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

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Afghan Sunset:

A Searing Survey of Imperial Failure



by Chris Floyd



July 6, 2010
http://uruknet.info/?p=m67669&hd=&size=1&l=e


William Dalrymple is one of the knowledgeable and experienced observers of Central Asia and India in the West. His insights are always valuable, and usually prescient, especially on the greatly variegated complexities -- social, economic, cultural, political, historical -- of the volatile region, where the American imperial impulse is now coming to grief in arrogance and ignorance ... as so many others have done before it.

In a New Statesman article rich with historical detail and direct reportage from the frontlines of "Af-Pak" front of the bipartisan Terror War, Dalrymple brings fresh confirmation of what everyone but the moronic masters of war along the Potomac knows: the war in Afghanistan is lost, and all the vaunted "surges" of the drone-firing Peace Laureate and his various COIN-operated commanders are only prolonging the pointless agony -- and building up a tsunami of horrific blowback.

Here are some extensive excerpts -- but they are only a few highlights. The whole piece well repays a full reading.



In1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."


As Dalrymple notes, the 1842 British "regime change" intervention in Afghanistan was:



arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow....


Embarrassing withdrawal after humiliating defeat is almost certainly the fate awaiting this latest Anglo-American imperial folly. The facts on the ground are mounting up, Ossa-like:



The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai's government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts. ... Already, despite the presence of huge numbers of foreign troops, it is now impossible - or at least extremely foolhardy - for any westerner to walk around the capital, Kabul, without armed guards; it is even more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley, along with the towns of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, are the only safe havens left for westerners in the entire country. In all other directions, travel is possible only in an armed convoy.


Dalrymple also writes chillingly of



... the blowback that is today destabilising Pakistan and the tribal territories of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). Here the Pakistani Taliban are once more on the march, rebuilding their presence in Swat, and are now surrounding Peshawar, which is almost daily being rocked by bombs, while outlying groups of Taliban are again spreading their influence into the valleys leading towards Islamabad. ...

The Fata, it is true, have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but the region has been radicalised as never before by the rain of shells and cluster bombs that have caused huge civilian casualties and daily add a stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, as ever larger numbers of ordinary Pakistanis are driven to fight by corruption, predatory politics and the abuse of power by Pakistan's feudal elite, as well as the military aggression of the drones. Indeed, the ripples of instability lapping out from Afghanistan and Pakistan have reached even New York. When CIA interrogators asked Faisal Shahzad why he tried to let off a car bomb last month in Times Square, he told them of his desire to avenge those "innocent people being hit by drones from above".


Dalrymple gets to the heart of the ignorance and arrogance that sustains the ever-more brutal and brutalizing conflict:



The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban - and they have very good reason for doing so - the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.


These observations are underlined by a harrowing trip Dalrymple takes trying to retrace the steps of that British retreat in 1842. For security, he travels with the forces of "a regional tribal leader who was also a minister in Karzai's government. He is a mountain of a man named Anwar Khan Jegdalek, a former village wrestling champion who made his name as a Hezb-e-Islami mujahedin commander in the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s."



During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. "It is exactly the same," said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, 'We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.' But they are lying."

..."Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power," [said] Jegdalek. "But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny - our fate is always determined by our neighbours. Next, it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans."...


The trip also points out one of the main factors inflicting a long and agonizing defeat on the Western coalition: the inherent, inescapable corruption and murder that are the inevitable products of any enforced military occupation:



As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist.

...One of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. "Last month," he said, "some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.'"

What did he say to that? "He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this." ...


The catalogue of brutal stupidities and rampant corruption goes on:

Now as then [in 1842], the problem is not hatred of the west, so much as a dislike of foreign troops swaggering around and making themselves odious to the very people they are meant to be helping. On the return journey, as we crawled back up the passes towards Kabul, we got stuck behind a US military convoy of eight Humvees and two armoured personnel carriers in full camouflage, all travelling at less than 20 miles per hour. Despite the slow speed, the troops refused to let any Afghan drivers overtake them, for fear of suicide bombers, and they fired warning shots at any who attempted to do so. By the time we reached the top of the pass two hours later, there were 300 cars and trucks backed up behind the convoy, each one full of Afghans furious at being ordered around in their own country by a group of foreigners. Every day, small incidents of arrogance and insensitivity such as this make the anger grow. ...

...Now as then, there have been few tangible signs of improvement under the western-backed regime. Despite the US pouring approximately $80bn into Afghanistan, the roads in Kabul are still more rutted than those in the smallest provincial towns of Pakistan. There is little health care; for any severe medical condition, patients still have to fly to India. A quarter of all teachers in Afghanistan are themselves illiterate. In many areas, district governance is almost non-existent: half the governors do not have an office, more than half have no electricity, and most receive only $6 a month in expenses. Civil servants lack the most basic education and skills.

This is largely because $76.5bn of the $80bn committed to the country has been spent on military and security, and most of the remaining $3.5bn on international consultants, some of whom are paid in excess of $1,000 a day, according to an Afghan government report. This, in turn, has had other negative effects. As in 1842, the presence of large numbers of well-paid foreign troops has caused the cost of food and provisions to rise, and living standards to fall. The Afghans feel they are getting poorer, not richer.


It is all most strange -- and terrible. Not only are the Potomac poltroons (and their British camp followers) unable to grasp the myriad complexities of the situation; they can't see the simple truth underlying their predicament either: i.e., you can't invade a country, kill the people, despoil their land, degrade their lives, and then expect them to support your domination. Only a lunatic would believe such a thing. But then, as you may have already noticed, the lunatics have long been in charge of the imperial asylum.




 

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No Official Confirmation About Taliban Chief Mullah Omar Arrest In Pakistan


Bernama

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67665&hd=&size=1&l=e

ISLAMABAD, July 6 (Bernama) -- The news of capturing the Taliban chief in Afghanistan Mullah Omar has spread confusion all around the world since Monday when American media claimed about his arrest by Pakistani forces, reported China's Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

Pakistani secret agencies, government officials and other sources refused to verify or deny the news.

"This is an act to strengthen earlier Western blames on Pakistan that the Taliban leadership is controlling the war against NATO forces while sitting in Pakistan," said Aslam Khan, a senior journalist.

"The original matter is totally different, actually Taliban are now reluctant to believe in Pakistan then how can they take risk to sit in Pakistan's most populated city," Khan, an expert in war against terrorism told Xinhua.

The American authorities have also refused to comment on the news.

The discussion started in the media after an American blogger claimed that the Taliban chief was captured from Pakistani coastal city Karachi on March 27, 2010.

Omar is wanted by the U.S. for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his Al-Qaeda network in the years prior to and after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in America.

He is believed to be leading the Taliban fighters in their war against the Afghan government and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan had arrested Mullah Brather, Taliban Chief No.2, earlier this year from the same city of Karachi.

Meanwhile, an Afghan popular television channel Tolo citing Pakistani media reported Tuesday that Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar has been arrested in Pakistan.

Tolo also showed a picture of the one-eyed Mullah Omar without giving more details.

Speaking to a Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadi via telephone, Xinhua reported that the spokesman rejected the report as mere western propaganda and confirmed that Mullah Omar is free, and enjoys sound health and in full command of his fighters.

-- BERNAMA




 

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Afghan Taliban blasts Mullah Omar's arrest report as US propaganda

By Sify

Mullah Mohammed Omar

July 6, 2010
http://uruknet.info/?p=m67667&hd=&size=1&l=e

The Afghan Taliban has rejected reports about its chieftain Mullah Mohammed Omar being arrested in Karachi in March this year.

Taliban spokesperson Zabeehullah described media reports about Mullah Omar's arrest as US propaganda.

"The US is employing such tactics to save its face. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan," The Nation quoted Zabeehullah, as saying.

It may be noted that a former US Homeland Security Department official, Brad Thor, wrote on his blog that Omar, who has a 25 million dollar bounty on his head, was nabbed in Karachi on March 27.

In November 2009, the Washington Times had reported that Omar, assisted by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), had moved to Karachi in October.

Bred is said to have close links with the US Army.

So far, there has been no official statement regarding the blogger's claim either from the US Defence Department or Pakistani officials. (ANI)


 

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OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-do-we-lose-if-we-los-by-Allan-Goldstein-100706-799.html

July 6, 2010

What do we lose if we "lose" in Afghanistan?

By Allan Goldstein

Our mission in Afghanistan is doomed. Another thousand American soldiers will die but their courage and sacrifice won't change the terrible truth: That war is lost.

If even Michael Steele stumbles to that conclusion, you know the game us up. It's all over, over there.

When we finally leave Afghanistan, we'll count up the cost in precious blood and wasted treasure and the price will be very high.

But the cost of losing? Not much. Our enemies left Afghanistan nine years ago; the fight's not there anymore. And here in America things will be pretty much the same, win or lose.

Here's a rule of thumb: Don't worry about losing a war, unless, if you lose the war, you lose. Anything less isn't a war. It's an expensive hobby.

I can hear the screams of those who make a fetish out of "supporting our troops" from comfortable couches in the suburbs and comfortable seats in Congress. "Are you saying they died in vain?"

Well, of course I'm not. Only a heartless idiot would denigrate their valor and the unending pain of their amputated families. But "did they die in vain?" is the wrong question.

The right one is, "Did they fight in vain?" That's the question our leaders need to ask before shipping the body bags overseas. What happens if we don't fight this war? What happens if we fight and lose? Will America be hurt, invaded and occupied, or merely embarrassed?

Here's another rule of thumb: Never wage a war unless the cost of losing it exceeds the cost of fighting it.

Isn't that the true lesson of Vietnam? We "lost" that war, but what did we lose? It was hard on the vets and the Viets, but those were self-inflicted wounds; they wouldn't have happened if we'd never gone there. When the dust cleared our defeat brought us a lot of nice Vietnamese restaurants, a few good movies, and an "enemy" that was too busy trying to feed itself to cause us any problems. And now we're buddies. That was the cost of losing the war in Vietnam.

The cost of fighting the war in Vietnam was 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives. The cost in money was steep, the cost in morale severe, and the cost in cynicism incalculable. In many ways we've never recovered.

War is killing people and breaking things. That's the stark truth we can no longer face, since the trauma of Vietnam. Now, when we fight, we have to fool ourselves with humanitarian fantasies.

Like how we're going to bring a decent government to Afghanistan on backs of the 10th Mountain Division.

It would be noble, what we're trying to do in Afghanistan, if it wasn't so foolish. Making that country whole and even minimally democratic is impossible. As far as their leaders are concerned, the war can go on forever, with pallets of American cash flying from Kabul airport right into their Swiss bank accounts.

We have to get over our humanitarian fantasies about war. War is killing people and breaking things, and it's a perfectly rational, even moral, response to unprovoked attacks, like Pearl Harbor, or 9/11.

Japan attacked us, not just in Pearl Harbor, but all around the Pacific in December 1941, and they kept on doing it until we stopped them by killing people and breaking things until they couldn't fight anymore.

Al Qaeda attacked us before, during and after 9/11, and they keep on trying. When we use special ops, bombs and allies to kill their people and break their camps we do the right thing.

But our humanitarian fantasy of replacing the Taliban with a tolerant Afghani democracy cannot be achieved by killing people and breaking things. It cannot be achieved at all, in my opinion, and certainly not by military power, because it's not a military problem.

Afghanistan isn't critical to Al Qaeda anymore. Pakistan is, Yemen is, Somalia is, Afghanistan isn't. So why do we have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and only tiny groups of covert soldiers and the odd drone in the others?

Because we're caught up in a humanitarian fantasy. We're going to make America safer by making Afghanistan better. But we're trying to do it with the military, under the lunatic delusion that we can somehow kill only the right people and break only their things.

We can't. We won't. We'll lose. And when we lose, we'll lose nothing. Other than the lives we've thrown away. In Afghanistan, we fight in vain.





Author's Website: allangoldstein.com

Author's Bio: Allan Goldstein is writer living in San Francisco. His op-ed column, "Caught off Base," has appeared in the West Portal Monthly for the past decade. Satire and invective are specialties. His other work includes fiction in various literary magazines, aviation journalism, articles in magazines as diverse and Rock and Gem and The Potomac Review, and enough other stuff to bore you to death, if he cared to enumerate it all. He lives in the City by the Bay with his trophy wife and two cats more beautiful than your children. His latest novel, "The Confessions of a Catnip Junkie," the best book ever written by a cat is now available on Amazon.com. Go there and search for that title. You can read a couple of chapters there for free! And, of course, purchase it if it intrigues you! Not just for cat lovers only, it's for anyone who loves a great read, humor, pathos, love, loss and redemption. Who says the Great American novel can't be written by a cat! Check it out, I promise you won't be disappointed! 

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Report: McChrystal probe of US Spec Ops killings excluded key eyewitnesses


By Gareth Porter / IPS
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 -- 12:02 pm
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0706/report-mcchrystal-probe-spec-ops-killings-excluded-key-eyewitnesses/

By Gareth Porter and Ahmad Walid Fazly*

WASHINGTON, Jul 6, 2010 (IPS) - The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would finally do what they had failed to do in the original investigation - interview the eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets out of the bodies of three women told IPS they were never contacted by U.S. investigators.

The failure to interview key eyewitnesses, along with the refusal to make public any of the investigation's findings, continued a pattern of behaviour by McChrystal's command of denying that the SOF unit had begun a cover-up of the killings immediately after the raid.

Both the original report of the U.S. investigation and initial NATO report on the Feb. 12 night raid in Gardez remain classified, according to Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the officer who was spokesman for McChrystal on the issue before the general was relieved of his command Jun. 23.

Casting further doubt on the integrity of the investigation, the officer who carried out the follow-up investigation was under McChrystal's direct command after completing the investigation.

As a member of the SOF community who had promoted night raids as a privileged tactic in his strategy in Afghanistan, McChrystal had an obvious personal and political interest in keeping evidence of an SOF cover-up of the killings out of any official U.S. report on the Gardez raid.

Even while claiming that he could not reveal anything about the conclusions of the report, Breasseale told IPS, "Based on the findings of this investigation, I can reaffirm what I wrote on 5 April - there is no evidence of a cover-up."

Breasseale had said in an e-mail to IPS before McChrystal was relieved of command that "many" survivors of the raid were interviewed, "depending on whether they were available to speak to the investigating officer".

But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and the brother of the police officer and the prosecutor killed in the raid all said in interviews with IPS last week that they had never been contacted by U.S. investigators about what they had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators.

In an interview with IPS, Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the bullets from bodies of my daughter and others."

Tahir said that he and as many as seven other eyewitnesses had told interior ministry investigators about the attempted cover-up they had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been interviewed by the U.S. military."

Mohammed Saber, the brother of the two men killed in the raid - Commander Dawood, the head of intelligence for a district in Paktia province, and Saranwal Zahir, a prosecutor - said he had not been interviewed by any U.S. investigator either. Saber told IPS, "The Americans were taking out the bullets from the bodies of the dead with knives and with other equipment that they always have."

Saber said the U.S. soldiers refused to let relatives of the victims go to help them as they lay bleeding to death. Saber said he and other eyewitnesses were taken to a U.S. base and detained for three nights and four days.

Sabz Paree, the 18-year-old woman's mother, also denied being interviewed by U.S. investigators. "I saw everything," she told IPS. "The Americans had knives and were taking out the bullets from her."

In response to a request for comment on the denials by the three family members that they or other eyewitnesses had been interviewed by the U.S. investigator, Breasseale wrote in an e-mail, "All available family members who offered themselves up to take part in the investigator's questions when he was there were interviewed during his visit(s)."

Breasseale said the name of the Army colonel in charge of the investigation would not be made public for reasons of "privacy". He acknowledged in an e-mail before McChrystal was relieved of duty, however, that the officer was under McChrystal's "operational control", although he was not at the time he was appointed and during the investigation.

The target of the raid was a young man who had been at the celebration at the compound but had not even been detained, according to Mohammed Saber, who was shown pictures of the target while being held in detention for four days. The man turned himself in for questioning a few days later but was then released without charge, according to Saber.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the combined U.S.-NATO command then headed by McChrystal, issued a statement within hours of the Feb. 12 raid declaring that the two men who died in the raid were "insurgents" who had fired on the raiding party, and that the troops had found the bodies of three women "tied up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women - who among them had 16 children - had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid.

The officials told reporters the bodies had shown signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife – a claim that appears to support the eyewitness accounts by family members of the use of knives by SOF members to dig bullets out of the dead bodies.

The New York Times quoted a family member, Abdul Ghafar, as recalling that he had seen bullet entry wounds on the bodies of the three dead women that appeared to have been scraped out to remove bullets. "The holes were bigger than they were supposed to be," Gafar was quoted as saying.

When Jerome Starkey of The Times of London reported Mar. 13 that more than a dozen people interviewed at or near the scene of the attack had said the three women were killed by the U.S.-NATO gunmen, McChrystal's spokesman, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, tried to challenge the accuracy of Starkey's reporting.

On Apr. 4, ISAF admitted for the first time that the woman had been killed as a result of the SOF raiders firing on the two men.

However, the ISAF statement suggested that the U.S. and Afghan investigators had conducted a "thorough joint investigation" and maintained that there was no evidence of a cover-up. It explained the earlier statement about the women being found bound and gagged as the result of "an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs".

But the head of the Afghan Interior Ministry's Criminal Investigation Department, Mirza Mohammed Yarmand, publicly contradicted to the ISAF statement, telling the New York Times Apr. 4 that his investigators had gotten eyewitness accounts from survivors of tampering with the bodies of the dead.

Yarmand told the Times that his investigation had concluded that "there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the compound by the members" of the SOF raiding unit.

Within 24 hours of the publication of Yarmand's revelations, McChrystal's spokesman was telling reporters that McChrystal had ordered a new U.S. investigation, even as he was continuing to deny that there any evidence of SOF tampering with the evidence.

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

Ahmad Walid Fazly reported from Kabul.

Originally published at IPS News

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US-led forces kill 6 Afghan soldiers


Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:29:55 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133753&sectionid=351020403

 
 
Six Afghan soldiers have been killed when their post was "mistakenly" attacked by a US-led aircraft in central Afghanistan, police sources say.

The air strike that occurred late Tuesday was originally aimed at Taliban militants in Ghazni, a province in south-central Afghanistan, Nawruz Ali Mohamoodzada, a provincial police official, said Wednesday, AFP reported.

"It mistakenly hit an army post in which six soldiers were killed. An investigation has been launched," Mohamoodzada said.

Meanwhile, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi condemned Wednesday the latest "friendly fire" deaths, saying that the Afghan soldiers were launching an ambush against militants reportedly on the move in Ghazni province when NATO aircraft began firing on them without warning, AP reported.

US-led forces in the past too had committed such mistakes which claimed the lives of Afghan military and civilians.

"This is not the first time such an incident has happened, but we wish that at least this would be the last one," Azimi said.

MVZ/MVZ

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Wednesday, July 07, 2010
07:59 Mecca time, 04:59 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/20107733127398353.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
UK troops to 'pull out of Sangin' 

 
British troops have launched several major offensives in Sangin since 2006 [AFP]

The United Kingdom will withdraw its troops from the Sangin district in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where they have suffered heavy casualties in recent months, according to British media reports.

The British troops will move to other parts of the southern province and be replaced with some of the 20,000 US troops already stationed in Helmand.

UK troops will leave the district by the end of the year, according to the media reports.

Liam Fox, the British defence secretary, is expected to formally announce the redeployment on Wednesday.

However, the ministry of defence has refused to confirm the reports.

"Any changes to force lay down affecting UK personnel will be announced in the usual way," a spokesman said.

Sangin is a fertile agricultural region in northeastern Helmand, one of the least densely-populated provinces in Afghanistan.

Heavy fighting

It has been the site of heavy fighting for years with almost 100 British troops being killed there, nearly one-third of the 312 to have died throughout Afghanistan.

The reports came as the Nato military alliance announced the deaths of three foreign troops in the south of Afghanistan.

All three troops, whose nationalities were not given, died in bomb attacks on Tuesday, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said in a statement.

At least 17 Nato and US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan already this month, after 102 died in June, the deadliest month since the war began in 2001.

The UK established a base in Sangin in the summer of 2006, when several hundred British soldiers were airlifted into the district.

The Afghan army also established a presence in Sangin in April 2007 following a larger Nato operation.

But the deployment has long been controversial in the UK, where some military officials feel Sangin is too small and remote to merit a large army presence.

About 8,000 of the 9,500 British servicemen serving as part of the Isaf force in Afghanistan are based in Helmand province.

British troops have already turned over other mountain valleys in Helmand to the US Marines who arrived in the province last year.
 
 

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Wednesday, July 07, 2010
12:27 Mecca time, 09:27 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/20107783139474561.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Nato air raid kills Afghan troops  
 

 
 
At least five Afghan soldiers have been killed by a Nato air raid in eastern Afghanistan.

The bombing took place in Ghazni province, where the soldiers were carrying out a pre-dawn raid against Taliban fighters, according to a spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry.

"Isaf aircraft bombed and martyred five of our soldiers," Zaher Azimi, a spokesman for the ministry, said, referring to the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).

"We condemn this incident and regret that this is not the first time such an incident has occurred. We hope it will be the last time."

Two other soldiers were injured in the air raid.

Josef Blotz, a Nato spokesman, confirmed the attack.

He said he regretted the incident and that Isaf would launch an investigation.

"The reason for this is perhaps a co-ordination issue," Blotz said. "We were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area."

He extended the personal condolences of General David Petraeus, the newly arrived commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, to the families of the victims.

So-called "friendly fire" incidents continue to occur in Afghanistan, despite tighter new rules of engagement designed to limit the use of air raids.

A Nato air strike killed four Afghan soldiers in Wardak province in January and the German army accidentally killed five Afghan soldiers in April in a "friendly fire" incident in Kunduz province.

Such incidents have been repeatedly condemned by the Afghan government, which highlights the effect the negative effect that they have on attempts to get the Afghan public to support efforts against the Taliban.
 
 

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General Petraeus takes command as killing in Afghanistan escalates

By Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67672&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, 6 July 2010

In assuming formal command of the US-led war in Afghanistan over the weekend, Gen. David Petraeus reiterated his indications that the military will alter its rules of engagement, allowing a more unrestricted use of air strikes and artillery bombardments in support of American ground troops.

Such a shift will inevitably mean a major escalation in the slaughter of Afghan civilians. The killing of civilians by foreign occupation troops has fueled the insurgency in Afghanistan, which is now stronger than at any time since the US intervened in the country nearly nine years ago.

At a "change of command" ceremony July 4, Petraeus took over the post formerly occupied by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who had been removed by the Obama administration ten days earlier, ostensibly over insubordinate remarks he and his aides made that were reported in an article published in Rolling Stone magazine.

While reflective of the contempt for civilian authority that is endemic in the officer corps, the article was at best a subordinate factor in the decision to relieve McChrystal of his command. Far more significant was the failure to suppress the growing popular resistance to the US occupation, reflected both in the inconclusive offensive in Marjah last February and the recently announced decision to postpone a long-planned siege of Kandahar.

There had also been growing public criticism of McChrystal for implementing new rules of engagement in Afghanistan designed to reduce civilian casualties by limiting the use of American firepower.

At Sunday’s ceremony, Petraeus began by praising McChrystal, declaring that "the progress made in recent months, in the face of a determined enemy, is in many respects the result of the vision, energy, and leadership" of his sacked predecessor.

Petraeus, whose new command formally represents a demotion from his post as head of US Central Command, where he was McChrystal’s superior and in charge of both the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations, seemed hard-pressed to substantiate this "progress." In his speech he made references to increased immunizations and cell phone usage in Afghanistan.

The reality is that June represented the bloodiest month for the US-led occupation since the war began, with 102 troops—60 of them American—killed, and many hundreds more wounded.

Petraeus insisted that his taking over the Afghanistan command represented "a change in personnel, not a change in policy or strategy," and, indeed, he is closely identified with the counterinsurgency doctrine pursued by McChrystal, a former head of the military’s special operations forces.

What precise strategy and objectives are being pursued by Washington was left somewhat murky by the new commander. At the outset, he insisted that the US was waging war to deny "Al Qaeda and its network of extremist allies" the ability to "again establish sanctuary in Afghanistan." This, the original pretext for the war, has grown increasingly threadbare as US officials admit that there are no more than 100 members of Al Qaeda in the entire country.

As he continued, however, Petraeus declared the mission of the American forces was to "safeguard the Afghan people" and to "reverse the Taliban’s momentum and take away insurgent safe havens." In other words, US troops have been deployed in an attempt to conquer the country and suppress popular resistance to occupation.

While stressing that the US objectives in Afghanistan would remain unchanged, Petraeus allowed that he would "determine where refinements might be needed" in pursuing these objectives.

The "refinements" under consideration appear to be centered on the rules of engagement introduced by McChrystal last summer with the stated aim of reducing the number of civilian casualties. These rules, governing the use deadly force by the nearly 100,000 US troops occupying the country, included restrictions on directing artillery fire or air attacks against buildings where civilians were believed to be present, unless American forces feared that they were in danger of being overrun.

McChrystal coupled these restrictions, which he dubbed "courageous restraint," with an expanded use of special operations killing squads, which have been responsible for some of the most brutal massacres of civilians in Afghanistan over the last year.

In a letter to US troops, Petraeus stressed that, while civilian safety supposedly remained a consideration, "as you and our Afghan partners on the ground get into tough situations, we must employ all assets to ensure your safety."

The remark clearly suggested that the US was not going to sacrifice the lives of its troops in an attempt to avoid killing Afghan civilians.

In his speech Sunday, the new commander condemned the tactics of the insurgency in terms that appeared to justify the killing of civilians—including children—by US-led forces.

"No tactic is beneath the insurgents," said the general, "indeed, they use unwitting children to carry out attacks, they repeatedly kill innocent civilians, and they frequently seek to create situations that will result in injury to Afghan citizens."

The unstated implications of this remark are that children may become military targets because of their "unwitting" use by the insurgency, and that the killing of civilians is not the fault of the US occupation forces, because the insurgency deliberately works to "create situations" in which such killings are unavoidable.

The latest such "situation" was reported over the weekend, after US-led forces searching for a Taliban commander raided a series of compounds in the Kandahar district. Opening fire on suspected insurgents in one of the compounds, the troops shot several civilians living in the compound, killing one woman and one man.

The Los Angeles Times reported from Kabul that Afghan civilians are already seeing the arrival of Petraeus as a threat of intensified military violence against them.

"The change of command in Afghanistan has civilians worried that it will be even more dangerous to come into contact with the foreign forces in their midst," the Times reported. "Already, many motorists freeze with anxiety at the sight of a Western convoy or when coming up on a military checkpoint, fearing they will be taken for would-be suicide attackers and shot."

Underscoring the shift in US tactics in Afghanistan were statements by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who were present in Kabul for the change in command.

Senator Joseph Lieberman Sunday called upon Petraeus to change the rules of engagement "as soon as possible."

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," the former Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut said that the new Afghanistan commander had told him he was "committed" to reviewing the current rules.

"Ultimately, we’ve got to be concerned about the safety of our American troops here," said Lieberman. He added that troops under fire should not be forced to wait for air support.

Lieberman’s comments were echoed by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who stated at a press conference in Kabul that "General Petraeus is reviewing the entire rules of engagement, and probably there will be some tweaking. We got that impression from him."

While claiming that the US military had "the right strategy," McCain warned, "There will be more difficult times, and in the short term casualties will go up."

At the conclusion of his July 4 speech, Petraeus stressed that the US "commitment to Afghanistan is an enduring one and that we are committed to a sustained effort to help the people of this country over the long-term."

The message was clear. The "sustained," "enduring" and "long-term" effort will continue long after the July 2011 date that Obama gave when announcing his Afghanistan surge for the beginning of a US withdrawal from the country.

Last week in his congressional testimony, Petraeus stressed that the July 2011 date applied only to the 30,000 "surge" forces, and even that would be dependent on conditions on the ground. No one should believe, he warned, that the US military would be "switching off the lights and closing the door behind us."

In giving the Afghan command to Petraeus, a highly political general around whom there has been substantial speculation regarding a future run for the Republican presidential nomination, Obama has installed someone who will wage a political fight for continuing the Afghan war indefinitely.

That this is the Democratic president’s own position was made clear in his response to last month’s feeble attempt by House Democrats to pass an amendment calling for the president to declare a withdrawal timetable. There was "a lot of obsession" about when troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan, Obama declared contemptuously.

The reality is that the amendment maneuvers of the House Democrats—who provided the necessary votes to ensure that funding for the war continued—is only an attempt to deflect the massive popular opposition to the war.



 

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5 US troops killed in Afghanistan

WAVY-TV

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67680&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 6, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Roadside bombs in Afghanistan killed five U.S. service members in different parts of the country on Monday.

NATO says two died in the west, two in the south and one in the east. And Britain's Defense Ministry says a British soldier was killed in a blast during a vehicle patrol in southern Helmand province. Their deaths brought to 14 the number of U.S. and other international troops killed so far this month.

A tally by The Associated Press shows June was the deadliest month of the war for U.S. and international forces at 103 killed, including 60 Americans.

Meanwhile, the Afghan Ministry of Interior reports that six Afghan civilians, including a woman, died after their vehicle hit a roadside bomb Sunday. Another civilian was killed and four others were wounded in a separate incident.




 

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Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms

By Spencer Ackerman  July 6, 2010  |  3:37 pm  |  Categories: Af/Pak 

Yes, we needed economists to tell us this. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds “strong evidence for a revenge effect” when examining the relationship between civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and radicalization after such incidents occur. The paper even estimates of how many insurgent attacks to expect after each civilian death. Those findings, however intuitive, might resolve an internal military debate about the counter-productivity of civilian casualties — and possibly fuel calls for withdrawal.
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16152#fromrss

“When ISAF units kill civilians,” the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, “this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an “additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

The team doesn’t examine the effect of CIA drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan, the subject of fierce debate concerning both the level of civilian deaths the strikes generate and their radicalizing effect.

A team of four economists — Stanford’s Luke N. Condra and Joseph H. Felter, the London School of Economics’ Radha K. Iyengar, and Princeton’s Jacob N. Shapiro — used the International Security Assistance Force’s own civilian-casualty data to reach their conclusions, breaking it down by district to examine further violence in the area in which civilians died. They examined the effect of over 4000 civilian deaths from January 2009 to March 2010 by looking at the sometimes-lagging indications of reprisal attacks in the same areas. To be clear, the team’s research is inferential, creating a statistical model to examine spikes in violence following civilian-casualty incidents, rather than interviewing insurgents as to their specific motivations.

But in their study, the researchers found that there’s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. “An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,” the researchers write. “The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.”

In other words, even if the insurgents possess a “total disregard for human life and the Afghan people,” as an ISAF press release reacting to this weekend’s insurgent bombings in Herat put it, Afghans effectively would rather be killed by other Afghans than foreigners.


That’s not all. The researchers found that ISAF-caused civilian casualties corollate with long-term radicalization in Afghanistan. Plotting reprisal incidents of violence in areas where civilians died at coalition hands, the data showed that “that the Coalition effect is enduring, peaking 16 weeks after the event. This confirms the intuition that civilian casualties by ISAF forces predict greater violence through a long-run effect.” That’s consistent with intuitions that civilian casualties “are affecting future violence through increased recruitment into insurgent groups,” although they find no direct evidence for such a thing. Interestingly, the researchers found the opposite to be the case in Iraq: U.S.-caused civilian casualties are more likely to cause short-term retaliatory spikes than they are violence over the long term. (Yet.)

Repeated efforts to get in touch with the four researchers by email and phone were unsuccessful by publication time.

The relationship between civilian casualties and the creation of new enemies is no mere academic debate. As the paper notes, there can be “strategic military returns” for U.S. troops who incur greater risk to themselves in order to prevent civilian casualties if that stops Afghans from taking up arms against the U.S. in revenge. Some troops in Afghanistan bridled against General Stanley McChrystal’s rules of engagement, considering them too restrictive against a violent insurgency. General David Petraeus’ letter to his troops on Sunday indicates that he’s trying to strike a balance between protecting the Afghan people and allowing troops to finish the battles they fight.

Additionally, some in the military consider a preoccupation with civilian casualties to be a media-driven phenomenon. Last December, the Air Force’s intel chief, Lieutenant General David Deptula, told Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman that “there appears to be an almost complete lack of indication to support the conventional wisdom, popularized in the media, that air attacks have been provoking deep hostility toward the U.S. and the Kabul government.” Deptula was talking specifically about the air war, and the researchers found that only about six percent of civilian casualties caused by ISAF come through air strikes. (Of course, that’s after McChrystal and his predecessor, General David McKiernan, scaled back ISAF’s use of air strikes.) But after the study, Deptula might want to reconsider his contention that “there is little reason based on the admittedly limited data available in open source to expect that drastically reducing the civilian casualty issue would produce game changing results on the political battlefield.”

The most recent United Nations quarterly study of political and security affairs in Afghanistan found that civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its allies dropped from 33 percent to 30 percent of total civilian casualties, a dip the U.N. attributed to measures resulting from “a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” But the researchers suggest that Afghans aren’t going say, “Those Americans are OK! They only cause one out of three dead innocent Afghans!” — especially if, as the U.N. also found, civilian casualties in the escalated war are on the rise overall.

After all, if the goal is just to stop U.S.-caused civilian casualties, then the policy implications are clear: stop the war. If it’s to erode the influence of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan while reducing civilian casualties to the “absolute minimum” Petraeus describes in his letter, then getting the balance between fighting insurgents and protecting civilians wrong risks making the Afghanistan war counterproductive for its stated purpose.

And while some recent academic research suggests that across the border in Pakistan, the CIA’s drone strikes may not kill as many civilians as commonly believed — a very difficult thing to verify in any case — it’s not as if the U.S. has much margin for error. At his sentencing last month, Faisal Shahzad testified that his failed attempt to detonate an SUV filled with explosives came as revenge for what he considered an avaricious U.S. foreign policy. “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,” said Shahzad, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, “because only — like living in U.S., the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, conceded the point made by the four researchers this weekend. He wouldn’t argue, he said, “that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized,” Leiter told an Aspen Institute security forum. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. It means you craft a fuller strategy to explain why you’re doing it.” Good luck with that. If the U.S. is killing innocent civilians — however accidentally, and however in pursuit of dangerous fanatics — what story can Washington tell to reassure the relatives of the innocent dead?

Credit: ISAF



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/civilian-casualties-create-new-enemies-study-confirms/#ixzz0szyOyyvI

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Afghanistan: British troops to hand over northern Helmand to US Marines

British troops will hand over some of the most dangerous and heavily contested parts of Afghanistan to US forces, ministers will announce on Wednesday.
 
By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Published: 7:50PM BST 06 Jul 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7875855/Afghanistan-British-troops-to-hand-over-northern-Helmand-to-US-Marines.html

WATCH VIDEO :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/7876526/Afghanistan-British-troops-to-leave-Sangin-region.html

Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, will tell MPs that British troops in Helmand province will hand over districts including Sangin, where scores of British troops have been killed.

The change will see British troops withdrawing from large parts of northern Helmand and concentrate on the central area of the province.

By some estimates, around a third of the British fatalities in Helmand have come in Sangin, described by some soldiers as the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence on Tuesday announced that a soldier from 1st Battalion, The Mercian Regiment, died in hospital after being caught in a bomb explosion on Sunday. A total of 312 British personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001.

Any suggestion that Britain is giving up areas where so many British lives have been lost driving out the Taliban will prove controversial.

But with the US Marines now outnumbering British forces so heavily, military analysts said it was inevitable that the Americans would take more responsibility in Helmand.

Ministers and commanders are worried that the changes will be seen as a retreat or a humiliation for British forces.

Dr Fox will insist that the changes are simply a sensible redistribution of manpower to reflect the differing sizes of the British and American contingents.

Plans for US Marines to replace British personnel have been under discussion since the start of the year when an American “surge” began, sharply increasing US numbers in Helmand.

Britain has around 8,000 troops in Helmand, while the US Marine Corps now has nearly 20,000

Nato commanders have been reviewing their counter-insurgency mission in recent months. On a visit to London last month, Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, said: “The view of the British military is they probably don't have enough manpower to do that their areas of Helmand.”

Today’s announcement follows a change in the Afghan command structure that puts all troops in Helmand under the command of a US Marine Corps general.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “UK Forces continue to make real progress across Helmand including in Sangin, one of the most contested and challenging areas in southern Afghanistan.

“ISAF is responsible for ensuring the most effective allocation of international forces to deliver the campaign strategy in Afghanistan and the UK fully supports ISAF commanders in this aim.”

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US-led forces kill two Afghan civilians

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:08:23 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133853&sectionid=351020403

 
 
US-led strikes have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians over the past few months.


US-led soldiers have raided a village in northern Afghanistan, shooting dead two civilians and abducting about 20 others.

The incident took place on Wednesday, when US-led forces opened fire from helicopters on civilians in the suburbs of Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Blakh province, a Press TV correspondent reported.

Upon landing, the soldiers entered a brick production workshop firing at the surrendered workers, killing two and injuring several others, including a child.

A video footage obtained by Press TV, shows how one of the victims was killed and the child was wounded.

The wounded child is reportedly in coma. The US troops have also burnt several houses belonging to the villagers.

This is not the first time that Afghan civilians are being killed or abducted for unclear reasons.

Afghan officials repeatedly protest such attacks and civilians hold frequent demonstrations against such raid.

The continuous killing of civilians by foreign forces has caused deep resentment among the Afghan population. Over 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan last year.

The United States and its allies claim that militant hideouts are being targeted in their military operations. However, most of the attacks have resulted in heavy civilian casualties.

JR/HGH/MMN

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UK troops forced to pull out: Taliban

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:01:10 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133867&sectionid=351020403

   
 

US-led troops in Afghanistan

 
The reclusive leader of the Taliban has taken credit for a plan by British troops to pull out from a troubled southern district in Afghanistan, saying they were forced to withdraw by the militants.

A statement attributed to Mullah Mohammad Omar said Wednesday that British forces were pulling out from the violence-wracked Sangin district of Afghanistan's Helmand Province due to pressure from militant attacks.

"This is the start of the British forces' defeat in Afghanistan," a Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, quoted Mullah Omar as saying.

"We defeated them in Sangin. They'll be defeated in the rest of the country soon," he added.

Under the new plan, British troops will hand over control of the troubled region to US forces. Taliban militants, however, warned that the US forces will suffer "the same fate."

The statement came out as UK Defense Secretary Liam Fox announced a plan by Britain to hand over control of the area to US forces by the end of the year.

Fox insisted that the move was not a withdrawal but a logical redeployment.

"This will simplify current command arrangements," he told the House of Commons.

The decision was announced as the UK has suffered its heaviest loss in the notorious Sangin district -- with almost 100 deaths since the start of the US-led war nine years ago.

The British government is under fire at home over the rising number of fatalities in Afghanistan. Opinion polls show that most Britons want their troops back home.

JR/CS/MMN

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Published on Wednesday, July 7, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Losing in Afghanistan

by Marjorie Cohn

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass.

The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined.

Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs.

Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except U.S. personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, “death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

There are other “depressing” aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the axe, there is a “resilient and growing insurgency” with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal’s remarks were considered “off message” by the White House, which was also irked by the general’s criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn’t work.”

He and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, likely disagree on the need to prevent civilian casualties (known as “Civ Cas”). McChrystal instituted some of the most stringent rules of engagement the U.S. military has had in a war zone: “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force.” Commanders cannot fire on buildings or other places if they have reason to believe civilians might be present unless their own forces are in imminent danger of being overrun. And they must end engagements and withdraw rather than risk harming noncombatants. McChrystal knows that for every innocent person you kill, you create new enemies; he calls it “insurgent math.” According to the Los Angeles Times, McChrystal “was credited with bringing about a substantial drop in the proportion of civilian casualties suffered at the hands of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan allies.”

While testifying in Congress before he was confirmed to take McChrystal’s place, Petraeus told senators that some U.S. soldiers had complained about the former’s rules of engagement aimed at preventing civilian casualties.

According to the Rolling Stone article, Obama capitulated to McChrystal’s insistence that more troops were needed in Afghanistan. In his December 1 speech at West Point, the article says, “the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then,” the article continued, “without ever using the words ‘victory’ or ‘win,’ Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested.”

Both Obama and Petraeus no longer speak of “victory” over the Taliban; they both hold open the possibility of settlement with the Taliban. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, chief of operations for McChrystal, told Rolling Stone, “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win.”

The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying that “the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem.” Noting that CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, “why are we fighting a major war” there? “Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan,” he said. “That’s more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.” Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, “That’s a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.” He queried, “Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?” And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda by saying, “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.”

There is also division in the Republican ranks over the war. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele made some gutsy comments about the war in Afghanistan, saying it is not winnable and calling it a “war of Obama’s choosing.” (Even though George W. Bush first invaded Afghanistan, Obama made the escalation of U.S. involvement a centerpiece of his campaign.) Steele said that if Obama is “such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed.” Interestingly, Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain slammed Steele and jumped to Obama’s defense. Rep. Ron Paul, however, agreed with Steele, saying, “Michael Steele has it right, and Republicans should stick by him.”

Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a “Great Society” when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past President of the National Lawyers Guild, is the deputy secretary general for external communications of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists..  She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law [1] and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent [2] (with Kathleen Gilberd).  Her anthology, The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, will be published in 2010 by NYU Press. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com
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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/07

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South Asia
Jul 9, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LG09Df01.html 
 
Bombs away!   Remember Cambodia


By Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen

The United States war in Afghanistan is "going badly", according to the New York Times. Nine years after American forces invaded to oust the repressive Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda ally, "the deteriorating situation demands a serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies".

Aerial bombardment, a centerpiece of the US military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, US and North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.

When US bombs hit a civilian warehouse in Afghanistan in late 2001, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded, "We're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is." There was laughter in the press gallery.

But the bombing continued and spread to Iraq in 2003, with the United States determined to use "the force necessary to prevail, plus some", and asserting that no promises would be made to avoid "collateral damage".

Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties, in other words, were predictable if not inevitable. The show of strength aside, didn't the US underestimate the strategic cost of collateral damage? If "shock and awe" appeared to work at least in 2001 against the Taliban regular army, the continued use of aerial bombardment has also nourished civilian support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda anti-US insurgency.

In March 2010, the New York Times reported that "civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency." Beyond the moral meaning of inflicting predictable civilian casualties, and contravention of international laws of war, it is also clear that the political repercussions of air strikes outweigh their military benefits.

This is not news. The extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, which the US Air Force bombed from 1965 to 1973, was a troubling precedent. First, Cambodia became in 1969-1973 one of the most heavily-bombarded countries in history (along with North Korea, South Vietnam, and Laos). Then, in 1975-79, it suffered genocide at the hands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists, who had been military targets of the US bombing but also became its political beneficiaries.

Despite key differences, an important similarity links the current conflict in Afghanistan to the 1970-1975 Cambodian war: increasing US reliance on air power against a heterogeneous insurgency. Moreover, in the past few years, as fighting has continued in Afghanistan supported by US air power, Taliban forces have benefited politically, recruiting among an anti-US Afghan constituency that appears to have grown even as the insurgents suffer military casualties.

In Cambodia, it was precisely the harshest, most extreme elements of the insurgency who survived the US bombing, expanded in numbers, and then won the war. The Khmer Rouge grew from a small force of fewer than 10,000 in 1969 to over 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.

During that period, their recruitment propaganda successfully highlighted the casualties and damage caused by US bombing. Within a broader Cambodian insurgency, the radical Khmer Rouge leaders eclipsed their royalist, reformist, and pro-Hanoi allies as well as defeating their enemy, the pro-US Cambodian government of Lon Nol, in 1975.

The Nixon Doctrine had proposed that the United States could supply an allied Asian regime with the materiel to withstand internal or external challenge while the US withdrew its own ground troops or remained at arm's length.

"Vietnamization" built up the air and ground fighting capability of South Vietnamese government forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia from 1970, Washington gave military aid to General Lon Nol's new regime, tolerating its rampant corruption, while the US Air Force (and the large South Vietnamese Air Force) conducted massive aerial bombardment of its Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge communist opponents and their heterogeneous united front, across rural Cambodia.

United States policy in Afghanistan has shown a similar reliance on air strikes in fighting the motley insurgency there. These strikes, while far more precisely targeted than the earlier bombing campaigns in Indochina, inflicted substantial civilian casualties in the first year of the Afghan war in 2001-02.

The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that in a three-month period between October 7, 2001 and January 1, 2002, between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians were killed by aerial bombing, and The Los Angeles Times found that in a five-month period from October 7, 2001 to February 28, 2002, between 1,067 and 1,201 civilian deaths were reported in the media.

Deaths reported in newspapers should be treated with caution, but not all are reported, and the total was undoubtedly high. And the toll has continued long after the initial US invasion. According to Human Rights Watch, air strikes by the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and its NATO-led coalition, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), killed 116 Afghan civilians in 2006, and 321 civilians in 2007.

And the number rose again in 2008: according to a United Nations study on the humanitarian costs of the conflict, air strikes accounted for 530 of the 828 civilians killed that year by US or Afghan government forces. The same study found that between January and June 2009, 200 of the 310 recorded civilian deaths were caused by air strikes. Overall in 2009, the UN reported that 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, though the number killed by foreign and Afghan troops was down 25%.

While their large-scale killing of civilians presented a moral challenge to the US-led coalition forces, there has also been increasing acknowledgment of strategic costs accompanying these casualties.

In mid-2007, the London Guardian reported that "a senior UK military officer said he had asked the US to withdraw its special forces from a volatile area that was crucial in the battle against the Taliban" after the US forces were "criticized for relying on air strikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters".

The paper added: "British and NATO officials have consistently expressed concern about US tactics, notably air strikes, which kill civilians, sabotaging the battle for ‘hearts and minds'."

NATO's secretary general added that NATO commanders "had changed the rules of engagement, ordering their troops to hold their fire in situations where civilians appeared to be at risk". More recently Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the senior NATO soldier in Afghanistan, has argued that many of the insurgents being held at Bagram air base had joined the insurgency due to deaths of people they knew.

He told the troops, "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents. Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed." The same report cited a village elder from Hodkail corroborating this argument: "The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore. The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people."

Yet the bombings have continued and the civilian death toll has mounted. In 2008, after US aircraft killed more than 30 Afghan civilians in each of two bombardments of rural wedding parties, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, "ordered a tightening of procedures for launching air strikes" and proclaimed that "minimizing civilian casualties is crucial". In December 2008, McKiernan issued another directive, ordering that "all responses must be proportionate".

Again new procedures failed to stop the slaughter from the air. Following an investigation into a 2009 air strike in Farah province that killed at least 26 civilians (the Afghan government reported a much higher toll of 140 dead), McKiernan's replacement, General Stanley McChrystal, issued new guidelines meant to minimize civilian casualties.

In earlier testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal had stressed the strategic importance of civilian protection. "A willingness to operate in ways minimizing causalities or damage ... is critical," he argued. "Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of success will not be enemy killed. It will be shielding the Afghan population from violence." So far the cost of failure, for instance by inflicting more civilian casualties, has included a political windfall for Taliban insurgents, who by 2009 posed a much stronger threat than they had in 2005.

Since the issuing of McChrystal's 2009 directive, however, air strikes have continued to kill civilians, the toll increasing with the escalation of the US ground war in response to the greater Taliban threat.

In February 2010 alone, 46 Afghan civilians were killed in just three strikes. An errant rocket attack on February 14 killed 12 civilians. Four days later, a NATO air strike mistakenly killed seven Afghan police officers. Another NATO strike on February 20 killed 27 civilians.

In comparison to the previous year, the three-month period from March to June 2010 saw a 44% drop in civilian casualties caused by the coalition. Yet, nine years after the US went to war in Afghanistan, bombing remains part of US strategy and the death toll in aerial strikes continues. In a March incident, a US air strike killed 13 civilians and in June, 10 more civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in a NATO air strike.

One reaction to the McChrystal directive has been an increased US use of unmanned aerial drones to deliver air strikes. While proponents of targeted drone strikes argue that they offer greater precision, and therefore minimize civilian casualties, it is also possible that the greater ease with which they can be deployed could instead increase the number of raids and thus the civilian casualty rates.


For example, a Human Rights Watch report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan argued that most civilian casualties do not occur in planned air strikes on Taliban targets, but rather in the more fluid rapid-response strikes mostly carried out in support of "troops in contact".

A recent US military report on a drone strike that killed 23 civilians in February found that "inaccurate and unprofessional" reporting by the drone operators was responsible for the casualties.

In response, McChrystal repeated what he had said many times, "inadvertently killing or injuring civilians is heartbreaking and undermines their trust and confidence in our mission". In late June, in the second change of Afghanistan commander in 18 months, US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus.

The resort to drones, while potentially useful for well-planned long-term surveillance-based strikes, could also enable the execution of more frequent troop support strikes. More generally, any shift to increased air power, even in conjunction with ground troops, will likely inflict greater civilian casualties.

The resulting local outrage could benefit an insurgency seeking civilian support and recruitment. While air strikes today can be much more accurate than they were in Indochina in the 1970s, it would be perilous to ignore a disastrous precedent: the political blowback of the US air war against Cambodian insurgents.

Raining bombs on Cambodia
On December 9, 1970, president Richard Nixon telephoned his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. B-52s, long deployed over Vietnam, had been targeting Cambodia for only a year.

In a "sideshow" to the war in Vietnam, American aircraft had already dropped 36,000 payloads on Cambodia, a neutral kingdom until the US-backed General Lon Nol seized power from Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a March 1970 coup.

The 1969-70 "Menu" B-52 bombings of Cambodia's border areas, which American commanders labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Desert and Snack, aimed to destroy the mobile headquarters of the South Vietnamese "Vietcong" and the North Vietnamese Army (VC/NVA) in the Cambodian jungle. However, these and later bombardments forced the Vietnamese communists further west and deeper into Cambodia, and ultimately radicalized Cambodian local people against Lon Nol's regime.

After the US ground invasion of Cambodia in May-June 1970, which also failed to root out the Vietnamese communists there, Nixon faced growing congressional opposition to his Indochina policy. The president now wanted a secret escalation of air attacks, further into Cambodia's populous areas.

This was despite a September 1970 US intelligence report that had warned Washington that "many of the 66 ‘training camps' on which [Lon Nol's army] had requested air strikes by early September were in fact merely political indoctrination sessions held in village halls and pagodas".

Telling Kissinger on December 9, 1970, of his frustration that the US Air Force was being "unimaginative", Nixon demanded more bombing, deeper into Cambodia: "They have got to go in there and I mean really go in ... I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?"

This order ignored prior limits restricting US attacks to within 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the Vietnamese border and prohibiting B-52 bombing within a kilometer of any village, and military assessments likening the air strikes to "taking a beehive the size of a basketball and poking it with a stick".

Kissinger responded hesitantly, "The problem is Mr President, the air force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war ... in fact, they are not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight."

The US insistence even today on using air power against insurgencies raises this same dilemma: perhaps even more than the civilian casualties of ground operations, the "collateral damage" from US aerial bombing still appears to enrage and radicalize enough of the survivors for insurgencies to find the recruits and supporters they require.

Five minutes after his telephone conversation with Nixon, Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders. "He [Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?" The response from Haig, recorded as barely audible, sounded like laughing.

As in Vietnam, the US now deployed massive air power over Cambodia to fight an insurgency that enjoyed significant local support. One result was more growth in the insurgency. In recent years the impact of the US bombing on Cambodia has become much better known.

An apparently near-complete Pentagon spatial database, declassified in 2000 and detailing no fewer than 230,488 US aircraft sorties over Cambodia from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, reveals that much of that bombing was indiscriminate and that it had begun years earlier than ever officially disclosed to the US Congress or the American people.

A decade ago, the US government released to the governments of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam extensive classified air force data on all American bombings of those countries. This data assist those countries in the search for unexploded US ordnance, still a major threat in much of the region, and it can also be analyzed in map and time series formats, revealing an astounding wealth of historical information on the air war there.

We now know, for instance, that from 1965 to 1969, before Nixon's "secret" Menu bombing even started, the US Air Force had dropped bombs on, among other places in Cambodia, 83 sites at which the Pentagon database described the intended target as "Unknown" or "Unidentified". The detailed record reveals that for these 83 cases, the US Air Force stated in its confidential reporting that it was unaware of what it was bombing. It nevertheless dropped munitions on those sites which it could not identify, in a neutral country at peace.

This practice escalated after the ground war began in Cambodia in 1970. For that year alone, the number of US air strikes on targets recorded as "Unknown" or "Unidentified" increased to as many as 573 bombing sites. American planes also bombed another 5,602 Cambodian sites where the Pentagon record neither identifies nor cites any target - 15% percent of the 37,426 air strikes made on the country that year.

Interestingly, after Nixon's December 1970 order for wider bombing of Cambodia, the number of such attacks fell in 1971, but that year still saw as many as 182 bombing raids on "Unknown" targets, and 1,390 attacks on unidentified ones (among the 25,052 Cambodian sites bombed that year).

The long-term trend favored more indiscriminate bombardment. In 1972, the US Air Force bombed 17,293 Cambodian sites, including 766 whose targets it explicitly recorded as "Unknown", plus another 767 sites with no target identified in the military database. These figures dramatically increased the next year. In the period January-August 1973 alone, the air force bombed 33,945 sites in Cambodia, hitting as many as 2,632 "Unknown" targets, and 465 other sites where the Pentagon record identified no target.

May 1973 saw the height of the Cambodia bombing. During that month, US planes bombed 6,553 sites there. These sorties included hits on 641 "Unknown" and 158 unidentified targets, at a rate of over 25 such strikes per day for that month.

Overall, during the US bombardment of Cambodia from 1970 to 1973, American warplanes hit a total of 3,580 "Unknown" targets and bombed another 8,238 sites with no target identified. Such sites accounted for 10.4% of the air strikes, which hit a total of 113,716 Cambodian sites in less than four years.

Also unknown is the human toll that these specific air strikes inflicted on "Unknown", "Unidentified" or non-identified targets, and the toll from the additional 1,023 strikes on targets identified only as a "sampan". Civilian casualties from the former, at least, are properly considered US war crimes (not genocide), though they remain unprosecuted.

However, it is possible to cross-check other information in the Pentagon bombing database with details that Cambodian survivors provided to Ben Kiernan in interviews he conducted in 1979-1981. We can also begin to answer important further questions concerning the strategic efficacy and political consequences of aerial bombing: Can insurgencies be beaten with bombs? What are the human and also the strategic costs of "collateral damage"? For a strategy of replacing or reinforcing ground troops with air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cambodia at least shows how strategic bombing can go disastrously wrong.

The new data transforms our understanding of what happened to Cambodia, even today one of the most heavily bombed countries in history. The total tonnage of US bombs dropped on Cambodia, at least in the range of 500,000 tons, possibly far more, either equaled or far exceeded the tonnages that the US dropped in the entire Pacific Theater during World War II (500,000 tons) and in the Korean War (454,000). In per capita terms, the bombing of Cambodia exceeded the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, and the US bombing of North Vietnam (but not that of South Vietnam or possibly, Laos).

Not only was the total payload dropped on Cambodia significant, and much of it indiscriminate, but also, the bombardment began much earlier than previously disclosed. The "secret" 1969-70 Menu campaign, when later uncovered, caused congressional uproar and provoked calls for Nixon's impeachment, but we now know that US bombing had actually started over four years earlier, in 1965, as Cambodian leaders had claimed at the time.


These early tactical strikes may have supported secret US Army and Central Intelligence Agency ground incursions from across the Vietnamese border. During the mid-1960s, the Studies and Operations Group, US Special Forces teams in tandem with the Khmer Serei (US-trained ethnic Cambodian rebels from South Vietnam), were collecting intelligence inside Cambodia. Perhaps the US tactical air strikes supported or followed up on these secret pre-1969 operations.

This revelation has several implications. First, US bombing of neutral Cambodia significantly predated the Nixon administration. Early individual bombardments of Cambodia were known and protested by the Cambodian government. Prince Sihanouk's foreign minister, for instance, claimed as early as January 1966
that "hundreds of our people have already died in these attacks".

The Pentagon database reveals escalating bombardments. From 1965 to 1968, the Lyndon B Johnson administration conducted 2,565 sorties over Cambodia. Most of these strikes occurred under the Vietnam War policy of then-secretary of defense Robert S McNamara, which he subsequently publicly regretted.

Second, these early strikes were tactical, directed at military targets, not carpet bombings. The Johnson administration made a strategic decision not to use B-52s in Cambodia, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives, or for the country's neutrality, or because of perceived strategic limits of carpet bombing. However, Nixon decided differently, and from late 1969 the air force began to deploy B-52s over Cambodia.

Why did the United States bombard a small agrarian country that attempted to stay out of a major war, and what were the consequences?

In the first stage of the bombing (1965-1969) the US goal was to pursue the Vietnamese communists retreating from South Vietnam into Cambodia, then to destroy their Cambodian sanctuaries, and cut off their supply routes from North to South Vietnam, through both Laos to the north and later, the southern Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. These early US attacks failed to find, let alone hit, a mobile Vietnamese headquarters, or to stop the flow of weapons and supplies.

The second phase of the bombing (1969-1872) aimed to support the slow pullout of US troops from Vietnam, ironically by expanding the war to Cambodia in the hope of winning it faster by attacking the Vietnamese communists from behind. Lon Nol's 1970 coup facilitated much more extensive US action in Cambodia, including the short ground invasion and the prolonged carpet bombing, until 1973.

In 1969, Nixon first introduced B-52s into the still secret US air war in Cambodia to buy time for the US withdrawal from Vietnam. Later, as Emory Swank, US ambassador to Lon Nol's Cambodia, recalled, "Time was bought for the success of the program in Vietnam ... to this extent I think some measure of gratitude is owed to the Khmers."

Former US General Theodore Mataxis called it "a holding action. You know, one of those things like a rear guard you drop off. The troika's going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it." Thus Cambodians became a decoy to protect American lives. In its attempt to deny South Vietnam to the Vietnamese communists, the US drove them further into Cambodia, producing the domino effect that its Indochinese intervention had been intended to prevent. Phnom Penh would fall two weeks before Saigon.

The final phase of the US bombing, January-August 1973, aimed to stop the now rapid Khmer Rouge advance on the Cambodian capital. US fear of this first Southeast Asian domino falling translated into a massive escalation of the air war that spring and summer - an unprecedented B-52 bombardment, focussed on the heavily populated areas around Phnom Penh, but also sparing few other regions of the country. As well as inflaming rural rage against the pro-US Lon Nol government, the rain of bombs on non-combatants also reduced the relative risk of their joining the insurgency.

The impact of the resultant increased civilian casualties may not have been a primary strategic concern for the Nixon administration. It should have been. Civilian casualties helped drive people into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970, the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia, and extensive US bombing of its rural areas began.

Even before that, the initial US bombardments of border areas had set in motion a highly precarious series of events leading to the extension deeper into Cambodia of the impact of the Vietnam War, contributing to Lon Nol's 1970 coup, which also helped fuel the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The final phase of the story is better known. In 1973, the US Congress, angered at the destruction and the deception of the Nixon administration, legislated a halt to the Cambodia bombing. The great damage was already done. Having grown under the rain of bombs from a few thousand to over 200,000 regular and militia forces by 1973, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh two years later. They then subjected Cambodia to a genocidal Maoist agrarian revolution. Is there a lesson here on combating insurgencies?

Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused. Because Lon Nol was supporting the US air war, the bombing of Cambodian villages and its significant civilian casualties provided ideal recruitment rhetoric for the insurgent Khmer Rouge.

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge were explicitly recruiting peasants by highlighting the damage done by US air strikes. The Central Intelligence Agency's directorate of operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the communists there were successfully "using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda"

Years later, journalist Bruce Palling asked a former Khmer Rouge officer from northern Cambodia if local Khmer Rouge forces had made use of the bombing for anti-US propaganda:
Chhit Do: Oh yes, they did. Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched

The ordinary people ... sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told ... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over ... It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.

Bruce Palling: So the American bombing was a kind of help to the Khmer Rouge?

Chhit Do: Yes, that's right ... sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.
The Nixon administration, aware of this consequence of its Cambodia bombing, kept the air war secret for so long that debate over its toll and political impact came far too late.

Along with support from the Vietnamese communists and from Lon Nol's deposed rival, Prince Sihanouk, the US carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government, and once it had done so in 1975, perpetrated genocide in the country.

The parallels to current dilemmas in Iraq and Afghanistan, where genocidal al-Qaeda factions lurk among the insurgent forces, are poignant and telling.

Today, the technology of US bombing has become more sophisticated. "Unknown" targets are bombed less frequently and collateral damage is now lower than it was. Yet it remains high, and perhaps these days, information travels faster.

What are the strategic consequences of the continuing civilian death tolls that US forces inflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the outrage they spawn among rural communities there? Are they worth the risk, let alone the moral consequences, to say nothing of the implications under international criminal law?

The January 13, 2006, aerial strike by a US predator drone on a village in Pakistan, killing women and children and inflaming local anti-US political passions, seems a pertinent example of what continues to occur in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Collateral damage" in this case, even undermined the positive sentiments previously created by billions of dollars of US post-earthquake aid to that part of Pakistan. Aside from the killing of innocent civilians, how many new enemies does US bombing create?

In the lead-up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, neither the US media nor the George W Bush administration seriously included the impact of civilian casualties in public discussion of the overall war strategy. Even with official assurances that civilian casualties would be limited, when it came to a decision to bomb a village containing a suspected terrorist, the benefit of killing the target trumped the toll on innocents. This misguided calculus is quite possibly a fundamental threat to long-term Afghan and American security.

If the Cambodians' tragic experience teaches us anything, it is that official disregard of the immorality and miscalculation of the consequences of inflicting predictable civilian casualties stem partly from failure to understand the social contexts of insurgencies.

The reasons local people help such movements do not fit into Kissingerian rationales. Nor is their support absolute or unidimensional. Those whose lives have been ruined may not look to the geopolitical rationale of the attacks; rather, understandably and often explicitly, many will blame the attackers.

Dangerous forces can reap a windfall. The strategic and moral failure of the US Cambodia air campaign lay not only in the toll of possibly 150,000 civilians killed there in 1969-1973 by an almost unprecedented level of carpet, cluster and incendiary bombing, but also indirectly, in its aftermath, when the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime rose from the bomb craters to cause the deaths of another 1.7 million Cambodians in 1975-79.

These successive tragedies are not unrelated. It is only predictable that an insurgency in need of recruits may effectively exploit potential supporters' hatred for those killing their family members or neighbors. That Washington has yet to learn from its past crimes and mistakes is a failure of strategic as well as moral calculation. Until it does, America's hopes for Afghanistan and for its own improved security may be misplaced.




Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold professor of history, chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp). He is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985), The Pol Pot Regime (1996), Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007), and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007). Taylor Owen is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. They wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)

 
 
 

[bigron]

Three UN staff killed in Afghanistan

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:43:54 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133924&sectionid=351020403

   
 
Three staff members of the United Nations have been killed after a bomb went off in Afghanistan.

A Press TV correspondent reported that the UN staff members were killed by a roadside bomb in Parwan Province on Thursday.

Abdol-Rahman Seyyed Kheili, the police chief of the province, also told Press TV that a roadside bomb blast ripped through a UN vehicle, killing three people and injuring another one on board.

The police chief further added that the victims were members of the UN staff.

The official did not identify the nationality of the victims.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.

DB/HRF

[bigron]

A 200 per cent chance the Taliban won't return?

By Imran Khan in  Asia  on July 7th, 2010
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2010/07/07/200-cent-chance-taliban-wont-return

While the Pakistani army has routed the Taliban from areas along the Afghan border, some locals are not convinced they are gone for good.

Standing in the valley I look to the North East and Afghanistan.

The Tora Bora mountains seem to push toward the sky and even in July ominous clouds lurk overhead.

The Pakistani army have brought me to Khurram agency in the remote tribal belt in the North West of the country.

It's stunning, rugged and everything you'd expect it to be.

The Tora Bora mountains was the site of Osama Bin Ladens last stand.

Bloody battle

According to some accounts, in December 2001 Bin Laden narrowly escaped coalition fire here before he fled to Pakistan.

Since then Pakistan has seen a wave of almost daily bombings and attacks across the length and breadth of the country.

In recent years the army have taken on the fighters, and the battle has been hard and bloody.

However, they insist the tide is turning.

The army says it has successfully beaten back the Pakistani Taliban and secured Khurram.

They certainly present a good argument, and a good show.

We are taken around in pick-up vehicles with machine guns at the ready, we see bombsites and tunnels, we are  shown a vast array of captured weapons and drugs.

In a power point presentation facts and figures whizz across the screen at breakneck pace.

At one point the colonel in charge of the region says in answer to a question "[there is a] 200 per cent chance the Taliban won't come back".

And perhaps they won't.

Threat remains

Azmat Ali Khan is not so sure. He is a journalist with decades of experience living and working in Khurram.

"The Taliban are in the lower portions of Khurram, watching and waiting."

To be fair the army acknowledges that there may well be Pakistani Taliban in the area, but they say they are not a threat.

But it wasn't just the Pakistani Taliban who were a threat in Khurram.

In the 1980's Sunni fighters moved into the predominantly Shia area and violence broke out lasting for decades.

When the fighting was at its worst Khurram was effectively cut off from the world. The main road to the Pakistani city of Peshawar was split in two and controlled by armed Shia and Sunni fighters.

Khurram, geographically speaking, juts into Afghan territory. To go anywhere outside of Khurram the locals had to cross into Afghanistan and then back into Pakistan.

Lawlessness

The sheer lawlessness of the situation allowed the Pakistani Taliban to move in and set up a base.

The army decided to attack in December 2009. A bloody battle ensued. The Taliban fled to other areas and now the army rule the roost.

Khurram, it would seem is at peace.

Unlike neighbouring Orakzai and South Waziristan, where hardened pockets of fighters are still battling it out with the army.

That fighting, just a few kilometres away, feels like a whole other world.

There is an old Pashtun saying in these parts.

"Me against my brother, my brother and I against our father, our father and us against our tribe, our tribe against the world".

Put simply, the tribes of this area do not forget easily and they forgive trespass even less easily.

The Pakistani Taliban may be hiding, the Shia and Sunni's may be friends, but at night, sat around in the tranquillity of the hills, tales are told of insults to this one, of the murder of another.

Peace may have come to Khurram, but memories live on for a very long time.

[bigron]

U.S. Drones Suffer From Human Error, Computer Glitches In Afghanistan


First Posted: 07- 7-10 05:26 PM   |   Updated: 07- 7-10 05:26 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/us-drones-suffer-from-hum_n_637767.html

By David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military often portrays its drone aircraft as high-tech marvels that can be operated seamlessly from thousands of miles away. But Pentagon accident reports reveal that the pilotless aircraft suffer from frequent system failures, computer glitches and human error.

Design and system problems were never fully addressed in the haste to push the fragile plane into combat over Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks more than eight years ago. Air Force investigators continue to cite pilot mistakes, coordination snafus, software failures, outdated technology and inadequate flight manuals.

Thirty-eight Predator and Reaper drones have crashed during combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and nine more during training on bases in the U.S. -- with each crash costing between $3.7 million and $5 million. Altogether, the Air Force says there have been 79 drone accidents costing at least $1 million each.

Accident rates are dropping, but the raw numbers of mishaps are increasing as use of the aircraft skyrockets, according to Air Force safety experts.

But no lives are lost, and for some experts that's the most important point: For them, drones are the vanguard of a new type of remote warfare that minimizes the risk to U.S. personnel. The number of crashes, however, illustrates how quickly the unmanned aircraft have become an essential part of U.S. combat operations. At least 38 drones are in flight over Afghanistan and Iraq at any given time.

Story continues below

Flight hours over Afghanistan and Iraq more than tripled between 2006 and 2009. However, ground commanders in Afghanistan say only about a third of their requests for drone missions are met because of shortages of aircraft and pilots. The loss of aircraft to crashes and other accidents can hamper combat operations -- and risk the lives of troops who depend on them for reconnaissance and air cover.

The Air Force acknowledges that armed drones were not ready when first deployed as the U.S. military geared up for the campaign to oust the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. Most weapons systems are tested and refined for years. Unarmed drones had been in use since the mid-1990s, but the first armed version went to war just nine months after it was retrofitted.

It was pushed into use after a Predator successfully launched Hellfire antitank missiles at the Naval Air Weapons testing range at China Lake in January 2001.

"It was never designed to go to war when it did," said Lt. Col. Travis Burdine, a manager for the Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Task Force. "We didn't have the luxury of ironing out some of the problems."

Technicians bought off-the-shelf equipment at Radio Shack and Best Buy to build a system to allow ground forces to see the drones' video feeds. At least one drone crashed because it had no fuel gauge, and the aircraft ran out of fuel. In another crash, investigators cited a design flaw: The "kill engine" switch was located next to the switch to lower the landing gear, and a ground-based pilot confused the two.

Even now, the planes are not designed for the amount of use they're getting, their defenders say. The 27-foot Predators and 36-foot Reapers operate under conditions that put enormous stress on the light drones -- and the humans who operate them.

"These airplanes are flying 20,000 hours a month, OK?" said retired Rear Adm. Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., president of the aircraft systems group at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, which makes Predators and Reapers.

"That's a lot of flying," Cassidy said. "Some get shot down. Some run into bad weather. Some, people do stupid things with them. Sometimes they just run them out of gas."

The drones flew 185,000 hours over Afghanistan and Iraq in 2009, more than triple the number of hours flown in 2006. The Air Force expects that number to grow to 300,000 hours this year.

"The Air Force needs as many as they can get," said Col. Jeff Kappenman, director of the Center of Excellence for UAS Research, Education and Training at the University of North Dakota. "There has been exponential growth in need and demand."

Air Force officials say design and training improvements have lowered the Predator's accident rate. They say lessons learned from that plane's problems have solved some issues for the larger and more potent Reaper, in use in combat since 2007. Accident rates per 100,000 hours dropped to 7.5 for the Predator and 16.4 for the Reaper last year, according to the Air Force. The Predator rate is comparable to that of the F-16 fighter at the same stage, Air Force officers say, and just under the 8.2 rate for small, single-engine private airplanes flown in the U.S.

The crash figures do not include drones flown over Pakistan by the CIA, which does not acknowledge the covert program. But independent experts said Predators flown over Pakistan probably experience problems similar to those flown by the Air Force in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Four Air Force Predators have crashed this year, three of them in Afghanistan -- on Jan. 15 in southern Afghanistan, one on takeoff Feb. 9 in eastern Afghanistan, and a third March 14 in the southern part of the country. All were total losses, the Air Force said. Another Predator crashed in California during a training exercise April 20.

In the 12 months ended Sept. 30, the Air Force reported 16 Predator and Reaper accidents. Four involved crashes during a 15-day period in September. On Sept. 13, a pilot inside a ground station in Nevada lost video and data links to a Reaper over Afghanistan. As it was about to exit Afghan airspace and crash, an F-15 pilot was ordered to shoot it down and ground troops recovered the wreckage to keep top-secret technology out of insurgents' hands.

In another case, a drone crashed into a Sunni political headquarters in Mosul, Iraq. No injuries were reported.

In some cases, a cause is never determined and no wreckage is recovered. On May 13, 2009, a crew in Nevada lost contact with a Predator, and it was listed as "presumed crashed" somewhere in Afghanistan, according to an Air Force report.

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, asked whether high drone mishap rates concerned him, replied: "Not really. They're expendable." Others disagree, saying every drone that goes down is one less available for troops in need.

"We can't treat these things like disposable diapers and just throw them out," retired Air Force Gen. Hal Hornburg, former chief of the Air Force Air Combat Command, warned officers at a conference on drones.

Kyle Snyder, who tracks military drones for the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a nonprofit research group, said he had never heard anyone in the Air Force call drones expendable.

A 2007 study by the Air Force Research Laboratory found that up to 80% of Predator crashes involved some degree of human error. Updated studies attribute more recent accidents to inadequate manuals, crew coordination mistakes and crews being asked to perform tasks for which they are not fully trained, according to an analysis by the Air Force and a private contractor.

After a Predator crashed during a landing at Kandahar air base in March 2007, investigators faulted the Predator system for a "lack of visual cues" to help pilots understand the position of a plane flying half a world away. The pilot in Nevada misjudged the drone's altitude, the investigative report said.

The Predator that ran out of fuel over Iraq had a leak, but there was no gauge to warn the pilot, an Air Force crash researcher said. And a pilot trainee at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada crashed a Predator by hitting the "kill engine" switch instead of the adjacent landing gear switch, according to an investigative report.

Some ground control stations, where pilots and camera operators sit, still have 1990s-era text-based computer systems. Pilots have to type function and control commands rather than clicking on icons.

"There's a control delay between typing something and having it actually happen on the airplane," said Gregg Montijo, a contractor who trains drone crews. "When the heat is on, sometimes guys will type something in, then type it again real quickly. They'll confuse the computer and get the wrong display and get into a vicious cycle."

Despite the mishaps, Burdine said, Predators and Reapers are doing great work. "It's a big payoff for the Air Force to make sure the next generation of systems learns from the first generation," he said. "And that's what we're doing."

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NATO 'friendly fire' kills Afghan soldiers: police

By Mohammad Yaqob (AFP)

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67709&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 7, 2010

GHAZNI, Afghanistan — Police said Wednesday six Afghan soldiers were killed in a NATO air strike in Afghanistan, where the military announced the deaths of another three foreign soldiers fighting the Taliban.

Local police in troubled Ghazni province, in south-central Afghanistan, said NATO "friendly fire" on an army post killed six officers, in an incident that the US-led NATO force said it was investigating.

The air strike late Tuesday was originally aimed at Taliban militants, said Nawruz Ali Mohamoodzada, a provincial police official.

"It mistakenly hit an army post in which six soldiers were killed. An investigation has been launched," he told AFP.

Western military air strikes targeting the Taliban have mistakenly killed scores of Afghan civilians and security forces, fanning opposition to foreign troops, sparking angry protests and remonstrations from the Afghan government.

A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said: "We are aware of an incident and we are getting information".

About 140,000 international troops are fighting alongside Afghan forces to quell a Taliban-led insurgency into a ninth year and train Afghan counterparts to take over so that they can eventually leave.

The fiercest fighting is taking place in southern Afghanistan, heartland of the insurgency and the focus of a new US-led push to reverse Taliban momentum.

Reports emerged Wednesday that British troops, who make up the second largest contingent after those from the United States, are to withdraw from one of the deadliest battlefields in the south and hand control to the Americans.

British Defence Secretary Liam Fox was expected to announce later Wednesday that British forces will be pulled out of Sangin district in Helmand province, the BBC and newspapers reported.

US forces, who now outnumber the British in Helmand, will then take charge.

Of 312 British service personnel to have died in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion to unseat the Taliban regime, 99 were killed in the market town of Sangin and the surrounding area.

It has witnessed some of the fiercest fighting the British military has endured since World War II.

The area is particularly dangerous because it contains a patchwork of rival tribes and is a major centre for Afghanistan's opium-growing trade.

Western military losses in Afghanistan are now at record levels.

NATO announced that three troops, whose nationalities were not given, died Tuesday in bomb attacks in the south.

The deaths bring to 339 the number of foreign soldiers to have died in the Afghan conflict this year, according to an AFP tally based on a count kept by the icasualties.org website.

In July alone, 17 foreign soldiers have died. June set the record for the war, now in its ninth year, with 102 deaths.

Strategic planners warned the summer "fighting season" would see a spike in deaths, as NATO and the US beef up deployments in an effort to speed an end to the war.

The arrival of General David Petraeus as commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has focused attention on the rules of engagement, as many soldiers believe a principle of "courageous restraint" is leading to higher casualties.

Petraeus's sacked predecessor US General Stanley McChrystal put restrictions on troops, including fewer night raids and air strikes, as well as combat rules, aimed at cutting civilian casualties.

In a restive region just south of Kabul, four Afghan police officers were killed by a bomb, the interior ministry said.

The officers were on patrol in a troubled part of Logar province when the bomb hit their vehicle Tuesday. The ministry blamed the attack on the Taliban.





 

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Taliban 'forced British pullout': militants

AFP


http://uruknet.info/?p=m67711&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 6, 2010

The Taliban today claimed credit for British troops' planned pullout from a southern Afghanistan district and warned that the US forces set to take over the troubled region will face "the same fate."

British troops will hand over control of violence-wracked Sangin, a Taliban-infested district in Helmand province, to US forces by the end of the year, British Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced today.

The Taliban, who have been waging an insurgency against foreign forces in Afghanistan, said the British force was pulling out because of pressure from the militants' attacks.

"This is the start of the British forces' defeat in Afghanistan," Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman said, reading what he said was a statement by Mullah Omar, the militant group's fugitive leader.

"We defeated them in Sangin. They'll be defeated in the rest of the country soon," Ahmadi said on the phone, without disclosing his location.

He said the American troops set to take over from the British "will face the same fate. We'll defeat the Americans as well there (Sangin)," he added.

British forces have suffered their heaviest losses in Sangin, with almost 100 deaths in the market town and surrounding areas -- almost a third of their total casualties since their military involvement in Afghanistan began in 2001.





 

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July 7, 2010, 3:31 pm



Airstrike Complicates Afghanistan Fight

By RICHARD A. OPPEL JR.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/again-damage-from-an-airstrike-not-just-on-the-ground/


KABUL – If the accounts provided today by top Afghan officials are accurate, the first NATO airstrike gone awry under the new command of Gen. David H. Petraeus killed five Afghan soldiers who seemed to be doing precisely the sort of operation that not enough ever do: Setting a trap – in the middle of the night, no less – to catch or kill militants in a dangerous part of the country where the Taliban are strong.

The American and NATO exit strategy hinges on Afghan troops becoming competent and fearless enough to defend their own country without Western forces holding their hand – or leading the charge – every step of the way. Almost nine years into the occupation, they have fallen woefully short of that. But in the explanation provided Wednesday by the spokesman for the Afghan ministry of defense – but not confirmed yet by western military officials, who have sent officers to investigate – the Afghan troops killed early this morning had been setting an ambush for militants when nearby NATO troops wrongly assumed they were insurgents and called in a helicopter to attack them with high-powered rocket fire.

So while the casualty toll was far less than airstrikes that have incinerated scores of civilians, the killing of what appeared to be an intrepid squad of Afghan troops was a particularly hard blow, and a reminder of just how much is at stake in General Petraeus’ current review of rules governing how hard and fast American and NATO troops can attack perceived threats on the ground.

Troops have widely complained that rules that the recently-fired commander of Western forces, General Stanley A. McChrystal, put in place last year are too restrictive and tie their hands from attacking suspected militants or destroying buildings used to harbor insurgents or launch attacks on troops.

Yet others say there have been few cases identified where it is clear troops have been harmed because they were prevented from properly defending themselves – and that the drop in civilian deaths from airstrikes and night raids has also meant fewer enraged cousins and brothers who themselves become insurgents and kill Americans to avenge the deaths.

Hours after the airstrike, the second-ranking American officer in Kabul, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, said: “I do not know of a situation where close air support was denied when anybody needed it to protect themselves.”

And he predicted that there will not be “significant changes” to the rules governing close air support – though he emphasized “that we will have, you know, all the assets available to protect ourselves and our service members when they get in a tough situation.”

Whatever the outcome of the review, the stakes couldn’t be higher for American and NATO troops – who are dying at twice the pace of last year – or for Afghan civilians, and Afghan soldiers.

“Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened,” a mournful Gen. Zahir Azimi, the spokesman for the Afghan ministry of defense, said on Wednesday. “But we hope this would be the last one.”

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Afghanistan: Now it's America's war

The day the Government faced up to the reality of the conflict

By Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent


Thursday, 8 July 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/afghanistan-now-its-americas-war-2021218.html

A Chinook helicopter bringing forward an under slung load of equipment from Camp Bastion to Sangin

These are hard and painful times for British forces in the relentless conflict in Afghanistan. The death toll now stands at 312, with the former head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, saying it is likely to go beyond 400 before it is over. Both sides are anticipating a summer of ferocious fighting as the endgame approaches.


Against this background the withdrawal from Sangin – where 99 British soldiers were killed, almost a third of the total – has particular resonance as US forces take over. To a greater extent than ever before, this is America's war. There is little doubt that the new British Government would like to bring the troops back from a war it has inherited, and one which is proving increasingly costly in both human and financial terms.

David Cameron has said he wanted troops back home by 2015, the time of the next election, while Foreign Secretary William Hague has talked about 2014. The Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, initially stated they should be out as quickly as possible from what he described as a "13th-century state", but has since stressed they should stay for as long as it takes. Yesterday he announced that 300 extra troops, from a reserve battalion based in Cyprus, 2nd Battalion, the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment will be sent on a temporary basis.


General Dannatt, who is now a government adviser, stressed that the failure to reinforce in the past had led to small numbers of British soldiers attracting attacks like "flies in a honeypot" and an adequate force must be maintained.

There have been predictable cries that the withdrawal from Sangin has been a waste of the "blood and treasure" which have been invested and a betrayal of those who had fallen. Yesterday Major-General Gordon Messenger, the military's official spokesman on Afghanistan, said in a moment of quiet reflection: "I accept the attachment to Sangin. It is born of spilt blood, a great deal of endeavour and some pretty tough sacrifices. There will always be a bit of Sangin in the bloodstream of the Army and the Royal Marines."

But the reality on the ground is that Helmand, and southern Afghanistan as a whole, is now very much an American show. There are already twice as many US troops as British ones in Helmand and that number will rise by another third when the full complement of the "surge" is in place by next month.

Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Mr Fox said that the result of the British forces being moved from Sangin into central Helmand will be "a coherent and equitable division of the main populated areas of Helmand between three brigade-sized forces, with the US in the north and the south, and the UK-led Task Force Helmand, alongside our outstanding Danish and Estonian allies, in the central population belt".

In plain language this means that two American brigades will be in charge of just under three quarters of the territory in Helmand and the British the remaining area, mainly the urban population centres in central Helmand.

This, again, reflects the respective strengths on the ground. Until now the British, with 31 per cent of the Western forces, were supposed to be covering 70 per cent of the population. It was an untenable situation that resulted in areas being taken from the Taliban, often at a cost of life and limb, only to be abandoned because there were not enough "boots on the ground".

The 1,400-strong 40 Commando Royal Marines battlegroup will withdraw from Sangin in the autumn. Their replacements, a battlegroup led by the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, will be partly deployed in a belt from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gar, to Nad-e-Ali and Gereshk. The new ratio would be 31 per cent of the troops providing security for 32 per cent of the population.

The idea is that this will reinforce a "security envelope" where reconstruction is taking place. But the broader aim, as the Prime Minister made clear again yesterday, was to hasten the departure of the troops. "2010 was the key year for the mission in Afghanistan," said Mr Cameron, and time for concerted military and political pressure. But he stressed: "Let me be clear. Do I think that we should be there in a combat role in significant numbers in five years' time? No, I don't. This is the time to get the job done and the plan we have envisages making sure that we wouldn't be in Afghanistan in 2015."

General Dannatt talked of past failures and future pitfalls. "The intention when we went into southern Afghanistan was to try to get the country on its feet economically," he said. "We all know it didn't turn out that way. We spread our small resources thinly and that inevitably made the small number of British soldiers like flies in a honey pot. We got into this cycle of fighting.

"We have got to make sure that the general public in this country understand why we are in Afghanistan, what we are doing, and that the cost – while very, very tough for the families who lose loved ones – is worth the price we are paying. I don't want to see the figures get to 400 but realistically they probably will."

The former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said: "At out peril, we fail to understand and estimate the sophistication of these people and their ability to turn facts into propaganda," he said. "People will assume from this that this is preparing the ground for the eventual withdrawal in 2015 and it is bound, of course, to be interpreted in that way by the Taliban." And Sir Menzies added: "The political context of course has got to be what the Prime Minister said following his visit to Toronto and the G20 – namely that he expected British troops to be out by 2015."

But Afghanistan has shown that meticulous plans made in the offices of London and Washington often do not survive contact with harsh reality on the ground. For the moment, bringing the troops home by 2015 remains an aspiration – and nothing

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East Afghanistan Sees Taliban as ‘Morally Superior’ to Karzai

By Spencer Ackerman  July 6, 2010  |  9:43 am  |  Categories: Af/Pak

The looming security operations — er, “rising tide” — in southern Afghanistan are getting all the attention. But the American-led coalition may be in serious trouble in eastern Afghanistan as well. According to a just-departed U.S. commander in charge of a big chunk of the area, locals in four critical provinces believe that the Taliban have greater religious legitimacy and a stronger commitment to justice than Hamid Karzai’s government. Coalition forces who aid that government are seen as “naive at best,” and “‘co-conspirators’ at worst.”

Last month, Army Colonel Randy George completed a year-long tour leading the nearly 5800 soldiers of Task Force Mountain Warrior in some of Afghanistan’s most violent and vexing areas: Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, a mountainous part of the country home to about 3.7 million people, 33 tribes and sub-tribes, and over 300 kilometers’ worth of porous border with tribal Pakistan. After a yearlong effort to learn how the locals perceived the obstacles to their future, George prepared some briefing slides attempting to distill popular local sentiments. (He did not make any broader judgment about any other areas of Afghanistan.) Danger Room was recently able to review some of those slides and take notes on their contents, although we weren’t permitted to take them or reproduce them.

George titled of those slides “How Locals Ranked The Enemies To Progress.” Through the locals’ eyes, the slide reported four big challenges. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban rank dead last. A “Corrupt and Ineffective Government” is number one.


Now recall that it’s General David Petraeus’ first week of work in command of the Afghanistan war. He’s got no shortage of challenges: convincing the Afghan people that the NATO coalition acts in its best interest; rolling back insurgent gains; working with an Afghan government of dubious competence and integrity; and doing it all before 30,000 surge troops (allegedly) start coming home in July 2011. Perhaps nowhere in Afghanistan do all these challenges combine and metastasize as ominously as in the area George recently departed.

There’s disaffection for the central government in the area known as “N2KL” (for Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces). There’s outrage over government officials who charge bribes for the provision of government services. And there’s resentment over “illegitimate” or “non-existent” rule of law. The government is seen as “Un-Islamic and People Don’t Want to Connect,” George’s slide notes.

The second and third problems roiling are the dual challenges of “Criminal Networks and Graft” and the government’s “Lack of Inclusion of Respected Leaders at the Local Level.” The area has natural resources — like timber with high-grade cedar — that could serve as economic drivers. But as the Wall Street Journal has documented, in 2006 the Karzai government instituted a ban on logging as a questionable save-the-forests maneuver. Unsurprisingly, logging didn’t stop. It just went underground and became illicit, benefiting the insurgency and reinforcing what George’s slide called a “take what you can get when you can get it” mentality that the locals resent. (Petraeus alluded to the problematic nature of the government’s attitude to logging in a congressional hearing in mid-June, before President Obama tapped him to run the Afghanistan war.)

If the government included or listened to local potentates respected by the community, maybe it wouldn’t press forward with alienating measures like the logging ban. But instead, the slide reads, it “injects unfair and unacceptable personalities into local politics,” and its district sub-governors and the central government “do not reach out to connect” to the population.

As a result, those big mistakes by the Afghan government lead the locals of N2KL to rank the “Taliban/al-Qaeda/Militant-Insurgent ‘Syndicate’” fourth out of four on George’s list of how they perceive their problems. Locals consider the insurgents “morally superior” to the Karzai government. The insurgents provide the population something the government doesn’t, or at least doesn’t provide sufficiently: “culturally appropriate access to justice, resources and Islamic identity,” in George’s assessment.

Nor is the U.S. or its allies off the hook for the government’s errors. As befitting allies of a resented and aloof government, another slide of George’s reports that “Coalition Forces Seen As Naive at Best and ‘Co-Conspirators’ At Worst.”

None of that led George to throw up his hands and consider his mission hopeless. It led him to do what he could to get Afghan government officials to the area and address the locals’ legitimate grievances. He responded to the powerful Shinwari tribe’s offer of an alliance of convenience against the Taliban — until the governor of Nangarhar province, Gul Agha Shirzai, nixed the experiment and the U.S. embassy in Kabul balked at the military playing tribal politics. He expanded radio broadcasting in the area to get the coalition’s message out. He used cash at his disposal to help local government officials execute their budgets in an attempt at economic stimulus. And he got local officials to hold public trials for official corruption and violent crimes.

Members of George’s Task Force said George would tell the locals, “I know there are officials are corrupt and predatory officials, and we need your help to fix the problem.”

Whether the problem gets fixed, though, remains to be seen. Since General Stanley McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009, U.S. military efforts have shifted toward the Taliban’s southern heartland and away from the eastern border areas. George was tasked with closing bases in remote and hard-to-defend locations away from populous parts of his battlespace, including, in April, withdrawing from the violent Korengal Valley in Kunar.

It may have been the right move: senior officers assessed that the U.S. presence did more to inflame the locals than contribute to the fight against the insurgency. And George does not dispute the wisdom of the redeployment. But with Petraeus having about a year to reverse the Taliban’s momentum before broader withdrawals begin, it’s an open question whether the remaining U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan will be able to compel a distrusted national government to meaningfully connect with a deeply distrustful population in the area George labored to secure.

Credit: U.S. Army



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/in-afghanistans-east-taliban-seen-as-morally-superior-to-karzai/#ixzz0t5vCW2xu

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NATO Helicopter Strike Kills Five Afghan Troops

NATO Spokesman Guesses Killings Were 'Perhaps a Coordination Issue'

by Jason Ditz, July 07, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/07/nato-helicopter-strike-kills-five-afghan-troops/

NATO forces are again looking for diplomatic cover after an overnight attack by a NATO helicopter killed at least five Afghan soldiers in the Ghazni Province and wounded two others, prompting an angry response from Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry.

“The Ministry of Defense condemns this killing,” insisted a spokesman, adding “this is not the first time such an incident has happened, but we wish that at least this would be the last one.”

NATO is struggling to explain the killings of the troops, who were reportedly setting up an ambush for insurgents in the area. Spokesman Josef Blotz guessed that it was “perhaps a coordination issue” and insisted that “we were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area” when the rockets were fired.

NATO airstrikes, predominantly those from the US, are responsible for a large number of killings of not only allied Afghan forces, but also enormous numbers of Afghan civilians. At one point NATO promised to cut down on the number of civilian deaths, but new commander Gen. David Petraeus is expected to revise the rules of engagement to be more lax in fighting near civilians, citing dropping morale.

And while Afghan security forces killing NATO troops is more often cited, today’s incident and others like it are also fueling a growing lack of trust between the two forces, which often seem to be struggling with each other as well as the insurgency.

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Afghanistan : The "Graveyard of Empires" Strikes Back. Coalition Forces are in Retreat


By Felicity Arbuthnot
 
Global Research, July 7, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20054

"He uses his folly like a stalking-horse,

And under the presentation of that,

He shoots his wit."

("As You Like It", William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.)

 

As Britain's new Prime Minister struggles with reality and attempts to dress abject defeat up as resounding success - and whilst ordering the troops to leave Sangin, delusionally calls it: "Consolidation", a very brief return to the whole woeful Afghan disaster seems timely. As Iraq,  a course embarked on blindly by his predecessor Charles Anthony Lynton Blair, QC., in blind, puppy-like determination to obey His Master's Voice.

 

It seems some serious lobal affliction strikes those who enter No 10 Downing Street. But not since its previous incumbent stated: "I'm a pretty straightforward sort of guy", has such a departure from reality occurred as David Cameron declaring today: "Any suggestion that British troops have been beaten in Sangin and are retreating with their tales between their legs, is not just wrong, it's disgusting."

 

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. In another (nineteenth century) British folly in Afghanistan (where they again met their match in Sangin, in spite of: "better guns, better communications, better everything..") Sir Lepel Griffin, wrote to The Times:

 

"This policy consists in spending a quarter of a million annually on a post of defence and observation which defends and observes nothing, and on the maintenance of a road which leads nowhere".

 

How history repeats.

 

On the death of the three hundredth British soldier, Britain's new boy Prime Minister opined:

 

"The truth is that we are there because the Afghans are not yet ready to keep their own country safe ... That's why we have to be there. But as soon as they are able to take care of security ... that is when we can leave." Here, on planet earth, they seem to be doing pretty well at defeating invaders in "their own country."

 

General McChrytal is sacked, General Petrayus has fainted, David Cameron's flight was diverted on his last visit to Afghanistan, due to the base he was going to visit being under sustained attack. He turned tail, so to speak, in mid-air and fled, whilst committing others to potential death sentences.

 

The sign at the entrance to the British base at Sangin reads: "Welcome to Sangingrad." The name of David Loyn's excellent new book on Afghanistan, from which the Lepel Griffin quote is taken, is: "Butcher and Bolt." A recent newspaper heading read: "We can beat something in Afghanistan - a retreat."

 

Tony Blair has failed to cover up one monumental folly, and may yet be charged with war crimes. International law experts, worldwide, are working on it.

 

David Cameron should take heed and be big enough not to compound another. Defeat in an invasion which should never have been undertaken or enjoined, is writ large.

 

For politicians to continue to ignore that, is to - willfully - have uncounted more British, "coalition" and Afghan deaths, more grief and indeed more global hate, generating, maybe, more bombs on home soil (subway, airport, iconic building) haunt their tenure, retirement and, indeed, the rest of their lives.
 

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Thursday, July 08, 2010
17:06 Mecca time, 14:06 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/201078124118415689.html 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Study says Afghan graft worsening  
 
 By Gregg Carlstrom

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has promised to reduce corruption in his government [EPA]  


Afghans paid nearly $1bn in bribes last year, and corruption has become far more widespread since 2006, according to a new survey from a Kabul-based NGO.  See : http://www.iwaweb.org/corruptionsurvey2010/Main_findings.html

The study, conducted by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), found that 28 per cent of Afghan households paid bribes to obtain at least one government service. The average value of the bribes was $156 - nearly one-third of the country’s per capita income.

IWA's study was based on interviews with 6,500 people in all but two of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Paktika and Nuristan were the two provinces not surveyed.

Yama Torabi, the co-director of IWA, said more than half of Afghans who paid bribes did so at least twice last year. And he said the numbers masked the real depth of the problem, because some of the Afghans surveyed did not use government services in 2009.

"Not every household is asking for government services in one year," Torabi said in an interview from Kabul. "For example, corruption in land sales only touches 15 per cent of households... but what is the likelihood that a household will sell land in a given year?"

Police, courts most corrupt

Corruption appears to be worst amongst Afghanistan's justice and security agencies, according to the survey. Ten per cent of Afghans reported paying bribes to obtain court decisions or police protection. Many of those bribes were expensive and nearly half of them cost more than 2,500 afghanis ($55).

"When you go to the judiciary, there is a much higher likelihood you will pay a bribe, than, say, when you go to the education department," Torabi said.

Thirty-eight per cent of Afghans said they were personally affected by police corruption [AFP]

Forty-two per cent of respondents said the interior ministry was the most corrupt in Afghanistan, followed by the justice ministry at 32 per cent.

Those findings will be a particular concern to US and Nato commanders in Afghanistan, who are trying to strengthen the police and courts to provide security against the insurgency. Fifty per cent of those surveyed said the government’s rampant corruption was actually helping to strengthen the insurgency.

"When the justice system is corrupt, people have absolutely no recourse," said Candace Roundeaux, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group in Kabul. "The corruption drives the general population directly into the arms of the insurgency."

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has promised to reduce corruption in his government. He established an anti-corruption commission in November, and held a conference on the subject in December.

But Roundaeux called those efforts "largely cosmetic". And Torabi said the anti-corruption drive has focused on social service agencies - education, health care and the like - while ignoring the police and courts.

Worsening problem

IWA's findings suggest that corruption has worsened in Afghanistan over the last few years.

The group conducted a similar survey in 2007, which found the total cost of bribes was $466m - less than half the level it recorded in 2009.

The new survey also found that Afghans are less tolerant of corruption than they were several years ago.

"In 2007, when we did our interviews, we found that people were slightly more tolerant towards corruption, because they believed the salaries of civil servants were very low," Torabi said. "But now the salaries have been increased many times. So people associate the corruption with a life of luxury."

IWA's findings are slightly less stark than those of the United Nations, which released a report on corruption in January. The UN found that Afghans paid $2.5bn in bribes in 2009, and that 59 per cent of Afghans think corruption is the biggest problem facing the country.

The IWA report urged the Afghan government to create a stronger office of oversight, and to toughen the penalties for corrupt officials. Roundaeux also said foreign governments should threaten to cut back on aid unless corruption is reduced.

"I think the only thing the government will understand is the loss of its aid," she said. "You can't keep giving money to a crook."
 
 

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Published on Thursday, July 8, 2010 by Agence France Presse

Afghan Corruption Doubled Since 2006: Survey

by Agence France Presse

KABUL - Corruption in Afghanistan has doubled in three years since 2006, despite pledges by the government to clean up graft in one of the world's poorest countries, according to a survey released Thursday.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks after signing a decree at the Presidential Palace in Kabul in March 2010. Corruption in Afghanistan has doubled in three years since 2006, despite pledges by the government to clean up graft in one of the world's poorest countries, according to a survey released Thursday. (AFP/File/Shah Marai)

 
Afghans paid one billion dollars in bribes in 2009, twice the value of those paid in 2006, according to Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), a non-profit corruption watchdog.

In a poll of 6,500 Afghan adults, one in seven said they had experienced bribery, with more than a quarter of households saying they had paid a bribe to receive a public service.

It said corruption had become so entrenched that it threatened the multi-billion-dollar efforts of the international community to help end nearly nine years of current conflict, and rebuild Afghanistan after 30 years of war.

"The findings of this survey show that corruption threatens the legitimacy of state-building, badly affects state-society relations, feeds frustration and the support for the insurgency," IWA said.

Corruption also "leads to increasing inequality, impedes the rule of law according to Afghan standards, hinders access to basic public services, which impacts the poor most severely, and has a major negative effect on economic development," it said.

Corruption has been identified as one of the major problems plaguing Afghanistan as it tackles a Taliban-led insurgency that has spread across the country and intensified in recent years.

The United States and NATO allies are boosting foreign troop figures to 150,000 in coming weeks to escalate the fight in the Taliban's southern heartland and eradicate the insurgent threat in favour of civilian rule.

Key to the counter-insurgency strategy is winning the trust of ordinary people, assuring them that government officials are clean and judicial infrastructure accountable, which has not always been the case.

President Hamid Karzai is under intense pressure from Western backers that keep him in power to tackle corruption endemic in Afghan life, including in the polls that saw him re-elected last year to a second five-year term.

Earlier this year Karzai boosted the powers of the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption, an anti-corruption body that had faced fierce accusations of being toothless and half-hearted in its battle to wipe out official graft.

© 2010 AFP

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/08-0

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Published on Thursday, July 8, 2010 by the McClatchy Newspapers

U.S. Casualties to Mount as Afghan War Widens, General Says

by Reid Davenport

WASHINGTON - U.S. troops deaths in Afghanistan, which reached record highs in the last two months, will continue climbing, a top U.S. military commander warned Wednesday because the military is trying to oust the Taliban from places they've never been challenged before.

Afghan Army soldiers jump over a wall during a joint patrol with troops from the US Army's Alpha Company, 2-508 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team near the village of Jilga in Arghandab District north of Kandahar July 8, 2010. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)

"We are going into places that have been significant support bases for the Taliban for the past several years," Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the No. 2 commander in Afghanistan in charge of day-to-day war operations, told reporters in a video teleconference briefing at the Pentagon. "And they're going to fight hard for those, and that's why we expect the casualties to go up."

Rodriguez was the first commander to make to comment about the state of the war since his former boss, Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was forced to resign last month over derogatory comments he and his staff made in a Rolling Stone magazine piece. President Barack Obama named U.S. Central Command commander Gen. David Petraeus as his replacement and Petraeus officially took command July 4.

With growing concerns among Afghans and U.S. legislators alike about the state of the war, Rodriguez assured that Afghanistan was on the right track despite rising U.S. troop deaths, rampant corruption, growing ethnic tensions, a stalled offensive in Kandahar, a doubtful political solution and a looming July 2011 deadline to show progress.

He said he did not anticipate a change in strategy with Petraeus' arrival, calling it a personnel change. Rather, he said there was an "upward trajectory" toward establishing security in southern Afghanistan, the focus of recent U.S. efforts.

Rodriguez said that increased U.S. casualties should not be interpreted as Afghan regions falling back into the hands of the Taliban.

Instead, "This is a contest of will and a contest of threat and intimidation versus people who are going to stand up for themselves and their government, and then the security forces who are charged with protecting the Afghan people," he said.

There have been 94 U.S. fatalities in May and June, which account for about eight percent of U.S. fatalities since the 2001 invasion. July has already seen thirteen U.S. fatalities.

Rodriguez said that U.S. forces are now seeing less resistance in places like the Helmand River Valley and southern Afghan city of Marjah, the site of a major U.S. offensive earlier this year. While military leaders had once heralded the campaign in the Taliban stronghold, they have recently conceded that despite the offensive, the Taliban presence and fear campaign continues in Marjah.

But Rodriguez said there have been changes in the last week. The U.S. is gaining support in that previous Taliban hotspot and violence is falling. Rodriguez didn't have any statistical evidence to demonstrate an increased support of U.S. forces in former Taliban controlled regions.

Rodriguez said he expects Marjah to further develop a council in the upcoming months, a sign of its commitment to representative government.

"Those who think the Afghan people will let the nation slip back to the control of the insurgents don't know the Afghan people," he said. "Those who doubt, fail to consider those people's courage and resilience."

And he said that there is a clear increase in Afghan participation in their representative government in other parts of the country as well.

"Again, the important part is the people continue to participate with their government, the bazaars continue to be open and there are more and more schools open all the time," Rodriguez said.

There are currently 93,000 U.S. troops and 48,000 coalition troops in Afghanistan.

© McClatchy Newspapers 2010

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/08-3

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'Killing enthusiast' to replace Petraeus

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:56:36 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=134040&sectionid=3510203

   
 

Gen. James Mattis

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has named James Mattis, a four-star Marine general known for his blunt speech, as the new head of US Central Command.

Mattis is an erudite combat veteran known for quoting poetry and openly expressing his enthusiasm for "killing the enemy," Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.

The nomination that was announced on Thursday brought Secretary Gates under fire for choosing a general who was officially rebuked over his remarks in 2005 regarding the killing of Afghans.

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight," the Los Angeles Times quoted Mattis as saying. "You know, it's a hell of a hoot... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you. I like brawling."

Gates, however, dismissed the criticism saying that those comments were made five years ago, and that "appropriate action was taken at the time”, The New York Times reported.

Calling Mattis one of the best combat leaders and strategic thinkers and praising him for his insight into warfare, Gates said that he spoke about the issue with Mattis and was assured that the general will be careful.

If the nomination is approved by the Senate, Mattis will replace Gen. David Petraeus who took command of NATO forces in Afghanistan last week. Gen. Mattis is currently in charge of the military's Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

Petraeus replaces Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was was effectively fired for remarks he and his aides made to a reporter for Rolling Stone about President Barack Obama and other US officials.

As head of Central Command, Mattis would oversee US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as across the Middle East, including Iraq. In his new position, Mattis technically would be Petraeus' boss.

MSM/JG/MGH

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NATO troops and Afghan police official killed

By AMIR SHAH (AP)

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67756&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 8, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — Three international troops died in insurgent attacks and a senior Afghan police official was assassinated, officials said Thursday as violence spiraled across the country.

NATO also said it captured a suspected Taliban-linked supplier of bomb-making materials overnight in an eastern province, as the international security force steps up operations in the south and east, boosted by thousands of new American troops sent to try to turn around the nearly 9-year-old war.

The force said an American service member was killed by an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday. Two other service members, whose nationalities were not released, died in separate roadside bomb attacks in the south. No other details were available.

So far this month, 22 international troops have died in Afghanistan. Last month was the deadliest for foreign forces since the war began, with 103 killed, including 60 Americans.

Violence has been increasing across the country as the U.S. has poured in 30,000 more troops to try to reverse Taliban gains, improve security and build up the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Government officials have been increasingly targeted by the Taliban, which has waged an entrenched insurgency since its extreme Islamist government was toppled by U.S.-backed forces in 2001.

On Wednesday evening, Mohammad Gul, the police intelligence director for western Kabul, was ambushed and killed by gunmen outside his home as he returned from his office, said the city's criminal investigations chief, Abdul Ghfar Sayed Zada. One of his two bodyguards also was killed.

Gul was in charge of preventing terrorist attacks and tracking down suspected insurgents in the western quarter of the capital, Zada said.

The insurgents seek to kill Afghan officials to undermine government support and sow fear. More than 100 government figures were targeted last year, at least half of them killed.

In the eastern province of Khost, a combined Afghan-international force captured a suspected explosives supplier for the Haqqani network, a powerful militant group with links to both the Taliban and al-Qaida, NATO said in a statement.

The security force also arrested several other insurgents in the Wednesday night raid in Terayzai district, where they found a cache of automatic weapons, ammunition and grenades, the alliance said, adding that no shots were fired and no civilians were harmed.





 

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Sangin troop withdrawal: Four years in hell, and Taliban remain undefeated

by  Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Audrey Gillan



Soldiers applaud decision to pull out of 'Sangingrad', where IEDs and sniper fire cost many lives

July 8, 2010
http://uruknet.info/?p=m67749&hd=&size=1&l=e

The first troops arrived in Sangin in June 2006, filling sandbags as they fought off the Taliban – an enemy that, four years and at least 100 British deaths later, refuses to go away.

As the casualties have mounted over the years, soldiers stationed in Sangin protected themselves with higher walls and an ever darker sense of humour.

"Welcome to Sangingrad" reads the graffiti at the base entrance, in a bitter allusion to a battle that marked a turning point in world war two. Whether that comparison will prove to be prophetic, given the announced withdrawal, remains to be seen.

One senior British non-commissioned officer who was due to deploy to the district in September today described Sangin as a "hellhole".

"It's very hard to dominate without a massive amount of manpower. All the locals there are pro-Taliban. It's an IED [improvised explosive device] hell and it's hard to keep eyes on everywhere."

He was not surprised to learn of the pullout. "Sangin has been a strategic failure. We are not having the desired effect there."

There have been moments of hope. In 2007, American and Afghan infantrymen helped clear the Taliban from Sangin. "This is an incredibly exciting time for the local people. Now they will see the benefits of reconstruction," one young British officer said at the time.

But his optimism was short-lived. Faced with superior soldiers and firepower, the Taliban skillfully employed every means at their disposal. Initially attacking with small arms and mortars, they later switched to the IED – bombs scattered across the fields and rough dirt roads that have claimed the greatest number of British lives.

Last month the deputy commander of British and US forces in Helmand, Brigadier George Norton, said the Sangin militants had switched again, now attacking with long-distance, small-arms fire – similar to sniper fire, although not as effective.

Sangin has a long history of being troublesome to foreigners. It was the scene of the first major military engagement of the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878, when the British fought a cavalry battle against 1,500 fighters.

The latest generation of British visitors tried to remain upbeat, always claiming that the Taliban were being pushed out, and that normal life in the town was on the verge of resuming.

But as David Gill, a photographer who visited the town frequently in the past 15 months put it, Sangin was "like a ghost town in Death Valley where you drive through and all you see is a sign flapping in the wind".

In some of the more benign areas of Helmand, children may offer the occasional wave to passing soldiers, Gill said, but in Sangin "all you can feel is the intense hatred of a people who hate everything you stand for".

Another senior NCO, who has served there, said soldiers had seen the areas become more stable, with a local market starting to be established. "But it's a very, very strong Taliban area, and a lot of drugs are dealt through that town.

"It's at the bottom of the mountain, and it's on the main river and the main drug route, and is the major area for growing poppies. There's so much resistance because the people there don't want that to change."

The British mission has also been badly undermined by the failures of the Afghan government. Local leaders in Sangin have been weak, corrupt or linked to the drugs trade. Officers wrestle with fiendishly complicated local tribal politics.

As the death toll mounted, the political storm blew harder in Britain. The first row was over the availability of scarce helicopters to move troops and supplies into the stricken town.

Then Operation Panther's Claw, which began in June 2009, was billed as the big British push to clear the area from Sangin to Gereshk to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, of militants in time for Afghan elections later that year. In fact the map of the area has changed little in the intervening 12 months.

Last April, in the runup to the election, David Cameron offered to stop criticising Gordon Brown's government over Afghanistan if it pulled out of areas such as Sangin where the army was overstretched; he was rebuffed and told that "these are judgments for generals".

There are already more than 20,000 American troops in Helmand, twice the number of British soldiers deployed there, and they are also paying a heavy price. Last month four American troops died when their Black Hawk helicopter, on a mission to rescue wounded British soldiers, was shot down outside Sangin.

The second British officer today said the decision to pull out was "a good thing" from a soldier's point of view. "And from the bigger picture, as long as … somebody else is coming in, that's good. It's far too early to just pull out because it's not stable, but if the Americans are going to go in there then let them take the worry.

"We have paid an incredibly high price in Sangin. If you lose one soldier in one place, that's already too high a price to pay, but an awful lot of blood has been shed. So in that sense, I am pleased we will be leaving.





 

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Former US envoy calls for Afghanistan’s partition

By Anwar Iqbal

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67747&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 8, 2010

WASHINGTON: A 'de facto partition’ of Afghanistan is the best policy option available to the United States and its allies, argues a former US diplomat.

Robert D. Blackwill, a former US ambassador to India, warns that the Obama administration’s counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan "seems headed for failure" and the best option for Washington is to partition Afghanistan.

Mr Blackwill, who also served as deputy national security adviser for strategic planning and presidential envoy to Iraq, had advised the George W. Bush administration on Afghanistan as well.

"The US polity should stop talking about timelines and exit strategies and accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of its historic stronghold in the Pashtun south," he says,

"But Washington could ensure that north and west Afghanistan do not succumb to jihadi extremism, using US air power and special forces along with the Afghan army and like-minded nations."

In an article in the Politico magazine, Mr Blackwill argues that "after years of faulty US policy towards Afghanistan, there are no quick, easy and cost-free ways to escape the current deadly quagmire. But, with all its problems, de facto partition offers the best available US alternative to strategic defeat".

The former US diplomat, however, admits that partition is clearly not the best outcome for the United States in Afghanistan. But it is now the best outcome that Washington can achieve consistent with vital national interests and US domestic politics, he adds.

Pakistan, he warns, would likely oppose de facto partition and managing Islamabad’s reaction would not be easy — "not least because the Pakistan military expects a strategic gain once the US military withdraws from Afghanistan".

But Mr Blackwill urges Washington to persuade Islamabad to concentrate, with the United States, on defeating the Pakistani Taliban and containing the Afghan Taliban to avoid momentum towards a fracturing of the Pakistan state.

He acknowledges that a partitioned Afghanistan will not be trouble-free either as there might be potential pockets of fifth column Pashtun in the north and west.

Mr Blackwill acknowledges that President Hamid Karzai and his associates would also resist partition and might not remain in power if Afghanistan is partitioned.

He notes that "fearing a return of Pakistan dominance in Afghanistan, India would likely encourage Washington to continue ground combat in the south for many years to come".

But he urges the US administration to tell India that a prolonged US stay in Afghanistan is not on the cards.

To assuage India’s fears, Mr Blackwill proposes assuring New Delhi that the US would not permit the Taliban to re-emerge as a political or military force in that region.

"We would then make it clear that we would rely heavily on US air power and special forces to target any Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan, as well as Afghan Taliban leaders who aided them," he writes.

"We would also target Afghan Taliban encroachments across the de facto partition lines and terrorist sanctuaries along the Pakistan border."

Mr Blackwill also warns against a rapid US withdrawal from Afghanistan, pointing out that "it could dramatically increase likelihood of the Islamic radicalisation of Pakistan, which then calls into question the security of its nuclear arsenal."

A rapid withdrawal, he writes, might also weaken, if not rupture, the budding US-India strategic partnership.




 

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Makeshift bombs at all-time high in Afghanistan

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 8, 2010; 6:55 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/08/AR2010070805141_pf.html


KABUL -- Use of the Taliban's deadliest weapon, crude homemade bombs, has reached an all-time high in Afghanistan, where in the last week of June more than 300 of the devices either exploded or were found before they could detonate.

The number of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in the country has risen relentlessly in recent years, up from about 50 a week during summer 2007. The bombs -- made using vast supplies of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, much of it brought in from Pakistan -- account for about two-thirds of NATO's troop fatalities in the nearly nine-year war. That figure also hit a per-month peak in June, with 102 dead.

Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told reporters in Kabul on Thursday that the United States is in the process of delivering $3 billion worth of counter-IED equipment to Afghanistan, at least doubling what it now spends. That includes doubling to 64 the number of surveillance blimps that float above cities and military bases to detect Taliban activity and adding more explosive-residue detection kits and new drone aircraft.

About 1,000 people are also headed to Afghanistan to serve as lab technicians, intelligence analysts and investigators as part of the effort to disrupt the bombmaking networks.

On Thursday, three NATO troops were killed in Afghanistan, two of them by Taliban bombs.

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General: US Casualties in Afghanistan Will Continue to Rise

Insists War 'on the Right Track'

by Jason Ditz, July 08, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/08/general-us-casualties-in-afghanistan-to-continue-to-rise/

June’s devastating record death toll in Afghanistan, 103 NATO troops including 61 Americans, may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to second in command Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez.

“We are going into places that have been significant support bases for the Taliban for the past several years,” Rodriguez explained, “and they’re going to fight hard for those, and that’s why we expect the casualties to go up.”

The death tolls have been on the rise all year, with every month in 2010 the worst on record since the war began. Yet June’s reaching of the 100 plateau took everyone by surprise, more than doubling the previous record for that month and handily surpassing the worst month overall, August 2009, which saw 77 NATO troops killed.

But Lt. Gen. Rodriguez’ comments suggest the toll is the new normal, and furthermore he cautions against drawing any conclusions about how badly the war is going based on the massive death tolls. “This is a contest of wills,” he insisted, adding that there was an “upward trajectory in the war.

These claims of progress have been made for years by US leadership about the war, but if the rising death toll is not the metric for progress, or the dismissal of the “drawdown date,” or the record number of Taliban attacks, what possibly could be?

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 - Asia  Jul. 08, 2010
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/08/ap/asia/main6658368.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CBSNewsGamecore+%28GameCore%3A+CBSnews.com%29

US To Spend $3B To Combat Afghan Homemade Bombs

US To Spend $3 Billion On Equipment To Combat Insurgents' Makeshift Bombs In Afghanistan


(AP)  KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An American defense official says Washington is spending $3 billion for equipment in Afghanistan to combat the threat from roadside bombs.

U.S. Defense Department undersecretary Ashton Carter says some of the money will be used to double the number of tethered surveillance blimps to 64, providing troops a bird's eye view of certain areas.

Carter told reporters Thursday that 6,700 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles have been also delivered to Afghanistan and the Defense Department is continuing to send unmanned aerial vehicles so every route-clearance patrol will have the benefit of full-motion video overhead.

Makeshift bombs, often buried in roads or footpaths, accounted for about 40 percent of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan in 2009.

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Petraeus reviews directive meant to limit Afghan civilian deaths

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2010; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/08/AR2010070806219_pf.html


To the U.S. soldiers getting pounded with thunderous mortar rounds in their combat outpost near Kandahar, it seemed like a legitimate request: allow them to launch retaliatory mortar shells or summon an airstrike against their attackers. The incoming fire was landing perilously close to a guard station, and the soldiers, using a high-powered camera, could clearly see the insurgents shooting.

The response from headquarters -- more than 20 miles away -- was terse. Permission denied. Battalion-level officers deemed the insurgents too close to a cluster of mud-brick houses, perhaps with civilians inside.

Although the insurgents stopped firing before anybody was wounded, the troops were left seething.

"This is not how you fight a war, at least not in Kandahar," said a soldier at the outpost who described the incident, which occurred last month, on the condition of anonymity. "We've been handcuffed by our chain of command."

With insurgent attacks increasing across Afghanistan, frustration about rules of engagement is growing among troops, and among some members of Congress. Addressing those concerns will be one of the most complicated initial tasks facing Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country.

The controversy pits the desire of top military officers to limit civilian casualties, something they regard as an essential part of the overall counterinsurgency campaign, against a widespread feeling among rank-and-file troops that restrictions on air and mortar strikes are placing them at unnecessary risk and allowing Taliban fighters to operate with impunity.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Petraeus promised to "look very hard" at the rules of engagement. He has since asked Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the top operational commander in Afghanistan, to review the rules. The examination will include discussions with troops around the country, military officials said.

At issue is a tactical directive issued last July by Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that limits the use of air and mortar strikes against houses unless personnel are in imminent danger. The directive requires troops to take extensive measures, including a 48-hour "pattern of life" analysis with on-the-ground or aerial surveillance, to ensure that civilians are not in a housing compound before ordering an airstrike.

Senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and Washington said Petraeus almost certainly will not rescind the directive but instead will issue revised guidance in the coming days in an attempt to streamline procedures and ensure uniformity in how the rules are implemented.

Despite claims from some relatives of military personnel killed in Afghanistan that the directive has limited the ability of troops to defend themselves, the officials said a review by the U.S. military of every combat fatality over the past year has found no evidence that the rules restricted the use of lifesaving firepower.

"We have not found a single situation where a soldier has lost his life because he was not allowed to protect himself," one of the officials said.

If troops are in imminent danger, there is no restriction on the use of airstrikes or mortars. "The rules of engagement provide an absolute right of self-defense," the official said.

The official, like others quoted for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because military regulations limit discussion of rules of engagement.

Differing interpretations

Part of the controversy is rooted in divergent interpretations of the directive. To those atop the chain of command, the restriction has helped reduce civilian casualties, which have been a politically charged issue in Afghanistan and have helped sap popular support for the international military presence. There have been 197 civilian fatalities caused by NATO forces, including U.S. troops, in the 12 months since the directive was issued, compared with 332 in the previous year, according to figures compiled by the NATO command in Kabul.

Although the directive has markedly reduced the bombing of housing compounds, dozens of Afghans continue to die each year in airstrikes on other types of targets, including vehicles.

For troops on the ground, however, the directive has lowered their morale and limited their ability to pursue insurgents. They note that Taliban fighters seem to understand the new rules and have taken to sniping at troops from inside homes or retreating inside houses after staging attacks.

"Minimizing civilian casualties is a fine goal, but should it be the be-all and end-all of the policy?" said a junior Army officer in southern Afghanistan. "If we allow soldiers to die in Afghanistan at the hands of a leader who says, 'We're going to protect civilians rather than soldiers,' what's going to happen on the ground? The soldiers are not going to execute the mission to the best of their ability. They won't put their hearts into the mission. That's the kind of atmosphere we're building."

The principal problem, senior officials say, is that U.S. and allied units across Afghanistan have carried out the directive in ways that are more restrictive than McChrystal intended. Fearful of career-ending sanctions if they violate the order, commanders at every subordinate level down the chain have tightened the rules themselves, often adding their own stipulations to the use of air and mortar strikes.

This spring, the Army brigade to which the soldiers at the outpost near Kandahar belong rescinded authority from on-the-scene commanders to fire mortars or call for air support, except in the most urgent cases of self-defense. Permission now has to be granted by a battalion headquarters -- a requirement not enumerated in the tactical directive that could delay any strike on an enemy.

"Now you have to think like a lawyer when you're getting shot at," the soldier at the outpost said. "It's a case of hesitancy and oversimplification. When you're getting shot at, you don't have a lot of time to build a picture for the guys back at headquarters. Your head is in the ground."

Less than six hours before Marines commenced a major helicopter-borne assault in the town of Marja in February, Rodriguez's headquarters issued an order requiring that his operations center clear any airstrike that was on a housing compound in the area but not sought in self-defense. But before the order was given to the Marines, the British-run regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan amended the language to include any strikes "near" houses, according to two U.S. sources familiar with the incident.

The angst over the directive on airstrikes has been compounded by additional orders on driving -- be polite and don't hog the road -- and escalation-of-force situations, such as when suspicious vehicles approach convoys or entrances to bases. The rules, titled Standard Operating Procedures 373, call for military personnel to "use force for the duration and to the extent required to meet the threat and defeat or neutralize it, but no more." Some soldiers say those orders have also been used in a more draconian and patchwork way than senior commanders intended.

"We have to be absolutely certain that the implementation of the tactical directive and the rules of engagement is even throughout the force, that there are not leaders at certain levels that are perhaps making this more bureaucratic or more restrictive than necessary," Petraeus said at his confirmation hearing.

Permission denied

The tightened rules on airstrikes during the initial days of the Marja operation prompted intense frustration not just among Marines on the ground but for mid-level officers in the combat operations center at their headquarters at Camp Leatherneck.

Within an hour after the first Marines landed in Marja, officers in the command center were watching a live black-and-white video feed from an aerial drone that showed suspicious activity around a cluster of 50-gallon fuel drums within the open courtyard of a house. Marines on the ground also had intelligence that insurgents intended to target approaching U.S. forces with 50-gallon drums filled with homemade explosives and metal fragments.

But when officers at the command asked for permission to strike from the regional command in Kandahar, they were rejected. Too close to the house, they were told.

The Marines proposed targeting the drums at an angle to avoid damaging the house in case, as one officer noted, "they contained baby milk." Again they were denied.

Finally, as the sun rose, a Marine unit began approaching the compound. The frustrated officer, fearful that a detonation would kill the troops, declared the target a case of self-defense. No longer was he required to seek permission.

Three Hellfire missiles were launched at the drums, igniting them into a huge fireball, indicating that they were filled with explosives.

"You can't fight a war like this," the officer growled.

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July 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/world/asia/08contract.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimes

Afghan Companies Say U.S. Did Not Pay Them

By CARLOTTA GALL


Haji Layeq says an American company failed to pay a construction company he has ties to.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A number of Afghan construction companies working on contracts for American and NATO military bases in Afghanistan have accused American middlemen of reneging on payments for supplies and services, and in one case of leaving the country owing Afghan companies hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.

The failure of American companies to pay for contracted work has left hundreds of Afghan workers unpaid in southern Afghanistan, and dozens of factories and small businesses so deep in debt that Afghan and foreign officials fear the fallout will undermine the United States-led counterinsurgency effort to win the support of the Afghan people.

While there have been many accusations of corruption on the part of Afghan officials over recent years, there has been less heard about misconduct of the foreign companies working in Afghanistan, not least because Afghans have no organized system of recourse.

Yet the few cases of misconduct by foreign companies that have come to light may be just the “tip of the iceberg,” said a military official with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. It concerns not only American companies, he added.

“Without being too dramatic, American contractors are contributing to fueling the insurgency,” said the official, who could speak only on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the policy of his organization.

“Families, relatives, friends, village and tribal elders will all know that ISAF does not pay for the work,” the official added. “So one can understand why they may say, ‘We should get these Western soldiers out of here,’ and thus support the insurgency.”

In one case the official was familiar with, three Afghan businessmen said they had completed work for an American firm, Bennett-Fouch Associates LLC, of Michigan, but had not been paid. All of them and the official said they knew of other companies in the same position after doing work for the company.

One of the businessmen, Jalaluddin Saeed, said he was owed $1.5 million by Bennett-Fouch for four contracts to provide concrete barriers for American and NATO military bases last year. He said his life was now in danger and he had had to leave his home city of Kandahar and move his family to avoid his many angry creditors.

Two other smaller companies showed contracts and purchase orders signed by foreign employees of Bennett-Fouch for work last year for which they said they also had not been paid.

Officials at the American Embassy and in the United States-led coalition force said they could not comment on specific cases.

Several e-mail messages and telephone calls to Sarah Lee, the president of Bennett-Fouch, the company offices and other employees were not answered, and Ms. Lee did not return three messages left on the voice mail of her number in the United States.

Lt. Col. Michael T. Lawhorn, a senior military public affairs officer in Afghanistan, said previous reports of Afghan companies not being paid for contracted work had turned out to be problems of incomplete or improperly filed paperwork.

Officials with the Afghan companies said they believed that they had been cheated. Two foreigners working in southern Afghanistan who were familiar with Bennett-Fouch said its managers had left Afghanistan owing Afghan companies up to $5 million.

One who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the company was using money owed to subcontractors to set up a sister company, K5 Global; the military official said Bennett-Fouch ran into trouble after a concrete and asphalt batching plant it bought in Afghanistan failed because of poor construction.

“The subcontractors out here are very unlikely to be able to hire an attorney in the U.S., and thus the chances of seeing any payment is really zero,” the ISAF military official said.

As the United States military contingent in Afghanistan rises to nearly 100,000 troops, millions of dollars are being spent to expand the military bases and build extra forward operating bases, as well as training centers, bases and outposts for the expanding Afghan Army and police forces. The bulk of the construction work is handled by American companies who frequently subcontract to one or more layers of smaller companies.

Bennett-Fouch, according to its Web site, was set up in 2002 and works in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing services to foreign companies in construction, oil, logistics and communications.

The company began working in Afghanistan in 2008 and was awarded contracts in excess of $33 million with the United States military, often directly. Sometimes it worked as a subcontractor.

The American firm DynCorp International had subcontracted “limited work in Gardez and Kabul” to Bennett-Fouch in 2009, and had paid it for its work on those projects, Ashley Burke, director of communications for DynCorp, wrote in an e-mail message.

One foreigner familiar with Bennett-Fouch in Afghanistan said he started hearing that there were problems with subcontractors not getting paid in the fall of 2009.

An Afghan company called the Ahmadi Group Construction and Logistics Services began building a police training center in Gardez, southeast of Kabul, for Bennett-Fouch on Nov. 2, 2009.

By mid-December the foreign managers of Bennett-Fouch all left the country for the Christmas holidays, without paying for the work, said the company’s finance director, Abdul Ghafoor. “We did not receive a cent for $642,000 of work,” he said.

He pursued Bennett-Fouch through e-mail messages and Ms. Lee, the president, wrote in an e-mail message dated April 14, 2010, that the company would pay once it had been paid by its own client. Mr. Ghafoor said he did not believe her story since the prime contractor had told them they had paid Bennett-Fouch. “She was just buying time,” he said.

By June, the Ahmadi Group had still not been paid, and it is now close to bankruptcy after borrowing money to pay its biggest creditors. “For a small company, it is a big amount,” he said.

Another Afghan subcontractor, the Nasar Zabuly Construction Company, found itself in a similar position after supplying truckloads of crushed gravel for Bennett-Fouch to forward operating bases around Zabul Province last year.

This March the Afghan workers returned from a break for the Afghan New Year and found that Bennett-Fouch had closed its offices, emptied its bank account and left the country, said one of the company shareholders, Hajji Layeq.

The company is owed over $300,000 by Bennett-Fouch and itself owes large sums to 100 truck drivers, gravel companies and a security company, he said. “We cannot trust Americans anymore, because if a new company comes to work here who will be a guarantor for the new company?” Mr. Layeq said.

Mr. Saeed, whose company, Afghanistan in Development, is based in Kandahar, said he realized that there were problems in March when he found that Ms. Lee was delaying payment on contracts, even though the United States contracting center at Kandahar air base told him that she had been reimbursed for the work.

The United States military could not confirm specifics of the case, but in e-mail correspondence shown to The New York Times by Mr. Saeed, Ms. Lee accused him of going behind her back in checking with the contracting office.

She left the country a month after he confronted her and she has since ceased all e-mail contact, he said. Her other company, K5 Global, owes him $160,000, Mr. Saeed said.

United States forces are responsible for only those contracts made directly with the prime contractor and have no means of enforcing the rights of subcontractors, said Colonel Lawhorn, the ISAF spokesman.

Nevertheless, the Defense Department has a system of checks to try to ensure that the contractors used are “reputable” and will work with the American Embassy and United States agencies to investigate any suspicion of wrongdoing, he said.

“We are definitely concerned with the impact our activities have on our Afghan relationships,” Colonel Lawhorn said.

The Afghans, who were pro-American and ready to risk threats from the Taliban to do business with American firms, said they were disappointed when the United States Embassy and United States military told them they could not help. “People are thinking the Americans are failing in everything,” Mr. Layeq said.

[bigron]

[bigron]

Infinite Jest: State Terror From Nixon to Obama

by Chris Floyd

http://uruknet.info/?p=m67762&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 8, 2010

As Arthur Silber pointed out so ably out the other day, the high and horrendous crimes that the world's governments will openly commit -- and admit to, if not brag about -- in their push for loot and power are by no means the full record of their depredations. This is, as Silber rightly says, "an absolute certainty given the testimony of history." Indeed. For while we look on, shocked and awed, at the public parade of horrors rolling by each day, there are foul deeds afoot which will only come to light -- in dribs and drabs, in shards and splinters --after many decades. (And of course this does not include the countless crimes of elitist power that will never surface, that lie forever buried and rotting with their victims.)

One such crime -- oh, just a minor one, just the murder of one man; hardly worth mentioning, really -- came bobbing up from the fetid depths of history just the other day. It surfaced on a sliver of tape released from that endless, ever-gushing fountain of state crime and folly: the Nixon tapes. As Gore Vidal once noted: "Where Kennedy never forgot that he was being recorded, Nixon seems never to have remembered ... Despite intermittent political skills, Nixon seems, on the evidence of the tapes, to have had no conscious mind. He is all flowing unconscious." Crimes, slurs, wild hairs, flaming bigotry and galloping anxiety -- all have come tumbling out over the years from the taped trove of the jowl-quivering figure whose closest, most loyal apparatchik, Bob Haldeman, once called "the weirdest man ever to live in the White House." 
 
But the latest revelation involves no choice Nixonian weirdness; on the contrary. It is simply the record of two of the highest officials of the American republic sharing a hearty, manly joke about a foreign official they have had assassinated. As Jeff Stein reports on his Washington Post blog:



President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, joked that an "incompetent" CIA had struggled to successfully carry out an assassination in Chile, newly available Oval Office tapes reveal. At the time, in 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were working to undermine the socialist administration of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who would die during a U.S.-backed military coup two years later. One of the key figures to stand in the way of Chilean generals plotting to overthrow Allende was the Chilean army commander-in-chief, Rene Schneider, who was killed during a botched kidnapping attempt by military right-wingers in 1970.


As Stein puts it, rather demurely, the CIA's role in Schneider's killing has been "disputed" for decades. But the newly released tape nails the case as solidly as it can be in the murky machinations of power. Nixon and Kissinger are discussing the murder of a right-wing Chilean politician; a killing that some had blamed on the CIA. This Socratic dialogue followed:



Kissinger: They’re blaming the CIA.
Nixon: Why the hell would we assassinate him?
Kissinger: Well, a) we couldn’t. We’re—
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: CIA’s too incompetent to do it. You remember—
Nixon: Sure, but that’s the best thing. [Unclear].
Kissinger: —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.


Stein quotes historians who note that this perfectly fits the circumstances of Schneider's death:



"Two Chilean groups, both with ties to the CIA, carried out three attempts to kidnap the general, and on the third attempt shot him. He languished for three days (not three weeks) before dying on October 22, 1970," [said John] Dinges, [author of two books on Chilean history of the period.] "Kissinger’s denial, in his book and in statements to Congress, alleges that the CIA had broken off contact with the group before it carried out the third and successful attempt against the general. The clear language of Kissinger’s remarks to Nixon, and Nixon’s affirmation of his comments, is that the assassination-kidnapping was a CIA operation."


Naturally, the CIA denied that the tapes proved -- or even suggested -- anything untoward in the operations of the drug-running, death-squadding, torture-inflicting, coup-throwing agency of professional liars and covert operators:


"This incident from October 1970 -- almost 40 years ago -- has been, as I understand it, thoroughly dissected, examined, and investigated," said [CIA spokesman Paul] Gimigilano. "And now, based on someone’s interpretation of part of a conversation, it’s time for a completely different conclusion? Give me a break."


I totally agree. I think we should give Mr. Gimigilano a break. How about, oh, two to five years in a minimum security prison for his active association with a criminal organization? That would give him an ample period of reflection in which to thoroughly dissect, examine and investigate the poisonous, soul-killing equivocations and rationalizations of evil that are the daily meat and drink of any mouthpiece for the CIA.

But of course there will be no charges -- not for small fry like Mr. Gimigilano, and certainly not for the big fish at the top, whose head-rot has spread throughout American society. Although the worms have long since finished with Nixon's corpse, he went to his grave as a "rehabilitated" and honored "elder statesman." Henry Kissinger is still among us, still doling out counsel, publicly and privately, to our rulers -- and still lying every inch of the way to his own impending worm encounter about the many crimes of his past. From unleashing genocidal hell on Cambodia to helping guide the Bush Regime in its machinations for aggressive war on Iraq -- via such blood-soaked way stations as East Timor and the covert killing fields of Latin America -- Kissinger has been an instrumental accomplice in the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings. [For just a few examples, see here, here, here, and here.]


But it doesn't matter. And Kissinger knows it. This latest revelation will produce not the slightest ripple of discomfort for this "elder statesman." It did not even make the news pages of the Post, or any other paper. Just a passing notice on a blog. This is not surprising, of course. Just a few months ago, in April, yet another shard of ancient evil slipped out: more confirmation of Kissinger's acquiescence in a "targeted assassination" carried out by foreign power on American soil: the infamous murder of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and an American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on the very streets of Washington D.C. in 1976. The car-bombing was carried out by agents of America's staunch ally, mass-murdering Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet. Kissinger spent decades furiously spinning away his complicity. But as I noted here in April:



Poor old Henry Kissinger. All that botheration, all those lies, all the years of gut-churning anxiety about scandal, even prosecution -- and for what? Mere complicity in state murder of foreigners carried out by a foreign government? Why, nowadays, we have U.S. presidents openly ordering the murder of American citizens, and nobody bats an eye. There is no scandal, no prosecution -- there is not even any debate. It's just a fact of life, ordinary, normal, unchangeable: the sun rises in the east, cows eat grass, rain is wet, American presidents murder people. What's the big deal?


Yes, we've come a long way since those bad old days of weird old Nixon. He and Super K had to skulk around, straining to swathe their crimes in clouds of misdirection, implication and winking allusion. Now we have, as Silber aptly puts it in another recent essay, "evil in broad daylight": state murder on tap, cheery admissions of death squads and secret armies operating in 75 countries, free passes for torturers, indefinite detention championed by "progressives," and  the bipartisan, widespread, institutional acceptance of Nixon's own pernicious doctrine: "If the president does it, that means it's legal."

So who cares if the American president and his minions ordered the murder of Rene Schneider almost 40 years ago because he tried to defend the democratic system of his country? Who cares if this murder helped pave the way to mass butchery and repression under an American-backed dictator? Who cares if this kind of moral rot is now accepted as normal, even praiseworthy, by the entire American establishment? Who cares if it has led us to a place where a Nobel Peace Prize laureate can order the murder of his own citizens without charges, trial or evidence, while killing multitudes of innocent foreigners each year with drones, with bombs, with midnight raids?

Who cares? Look around you. Look at the news. Look at our politics. Look at our leaders. Look at our culture. Look at our people. What is the answer to the question?

That's right. No one. No one cares.

Keep laughing, Tricky Dick, down there with the worms. The joke is on us.