violations being committed by these arrogants. By doing so, you will prove that you are neutral and are not under the pressure of the influential circles.

4. The presence of the invading forces in Afghanistan is an open threat to journalists and their activities. These foreigners first detained Javaid Ahmad Yazmi for one year and then martyred him. The Journalists Without Borders should fulfill their responsibility by making the foreign invaders to respond to the allegations against them about the death of Martyr Yazami and about the torture of Al-jazeera journalists.

5. Recently Wikileaks website posted a video on its site about the murder of two Reuter’s journalists in Iraq at the hands of the American troops. The Journalists Without Borders should have included names of the White House and Pentagon rulers for their failure to contain their unscrupulous soldiers from committing this crime in the broad day light. As such, they should have cited in their annual report the names of the perpetrators of this gruesome event as it was their obligation for the protection of the innocent deceased journalists.

Cultural Commission

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan




 

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Afghan resistance statement

Victories of Mujahideen in the Words of the Enemy

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65709&hd=&size=1&l=e

Jamadi-ul-Awwal 20, 1431 A.H, Wednesday, May 05, 2010

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

Recently Pentagon, the American ministry of defense, has released 150-pages report about the growing resistance and influence of the Afghan Mujahideen. The report says, the Kabul surrogate administration maintains its writ in 29 districts out of 121 districts -- which are of paramount strategic importance, for being key terrain for the stabilization of the country. The report reveals, the Islamic Emirate influence has been expanding unremittingly and that the Karzai government control is limited to 25% in these area. The report further says, 2009 was the most successful year for Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate in terms of their extending influence in the country in this period. A 87% increase has been seen in overall attacks and ambushes of the Mujahideen.

The Pentagon military officers-cum-analysts admit that Mujahideen’s tactics are increasing in sophistication and broadness. They are now using complicated methods. The report admits, Mujahideen would never be vanquished completely but instead efforts be made to contain them in order to prevent Karzai government from being ousted.

These are the admissions and statements of a superpower, the president of which W. Bush, had said in 2001 that if we find our enemy in caves in Afghanistan, we will smoke them out and any one who chooses to confront America, in fact, digs his grave with his own hands. Today ground realities in Afghanistan indicate that the enemy and the surrogate administration are ensconced in hide-outs and besieged bases. The Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate have a tangible presence in 80% of the country.

This achievement has not become a reality out of nothing but has a solid foundation behind. The reason is that the aspirations and manifesto of the Islamic Emirate truly reflect the aspirations of the people and they are exactly alike. The people know that the Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are protecting their Islamic, national, cultural and social values and wants. Similarly, this achievement is not the result of any coercion or economic incentives at the hand of the Mujahideen. Contrarily. The enemy has both military might and material means. In the past nine years, they have used both their military power and material incentives to achieve their target. However, ironically, they have failed.

We remind the invading enemy that the reason for your failure is that you have imposed a corrupt administration on the people of Afghanistan; your have invaded the country, Afghanistan and deprived the people of their independence and national sovereignty. You have put thousands of innocent Afghans behind the bars in Guangtanamo, Bagram, Pulli-Charkhi, Kandahar and other open and secret jails. You have turned Afghanistan into the cobweb of CIA network; you carry out night raids on people’s houses and martyr defenseless Afghans, and you bombard wedding and funeral ceremonies. Your grip on the country will keep reducing unless and until you put an end to your aggression and stop torturing and martyring the miserable Afghans, and leave the land of the Afghans to the Afghans themselves.

A day will certainly reach when you will have no way except escape and humiliation. Time and situation are both against you. You have to hear this with your ears opened. The more you stay in Afghanistan, the more you will lose your credibility. It is in your interest and in the interest of the whole region to pull your forces out of Afghanistan.

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.