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

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America's 30 Year War On Afghanistan

By: James A. Lucas

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24897.htm


March 02, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deteriorated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, our nation’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible - making the situation even worse. But the most cataclysmic aspect of this chronology of events is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the image of the U.S. in the world is that of the world’s leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth.

Afghanistan in the late 1970s was a predominantly poor, rural and moderate Muslim nation. Although they were second class citizens, women were allowed to unveil and had the right to vote. From 1933-1978 women started to enter the workforce and become teachers, nurses and even politicians. They worked to end illiteracy and forced marriages. Most of these advances were mostly in Kabul, the most modern and populous city in Afghanistan, although in most of the rural areas women were treated as property.1

In the 1970s Afghanistan also had serious economic problems, one of which the concentration of ownership of most of the land in the hands of tribal and religious leaders (mullahs). Only 3% of the rural population owned 75% of the land.

Labor unions were legalized, a minimum wage and a progressive income tax were established and a separation of church and state was adopted.

Then, in the latter years of that decade various progressive and communist groups struggled over how to modernize Afghanistan and resolve these inequities. Unfortunately, their efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rates of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

It was the revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.

According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups.2

By the spring of 1979, rebellion had spread to most of the country's 29 provinces. On March 24, a garrison of soldiers in Herat killed a group of Soviet advisers (and their families) who had ordered Afghan troops to fire on anti-government demonstrators. From this point, the regime was no longer merely isolated from peasants in the countryside, but divided by open hostility from an overwhelming majority of all the people.

The government’s secret police and a repressive civilian police force went into action across Afghanistan, and army troops were sent into the countryside to subdue "feudal" villagers.3

The situation was very grave in Afghanistan at that point, but the U.S. was destined to make it much worse. The initial conflict might have been resolved far short of a civil war if the U.S. had refrained from fostering the uprising. Even if the struggle had progressed to a civil war, the nation might eventually have recovered and moved ahead. Civil wars are disastrous for nations, but after great pain and suffering they can eventually overcome this setback, as the U.S. did after its civil war.

The following is an account of how the U.S laid the groundwork for its encouragement of the uprising and the enormous support that it gave later for the ongoing revolt that would lead to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began in the 1950s and 1960s. The CIA used impressive bribes and threats to support this growing opposition to the progressive changes, and it also recruited Afghan students in the U.S. to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the U.S. and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the U.S. “are either CIA-trained or indoctrinated.”4

According to Roger Morris, National Security Council staff member, the CIA started to offer covert backing to Islamic radicals as early as 1973-1974.5

Subsequently, various other U.S. officials would also indicate their willingness to sacrifice the welfare of the Afghan people in the interest of the American goal of worldwide domination.

In August 1979, four months before the Soviet attack, a classified State Department Report stated: “the United States larger interests …would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”6

According to one senior official, "The question here was whether it was morally acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives for our geopolitical interests." Carter’s CIA director Stansfield Turner answered the question: "I decided I could live with that."7

Judging by examples of U.S. interferences since World War II, not included in this article, it appears that replies similar to that of Turner may have been given with similar genocidal-like results.8

In 1998 Zigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter came clean and admitted that indeed the U.S. had helped bring about the Soviet invasion. Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris in its January 15-21 issue carried the account of an interview with him in which he was asked if he had played a role in providing intelligence to the Mujahideen before the Soviets invaded. His reply was as follows:

“Yes, according to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”9

The Soviet Union at that time bordered Afghanistan on the north and had various ties with Afghanistan over the years. Those areas are now the nations of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Since these areas had large Muslim populations, when the Afghanistan civil war started the Soviet Union feared that the revolt could spread to within its own borders. Since they were not able to convince the factions of the communist government in Afghanistan to resolve their difference and go more slowly in their modernization program the Soviets invaded in December 1979 to quell the uprising.

To counter the Soviets, the U.S. deliberately chose to give most of its support to the most extreme groups. A disproportionate share of U.S. arms went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater. According to journalist Tim Weiner, "[Hekmatyar's] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him 'scary', vicious', a fascist', definite dictatorship material."10

The Mujahideen, while in power, killed or forced into exile most progressive-minded people, especially those suspected of being socialist or Marxist. Thus, the prospects of any progressive secular form of government in Afghanistan were eventually undermined. This continued after the Soviets left. Edmund McWilliams was sent to Afghanistan in 1989 as a semi-independent analyst of U.S. policy regarding the Afghan jihad. He discovered that as the Soviets left, Hekmatyar in allliance with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other groups, moved to eliminate his rivals kidnapping, and murdering Afghan opposition members.11

The U.S. was quick to provide weapons to the Mujahideen. By February 1980, the Washington Post reported that they were receiving arms coming from the U.S. government.12
The CIA purchased, mainly from China's government, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light anti-aircraft weapons and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. The amounts were significant - 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983 which rose to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to Mohammad Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war from 1983-87.13

Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was responsible for arming the Mujahideen, commented, “The U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan.”14

In October 1984, CIA director William Casey, who wanted to keep abreast of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, went by plane to the military air base south of Islamabad, Pakistan. Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched Mujahideen training.

Pakistani officers also traveled to the U.S, for training on the Stinger missile launcher in June 1986 and then set up a secret MujahideenStinger training facility.15 Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts, prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes thereby curtailing the damage they could cause. By 1987 a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon officials were visiting the ISI.16

During the war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen, with U.S. and Saudi Arabia financial help, augmented the size of its military by securing additional recruits in two ways. First, fundamentalist Islamic religious schools for boys called madrassas were established in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Often they came from refugee camps and were orphans of the war.

Although the subject matter of the schools was largely fundamentalist in content, structured to develop a fervor to expel the Soviets, the poverty-stricken families often had no other way to provide their boys with an education.

The prospective students usually had not learned any farming or other skills from their fathers, nor did they have other job opportunities. They were only trained for fighting in wars and how to handle guns. Besides that, food, shelter and military training were provided at no cost. Some boys who were as young as 13 or 14 saw a future stint in the military as a steady source of income. On several occasions madrassas were closed down so that all the students could join the troops on the battlefront.

The other source of additional recruits for the Mujahideen was from a variety of nations around the world with sizeable fundamentalist Muslim populations. These were males who wanted to fight the “godless Russians”, and some them expected to be martyrs in a holy war.

According to Central Asia specialist and journalist Ahmed Rashid:

“Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujaheddin. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.”17

According to John Ryan, senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg “As for the Mujahideen that this conflict created, they took on a life of their own, and have now spread throughout the Muslim world and are apparently in cells everywhere. About 5,000 of them were brought into Bosnia to fight the Serbs – even Osama bin Laden may have visited Bosnian president Izetbegovic in 1992.18 The Mujahideen later helped the Kosovo Albanians.”19

In 1989 the Soviets retreated from Aghanistan and left behind 1.5 million dead Aghans.20 and 14,000 of its own dead21

But then a new war started, this time between the Mujahideen and the Afghan government. It lasted for three years, until the government was defeated in 1992. After that, the competing armies within the Mujahideen fought among themselves to control Kabul, using stockpiles of weapons that had been provided by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. About 50,000 people were killed and much of the city was left in shambles.22 Even today, little of Kabul has been reconstructed. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven into squalid refugee camps, and millions of exiles were blocked from returning.

While the Mujahideen was in power there was a severe erosion of women’s rights. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was set up to control women’s dress codes and the length of men’s beards. Rape was a common tool of war for the fundamentalists. As one man said “young women who did not want to be raped by these zealots threw themselves off the top floors of tall buildings and preferred death to rape…Many families who had daughters didn’t want fundamentalists to rape them. So when the fundamentalists attacked their homes, they would kill their own daughters, because it was better for them to die than to be raped by these criminals.”23

Despite all of this brutality, women were still allowed to work, and get an education under the Mujahideen government. In fact, before the Taliban later took over Kabul, about half of the working population were women who were employed as teachers, doctors, as well as in other professional occupations.

For the next four years there was a war between the Mujahideen and the Taliban with the latter emerging victorious in 1996. Many Afghans welcomed them, since they believed that they would end the corruption of the Mujahideen. But as fundamentalist Muslims, their policies were similar to those of the Mujahideen.

A virtual war was declared on women under the Taliban, which had no basis in Islamic law. They were not allowed to participate in the work force or even have doctors treat them (without a male relative present), and girls were forbidden to go to school. They were forbidden to work, leave the house without a male escort, not allowed to seek medical help from a male doctor, and were forced to cover themselves from head to toe, even covering their eyes. Women who were doctors and teachers before, suddenly were forced to be beggars and even prostitutes in order to feed their families.26

Trying to understand the mindset of how such injustices can take place is not an easy undertaking. But one thing is obvious, as I have mentioned earlier in this article: the U.S. was the main force that created the conditions that allowed the Mujahideen and the Taliban to come to power because of the support it gave 20 to 30 years ago to the most violent and anti-democratic forces within Afghanistan who ruled ruthlessly, eradicating educated progressive leaders, driving others into exile and corrupting the minds of many of its young males.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 the U.S. reacted by attacking Afghanistan, although none of the those who hijacked the planes in those attacks were Afghans.. The rationale given for the U.S. air attacks on Afghanistan was that the training of the hijackers was done by Al Qaeda in camps in Afghanistan. Although this retaliatory bombing supposedly achieved the stated goal of the U.S. government, it was decided to invade anyway and is still there eight years later. The Taliban was replaced by the Northern Alliance and now there is an Afghan government which is the surrogate of the U.S.

What do the Afghan people have to show now over 30 years after the Soviet invasion in the areas of democracy, women’s rights and economic and social progress? Nothing! In fact the Afghan people are worse off now. And the future of Afghans at the hands of the U.S. probably is horrendous.

Democracy has been undermined in Afghanistan, because many of the progressive leaders were either killed or forced into exile by warlords supported by the U.S. during and after the war with the Soviets. This new government has been formed in an undemocratic process promoted by the U.S. and now consists of some of the warlords who were deposed by the Taliban.

Today the ordinary Afghan is caught between three forces: the U.S., the Taliban, and the puppet government composed of former members of the Mujahideen who many Afghans would like to have tried as war criminals. Also, the Upper House of Parliament is not a democratic institution, its members being appointed by the President. Furthermore, the Afghan constitution, although it proclaims equality for men and women, is secondary to the supremacy of Islamic law, which can be used to squash dissent and human rights, including the rights of women.27

Furthermore, it is ludicrous to contend that a nation that is occupied by a foreign power is allowed to make the important decisions. In short when the U.S. occupiers say “Jump!” the Afghan government replies “How high?”

Malalai Joya, a young Afghan woman who was elected to the Lower House of Parliament and who was later barred from that body because of her criticism of some of its members. She has estimated that up to 60% of the deputies in the Lower House are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses.28

Under the newly established government in 2001 women were allowed to once again work and go to school. Nevertheless, the abuse of women continues, since the government is too weak to enforce many of the laws, especially in the rural areas.29

According to Human Rights Watch, "The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her."30

According to Joya:

“Women’s conditions in some cities have slightly improved since the Taliban regime. But if we compare it with the era before the rule of the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, it has not changed much. Afghan women had more rights in the 1960s to 1980s than today. Rapes, abductions, murders, violence, forced marriages, and violence are increasing at an alarming rate never seen before in our history. Women commit self-immolation to escape their miseries, and the rate of self-immolations is climbing in many of the provinces. Afghanistan still faces a women’s rights catastrophe.”31

The economic and social welfare status of Afghans today due to U.S intervention that started over 30 years ago is abysmal. The U.S. is not the only culpable nation; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also played major roles in this deterioration.

The Afghan people are in dire straits. They lost about one and a half million people in their war with the Soviet Union, according to Rashid, and tens of thousands more have died in civil wars. In addition 600,000 have been wounded. About one in ten Afghans is disabled, mostly due to the wars and landmines. Their life expectancy is about 43 years.32

Many Americans explain this internal strife in Afghanistan by saying that “they have always been fighting among themselves.” But the truth is that America has been more or less behind most of the violence, as this article demonstrates.

Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, according to an estimate made by University of New Hampshire Professor Mark Herold. Those who died after impact of an explosive are not counted.33

Although more than 3.7 million Afghan refugees have returned to their homes in the past six years, several million still live in Pakistan and Iran. About 132,000 people are internally displaced as a result of drought, violence and instability. Furthermore, there are reportedly about 400,000 orphans in Afghanistan.34

Afghanistan suffers from an unemployment rate of 40% and most of those who have jobs earn only meager wages. Many youth joined the Mujahideen or Taliban in order to receive some food, shelter and income. The average educational level of Afghans is 1.7 years of schooling, which severely limits their job opportunities. As many as 18 million Afghans still live on less than $2 a day.35

Even today the Afghan people are confronted by many dangers. On their land there are still about 10 million mines which cause loss of life and limbs and reduces the amount of land available for farming.

An estimated seven million people remain susceptible to hunger throughout the country, and Afghanistan is also vulnerable to natural disasters as well as a high risk of diseases.36

Afghanistan needs economic development aid, health care and educational assistance - not bombs.

U.S. officials talk about nation-building in Afghanistan. But what they neglect to say is that the U.S. has actually done just the opposite: it has fostered the destruction of much of that nation and now poses a clear and imminent danger to what remains of the rest of that beleaguered country.

James A. Lucas is a member of Peace Action and Veterans for Peace. He can be reached at jlucas511@woh.rr.com

NOTES


1. Abdullah Qazi, “The Plight of the Afgan Woman,” August 30, 2009 Afghanistan Online.

http://www.afghan-web.com/woman/afghanwomenhistory.html

2. New York Times, 9 February, 1980, p.3, (From Willian Blum, Killing Hope, Ref. 52 on p. 346)

3. Philip Gasper, “Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban,” International Socialist Review,

November-December 2001. http://www.isreview.org/issues/20/CIA_binladen_afghan.shtml

4. “How the CIA turns foreign students into traitors”, Ramparts Magazine (San Francisco ), April 1967, pp.

23-4. (As mentioned in William Blum, Killing Hope, Ref 29 on p.343.)

5. “CIA Activities in Afghanistan,Wikipedia.”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Afghanistan

6. Gasper.

7. Gasper.

8. James A. Lucas, “Deaths in Other Nations Since WWI Due to US Interventions”, Countercurrents, April

24, 2007. http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm

9. “The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan, Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski”, President Jimmy

Carter's National Security Adviser. http://www.glonbalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

10. Gasper.

11. Steve Coll, “Ghost Wars”, (Penguin Books) p 181.

12. Gasper.

13. Steve Coll, “Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War”, 'Washington Post', July 19, 1992.

http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/anatomy.htm

14. Milton Bearden, “Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires.” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001.

15. Coll., Anatomy

16. Gasper.

17. Ahmed Rashid, “Taliban,” Yale University Press, New Haven, London, 2001, p. 130.

18. Dianna Johnstone, “Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions”, New York: Monthly

Review Press, 2002, pp. 61-62, personal communication with Canada’s foreign ambassador to

Yugoslavia, James Bissett.

19. John Ryan, “Afghanistan, A Tale of Never Ending Tragedy”, Global Research , July 19 , 2006.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2750FA

20. Rashid, p.13.

21. Borhan Younus, “Understanding the Afghan War”, January 29, 1988.

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1199279994255&pagename=Zone-English-Muslim_Affairs%2FMAELayout

22. Patricia Gossman, “Afghanistan in the Balance”, Middle East Report, Winter 2001.

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer221/221_gossman.html

23. Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, “Bleeding Afghanistan”, Seven Stories Press, 2006.

24. Abdullah Qazi, “Afghan Women's History”, January 4, 2009.

http://www.afghan-web.com/woman/afghanwomenhistory.html

25. Qazi.

26. Qazi

27. Qazi.

28. Foreign Policy in Focus, “Interview with Malalai Joya”, October 16, 2009.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/interview_with_malalai_joya

29. Qazi.

30. Qazi.

31. Foreign Policy.

32. Fund for Peace June 22, 2009.

http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=385&Itemid=542

33. Marcus Raskin and Devin West, “Collateral Damage: A U.S. Strategy in War?” Institute for Policy

Studies, October 10, 2008. http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/collateral_damage

34, Fund for Peace.

35. Fund for Peace.

36. Fund for Peace.
 
 

[bigron]

Digging in for the long haul in Afghanistan

SHOWCASE | March 01, 2010
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Showcase.view&showcaseid=00123&stoplayout=true&print=true


Nick Turse answers questions about his recent finding that there are nearly 400 U.S. and coalition military bases in Afghanistan, what that says about our occupation and our military strategy, and the indirect and direct costs to the American taxpayers. It's a big story most Americans know nothing about.


 
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War, and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. He recently answered questions from the Nieman Watchdog Project.

Q. In your latest piece for TomDispatch.com, you write that there are at present nearly 400 U.S. and coalition military bases in Afghanistan, and that the U.S. Government is in the process of spending some $3 billion in construction projects in the country. Why does this matter?
 
A. Where to begin? I think it matters because the United States is garrisoning a foreign land, on a massive scale -- but the American public has almost no idea of the size or scope of the project, the monies involved or the long-term commitment that these bases imply. I think it matters because occupations of this sort generally have horrific results for the occupied country and deleterious ones for the occupiers, as well.
 
I think it matters because the United States is still in a state of economic crisis and civilian infrastructure is in deep need of repair. Similarly, the people of Afghanistan are in even more dire need of infrastructure and money. Yet these funds are being put into building a greater capacity to carry out airstrikes and facilitate the occupation of a country that has, for centuries, fought long and hard against foreign occupiers. The strange thing is, until now we had no numbers on just how many bases the U.S. and its coalition partners had built there. I guess no one else bothered to ask. If this is the path the United States is taking, I think that Americans should have some idea about it.
 
Q. Four hundred bases does sound like an awful lot. And you write that in addition to those, there are some 300 Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the U.S. What are these bases being used for, and what does it say about our military strategy that it is so construction-intensive?
 
 From World War II onward, the U.S. military has been garrisoning the globe in a big way. And as it has begun fighting major wars without clear front lines, such as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it has relied on large numbers of bases -- from the big-box variety to smaller outposts and fire bases -- to facilitate its “big footprint”-style war-fighting efforts.

 
The Pentagon’s bases are a key feature of the American way of warfare that you almost never see examined in any meaningful way in the mainstream media -- it’s what Chalmers Johnson has called the Empire of Bases. The U.S. military has, by its own count, close to 5,600 bases worldwide. Of these, more than 700 are located in foreign countries -- not counting the many hundreds in Afghanistan and Iraq and the “secret” bases in Qatar and elsewhere.
 
Q. You say these bases imply a long-term commitment. How long is long-term? How many if any of these bases are being built as “permanent” rather than “temporary” facilities, that can be taken apart and flown elsewhere, for instance? Should all this construction make us skeptical of the (admittedly vague) withdrawal timeline President Obama has been talking about? After all, some of the bigger projects presumably won’t even be complete for a while -- and the withdrawal is supposed to begin in mid-2011.
 
How long is long-term? That’s the $64,000 question -- or since we’re talking about the Pentagon, the $640 million dollar one. The U.S. military does not, as a rule, relinquish bases quickly or easily. Look at Germany, Italy and Japan. The war that spawned bases there ended many decades ago, but the garrisons are still going strong, with little prospect of the U.S. withdrawing from these countries in the future. Why is that? Because we need to prevent Italy from being swallowed up by a neighbor -- like Switzerland?
 
So, I think we have good reason to be skeptical of a true withdrawal anytime soon. When it comes to permanency, only a few of these are truly massive “enduring” bases like Bagram Air Base or Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, but exactly how many are just small combat outposts and forward operating bases is unclear. The numbers just aren’t available.
 
Q. Where’s the money for all this coming from? Is it part of the sacrosanct defense budget? The money that no political party will touch for fear of endangering our national security?
 
While few American taxpayers have any idea that there are now hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan, it’s all due to them -- to their dollars at least -- and is embedded in the ever-ballooning true national security budget (including, but not limited to Department of Defense spending) that now clocks in at around a $1 trillion per year -- and rising.
 
Q. Who is the money going to, to build all this stuff? Is it defense contractors, or is it construction companies? Or are they one and the same these days? Are they American companies, Afghan, or something else? Who’s getting rich on these projects?
 
There are three major defense contractors doing base-building work in Afghanistan: DynCorp International, Fluor and KBR. And then there are all sorts of local and regional contractors aiding the efforts. The companies involved are largely silent about what they’re up to and the military public affairs people involved with them are quieter still.
 
Q. A major reason for this spending, presumably, is that Afghanistan simply didn’t have the infrastructure to support a modern war effort. But are the facilities we are building exclusively for military use? Is any of it infrastructure that Afghans can take advantage of now? Will any of it at least be useful to them when and if we leave? (Although even if so, presumably, if it was up to them, they’d have other ways of spending that $3 billion.)
 
I think it might be advantageous to first stop and address what you term “a modern war effort.” It’s an excellent starting point for a debate Americans have never had and a place to begin discussion of issues never much confronted. I think the United States needs to grapple with the very notion of the “modern war effort” -- what it means, why the U.S. is so often implementing it, and why it is so regularly unsuccessful.
 
In this iteration of America’s modern war effort, in addition to hundreds of bases, we’re also talking about many tens of thousands of heavily armed and armored troops, advanced aircraft, heavy artillery, spy satellites, billions of dollars in weapons and gadgetry all arrayed against a rag-tag group of guerrillas in one of the most devastated nations on the planet. And it’s been dragging on for almost a decade. (This is, of course, part of a longer record of failure and futility: the Korea stalemate, the loss in Vietnam, crash and burn efforts in Cambodia and Laos, being chased from Lebanon and Somalia, failure to accomplish the mission in Iraq, etc.)
 
Quite obviously, there are real, fundamental problems. Given this, why haven’t Americans seen a comprehensive and wide-ranging network news investigation, a major many-part newspaper series, or a comprehensive special issue by a major news magazine that has plumbed the depths of why the United States gets into so many wars, why it fights them the way it does and why it does so poorly?
 
But I digress…
 
As to the contribution of base-building to Afghan infrastructure -- sure, the Afghans will likely be left with some more roads. How chewed up they’ll be when it’s all said and done is another issue. But I think the opening of my piece on those 700 bases gives the best example of the future that these bases portend. The “new” U.S./Afghan base in Shinwar is built on the crumbling rubble of a 19th century British base and involves the rehab of facilities that the Soviets built on the same site in the 1980s. If Afghanistan’s history is any guide, the future of American bases there looks rather dismal.
 
Q. There has been a great deal of reporting coming out of Afghanistan of late related to the offensive in Marja and surge-increased operations there. Has this improved the quality of the coverage in relation to the issue of bases?
 
I’m sorry to say it has not. And it isn’t due to a lack of reporters there. While nobody is going to visit 400 bases, one could survey a number of them and then analyze what they mean and what that says about the American way of warfare. The lack of deep reporting on the subject says something about the focus of media outlets with the financial means to send reporters to Afghanistan and their failure to grapple with big picture issues.
 
Take a recent piece about Marines in a Taliban "stronghold" near the southern city of Kandahar that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. (Which, I might add, has done some fine work in Afghanistan.) The reporter described a U.S. Army captain's problems in getting local Afghans to work on construction projects -- due to fear of Taliban retribution later. He wrote, "Yet, the only construction work here so far has been the hammering of U.S. Navy Seabees, or construction troops, erecting a vast American base overlooking Senjaray." References to many "vast American bases," as well as a sprinkling of "gee-whiz" pieces on fast-food franchise-filled mega-bases, have popped up in the press year after year. (The same was true of coverage of U.S. bases in Iraq.) But what you don’t see is deep, thoughtful analysis of the meaning of, the logic of, and the costs (financial and otherwise) of these "vast American bases", what messages they send to locals and what they say about the United States, writ large.

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South Asia
Mar 5, 2010 
  http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC05Df01.html
 
 
Heroin lab menace grows in Afghanistan


By Sananda Sahoo

WASHINGTON - Drug traffickers are increasing imports of precursor chemicals used for processing raw opium poppy in Afghanistan into heroin and morphine, according to a new United States State Department report released on Monday.

They are channeling the chemicals through new routes and diverting them from legal commerce and grey markets, said the State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2009. West Asia and Africa are the new key transshipment points to smuggle and divert chemicals.

''Trafficking throughout Afghanistan continues to be a big challenge," David Johnson, assistant secretary at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said.

According to a survey of global counter-narcotics efforts, Afghanistan remains the world's top producer of opium despite a 22% decline in the area under poppy cultivation there during 2009. Historically, traffickers have exported raw opium produced in Afghanistan to other countries for processing into heroin and other opiates. In recent years, however, the country has emerged as one of the biggest producers of refined products.

Drug traffickers in Afghanistan deal in all forms of opiates, including unrefined opium, semi-refined morphine base and refined heroin.

The decrease in poppy cultivation has as much to do with economics as security, according to independent experts in the US. ''The decline is fueled by over-production of poppy which led to a lowering of prices,'' said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security expert with the Brookings Institution and author of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs. ''The market is saturated," she told Inter Press Service.

The increase in precursor chemicals coming into Afghanistan poses major challenges for the US and the international community's efforts to fight drug-trafficking. It suggests that traffickers intend to expand their refinery operations inside the war-torn country.

Under the administration of US President Barack Obama, Washington has altered its approach to tackling drug production in Afghanistan. The focus on eradication that prevailed for most of George W Bush's tenure has given way to greater emphasis on efforts to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers. It has renewed efforts to promote the production of alternative crops and livelihoods for farmers who are now growing poppies.

The new report cited the arrest of some major drug traffickers in Afghanistan over the past year. But it also suggested that authorities have had less success in disrupting Afghanistan's opium supply chain due to gaps in intelligence and limited international law enforcement expertise in detecting the chemicals.

The report also singled out Pakistan as a transit country for precursor chemicals, as well as for opiates and hashish destined not only for Afghanistan, but also global markets.

In September 2009, for example, prosecutors arrested a Korean suspect who attempted to smuggle 10 tonnes of acetic anhydride, the primary precursor for heroin, into Afghanistan with the help of Pakistani intermediaries suspected of having shipped 6.6 tonnes of acetic anhydride to Afghanistan earlier last year.

The change in US policy from eradication to rural development and interdiction can work well with Washington's overall counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan and lead to a sustainable reduction in drug economy, Felbab-Brown said.

Last year, Afghanistan produced more than 90% of the world's opium gum, the basic precursor to heroin, worth $2.8 billion. ''But how the two aspects of the policy are operationalized will determine their effectiveness," she said.

Russia does not agree with the US's policy shift. Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Control Service, said in an interview last week that this would flood Russia with heroin.

But Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reiterated that eradication worked against the larger purpose. ''We're focusing on high traffickers' interdiction and destroying drug bazaars, but that's a tactical difference [with Russia]," he said in Washington on Tuesday after completing a visit to Central and South Asia.

Interdiction has proved to be a difficult counter-drug tactic. It was effective at times, such as in Peru during the late 1990s, when smuggling was conducted by air. But in Afghanistan, smuggling is done over land. ''The border is a huge highway of illegal trade," Felbab-Brown said.

Border interdiction in Afghanistan is extremely difficult due to a lack of resources to protect its long, exceptionally rugged and unpopulated borders with Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Moreover, ''Internal interdiction is hard because so much of the terrain is not under government control," according to Felbab-Brown.

Many drug trafficking groups are not linked directly to the Taliban insurgency, which, according to US intelligence agencies, earns about $70 million a year from the drug trade. Some of the most important trafficking operations reportedly involve government officials and the police, while still others are independent and operate from outside Afghanistan, according to the report.

The Taliban have access to parts of the drug trade in Pakistan, but their access is limited. Nor does the group exercise control over smuggling channels and markets in Iran, Central Asia, Turkey, Europe and China.

''I am very skeptical that interdiction will be successful in stopping illicit flows,'' Felbab-Brown said. ''The goal of interdiction should be to prevent or minimize the corruption and coercive power of Taliban and government-linked traffickers and independent groups.''

Rural development is the administration's other important approach to combating the drug trade. ''But it takes a long time in Afghanistan, where challenges are greater than anywhere else in the world,'' Felbab-Brown said.

While northern Afghanistan has been far more secure than the southern and eastern border strongholds of the Taliban, rural development there has been slow in coming. In the north, marijuana is now competing with legal crops.

The principal sources of precursor chemicals are believed to be China, Europe, Central Asia and India. Traffickers hide the sources of their chemicals by repackaging or falsely labeling them, the report said. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, markets and processing facilities are clustered in border areas of Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Drug laboratories process a large portion of the country's raw opium into heroin and morphine base, which reduces the bulk of the raw opium by about one-tenth, making it easier to smuggle across foreign borders.

Primary trafficking routes from Afghanistan run through Iran to Turkey and Western Europe, through Pakistan to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Iran, and through Central Asia to Russia.

Recent international interdiction efforts under the leadership of the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board have led to an increase in the number of large seizures in Afghanistan, the report said.

But Felbab-Brown said the flow of precursor chemicals is hard to measure. More seizures can indicate that interdiction efforts are working, but can also show that more is flowing into the country.

Washington, which currently has some 70,000 troops deployed against the Taliban in Afghanistan, has shifted from poppy eradication to a greater emphasis on interdiction and rural development, primarily to avoid antagonizing local farmers, Felbab-Brown said.

But the ongoing counter-insurgency operation centered on Marjah in Helmand province, a major poppy-production region, has included the confiscation of poppy seeds discovered by troops in house searches.

''And that is generating political capital for the Taliban," Felbab-Brown said, noting that the some farmers have complained about the crackdown as that the Taliban had let them grow and sell poppy.

''How we handle post-Marjah operation will decide a lot,'' she said. ''If we equate good governance with poppy suppression before legal livelihoods are available, we can lose the majority of the population.''

(Inter Press Service) 
 
 

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Statement From The Afghan Resistance

Statement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan regarding monopolization

of activities of Mass Media Outlets by the Puppet Administration.

By Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24904.htm

March 03, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- According to international media reports, the Kabul Puppet Administration have warned media outlets not to publish or transmit live reports of events without obtainment of prior permission. In case of violation, they have threatened to arrest relevant reporters, seize their equipment and impose ban on activities of the concerned media outlet in a given area. International media outlets, civil societies and human rights organizations have condemned the irrational warning of the Kabul puppet administration. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan considers this measure of the surrogate administration as a flagrant violation of the recognized principle of freedom of speech and wants to announce as follows:

1. The ban on independent mass media outlets by the Puppet Administration is, in fact, an effort by the surrogates to put a clout on their failure and shameful fiascos, which they face during confrontations with the Mujahideen in every part of the country.

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

3. The said unjustified step of the Kabul Puppet Administration, defacto, originates from the anti-human attitude of their masters i.e. the Americans, who are bent on imposing their dictatorship and the so-called abhorrent liberty on independent nations.

4. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan while inviting all activists of mass media to accurately publish ground realities, highly appreciates the courageous efforts of the fact-finding and investigative journalists, reporters and photographers who continue their duty to reflect the ground realities of the Afghans issue despite threats and obstacles that they are facing in their way.

5. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, pertinent to its previous request, urges all employees of independent and neutral media outlets to initially observe the losses inflicted on the invaders by the Mujahideen and the destruction caused to public properties by the invaders and then transmit or publish their reports for the judgment of the public of the world. This as a part of their obligation to fulfill their journalistic mission and convey the true picture of events to the people of the world without any inclination to support the aggression of the invaders.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
 
 
 

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FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS A MUST READ   (VISIT PAGE FOR PICTURES, GRAPHS, TABLES AND MANY LINKS)

Technology Spectacles: the Country that Produced MRE’s now gives Afghans Drones and GRR (Government-Ready-to-Rule) Kits

More Afghan civilians died under the Obama clock in 2009 than under his predecessor, George W. Bush during 2008

By Marc W. Herold



RAWA, March 3, 2010

 
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63846&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Published on Thursday, March 4, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Karzai-ization of Afghanistan

by Jim Hightower

Isn't it great that America is standing so forcefully for fundamental principles of democracy around the world? We're standing side by side with some of the most notable, incredible, and astonishing democratic leaders on the globe today. Specifically, of course, I'm referring to Hamid Karzai.

Karzai? What a goofus! As the sitting president of Afghanistan, this guy is only notable for being an astonishingly-arrogant incompetent with no leadership credibility whatsoever. Yet we have tens of thousands of American troops over there - fighting, bleeding, and dying - to shore up Karzai's ridiculous and corrupt regime.

How ridiculous and corrupt? Let's remember that he flat-out stole last year's presidential election. The thievery was so rampant and blatant that his top opponent quit the race in disgust, declaring that there was no way for people to get a fair vote. Still, our government sanctioned this fraud, declaring that we had extracted promises from Karzai that he would stop the corruption and allow an independent commission to oversee future elections.

We might as well have tried to make a snake tap dance. With parliamentary elections coming up in September, this slippery autocrat has unilaterally dismissed the independent commission, decreeing that all new members will be handpicked by him. A Karzai spokesman noted that three of the disposed commission members were appointed by the United Nations and were "creating problems for us." Yeah, impartial election monitors can be a problem for petty tyrants. That's why they're there.

The spokesman claimed that Karzai's usurpation of the election office was merely part of "the process of Afghanization" of the government. What's happened to the democratization of the government? What's really happening is the Karzai-ization of the government - and not even one more of our soldiers should have to die for that.

"Afghan Leader Asserts Control Over Election Body [1]," New York Times, February 24, 2010

© 2010 Jim Hightower
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow [2], Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.


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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/04-11

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 4, 2010
3:28 PM
 CONTACT: Congressman Dennis Kucinich [1]


Nathan White [2] (202)225-5871

Congress Begins Afghanistan Debate

Kucinich Resolution will Spark House Debate Next Week


WASHINGTON - March 4 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today introduced H. Con Res. 248 a privileged resolution with 16 original cosponsors that will require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the war in Afghanistan.  A rule is expected to provide for three hours of debate which will occur on Wednesday March 11, 2010.

Speaking about his resolution on the House floor today, Kucinich said, "There is a new way to fight war in Afghanistan.  U.S. Commanders are publicly telling the Taliban when we are coming and where we are going to wage war. This while Karzai tries to cut a deal with the Taliban!

"Meanwhile a large offensive is being mounted--an assault on Kandahar.  The U.S. is going to have 100,000 troops ready for a big battle by autumn and logistical problems abound.  Here is a quote from the February 20th National Journal, "So, despite the immense effort to push out supplies, the front-line fighters sometimes don't even have the minimum they need. ‘We had guys out there at outposts in my area of operations starving because we couldn't get resupply in to them,'" said one Major. 

"What is this all about? To strengthen corrupt central government officials building villas in Dubai? I am introducing a privileged resolution to get us out of Afghanistan and I urge your support," Kucinich added.

Original cosponsors include Representatives John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI); Ron Paul (R-TX); José Serrano (D-NY); Bob Filner (D-CA); Lynn Woolsey (D-CA); Walter Jones, Jr. (R-NC); Danny Davis (D-IL); Barbara Lee (D-CA); Michael Capuano (D-MA); Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ); Tammy Baldwin (D-WI); Timothy Johnson (R-IL); Yvette Clarke (D-NY); Eric Massa (D-NY); Alan Grayson (D-FL); and Chellie Pingree (D-ME).

See a copy of the resolution here [3].

###


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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/03/04-8

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No Story Here! US Press Sits on Story

Executing Handcuffed Afghan Kids?


BY DAVE LINDORFF

CounterPunch, March 4, 2010

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63863&hd=&size=1&l=e

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four Americans who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes "suspected" of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable "collateral damage" of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save these children.  No observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt to report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the other serving US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he’s a Brit. While American reporters like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote CNN’s December 29 report on the incident (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/29/afghanistan.deaths/index.html), took the Pentagon’s initial cover story--that the dead were part of a secret bomb-squad--at face value, Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources--the dead boys’ headmaster, other townspeople, and Afghan government officials--and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime--the execution of handcuffed children.  And while a few news outlets in the US like the New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb-makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot.

Starkey reported the US government’s damning admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the grave.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners.  It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.

I called the Secretary of Defense’s office to ask if any investigation was underway into this crime or if one was planned, and was told I had to send a written request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing.  The Pentagon PR machine pretended to me on the phone that they didn't even know what incident I was talking about, but without their "help" I have learned that what the US military has done--no surprise--is to pass the buck by leaving any investigation to the International Security Assistance Force--a fancy name for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s a clever ruse. The ISAF is no more a genuine coalition entity than was  George Bush's Iraq War Coalition of the Willing, but this dodge makes legislative investigation of the event impossible, since Congress has no authority to compel testimony from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A source at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms that the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee has asked for a "briefing"--that means nothing would be under oath--once that investigation is complete, but don’t hold your breath or expect anything dramatic.

I also contacted the press office of the House Armed Services Committee to see if any hearings into this crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the press officer asked me to send her details of the incident (Not a good sign that House members and staff are paying much attention--the killings led to country-wide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to a formal protest by the office of President Hamid Karzai, and to an investigation by the Afghan government, which concluded that innocent students had been handcuffed and executed, and no doubt contributed to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan civilians.)

There is still time for people of conscience to stand up in the midst of this imperial adventure that may now appropriately be called Obama’s War in Afghanistan.  Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know that nine Afghan children were captured and murdered at America’s hands last December in Kunar. There are also probably people who were involved in the planning or carrying out of this criminal operation who are sickened by what happened. But these people are so far holding their tongues, whether out of fear, or out of simply not knowing where to turn (Note: If you have information you may contact me). There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and in Washington who could be investigating this story. They are not. Don’t ask me why. Maybe ask their editors.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-area journalistHis work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net. He can be reached at dlindorff@yahoo.com.


VISIT PAGE FOR MORE !
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63863&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Afghan survivors: Women waved scarves to try to stop NATO air attack

By DION NISSENBAUM AND NOORUDDIN BAKHSHI

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63865&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 4, 2010

KABUL -- The military helicopters swooped in from behind the three-vehicle convoy as it wound through a remote road in southern Afghanistan, and survivors of last week's deadly attack said they had no idea they were in danger until the lead four-wheel drive vehicle exploded.

After seeing the gruesome aftermath of that rocket strike, survivors of the NATO attack told McClatchy Newspapers, women jumped from the second car and frantically waved their head scarves to try to stop the attack.

A two-star American general is in southern Afghanistan investigating the Feb. 21 strike, which killed 21 Afghans in Daykundi province and quickly prompted U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal to deliver a videotaped apology.

Survivors said they want more than that, however.

"What do we do with his apology?" said Hussain Dilbarian, a 20-year-old survivor of the strike. "It doesn't make any difference. The killers should be handed over to us. We don't want anything else."

The attack was a frustrating setback for McChrystal in his campaign to win Afghans' confidence by minimizing the number of innocent civilians who are killed by coalition forces fighting Taliban insurgents.

McChrystal has made the issue the cornerstone of the coalition's renewed efforts to regain the trust of many Afghans, by enacting tougher military directives meant to curtail civilian deaths and by owning up to military mistakes.

In an effort to figure out what went wrong that Sunday morning, McChrystal sent Army Maj. Gen. Timothy P. McHale to southern Afghanistan to lead the investigation.

" 'Do you have positive ID of the insurgents, and how did you determine that your forces were at risk?' " said Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for coalition forces. " 'Were you being shot at?' Those are the hard questions you've got to ask your troops."

By the time the news became public last week, McChrystal already had apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and launched a full investigation.

Two days after the attack, McChrystal released a videotaped apology, dubbed in the Dari and Pashto languages, in which he vowed to "prevent this from happening again."

"I have made it clear to our forces that we are here to protect the Afghan people," McChrystal said in the video. "I pledge to strengthen our efforts to regain your trust to build a brighter future for all Afghans."

The day after the attack, the U.S.-led military coalition said that NATO forces had fired on a group of "suspected insurgents" who were thought to be on their way to attack Afghan and coalition soldiers a few miles away.

When troops arrived after the helicopter strike, they discovered women and children among the dead and wounded.

Survivors and local police said that 18 members of Afghanistan's Hazara minority, a group that traditionally opposed the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, were among the 21 people who were killed. Thirteen people were wounded.

In a series of telephone interviews with McClatchy Newspapers, survivors of the attack described a frantic scene as they scrambled for safety and shouted at the helicopters to stop shooting.

Dilbarian said he was riding in a packed Toyota Land Cruiser in the back of the convoy when they heard helicopters behind them.

The SUVs, survivors said, were full of more than three dozen relatives heading to Kandahar for supplies and Kabul for medical treatment.

Though the convoy was driving through Taliban-controlled territory, the survivors said they didn't encounter Taliban checkpoints or fighters in the area.

It was only when the first rocket hit the lead vehicle, the survivors said, that they realized they were a target.

As passengers scrambled for safety, survivors said, women in the second car used their head scarves to try to wave off the attack.

"When they hit the first car, the women and the children came out of the second car so they could see women and children were in the car," said Ali Yar, 40, who was riding in the middle Land Cruiser. "But still they didn't stop the bombing."

Ali said the helicopters hit the last vehicle with a rocket and then used a mounted machine gun to target men as they ran for cover.

Local police have been videotaping interviews with the survivors as part of the investigation. Military investigators are reviewing tapes from the helicopters to figure out what the coalition forces could see on the ground.

"I just can't see our guys knowingly engaging somebody that they didn't think was an insurgent," Shanks said. "However, did they use the proper procedures to determine that? That's what they are looking into."

(Bakhshi is a McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent.)





 

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Flexible Afghanistan War Objectives: And the Agony Grinds On


By Ramzy Baroud


 

March 4, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63889&hd=&size=1&l=e

Washington and its willing mouthpieces in the media have for years been trying to sell us the preposterous war in Afghanistan. While they attempt to convince us that the war is predicated on a faultless military logic and moral wisdom, it remains in fact a tragic adventure with no decipherable objectives, and involving several countries, private contractors, and all sorts of firms seeking to make a quick buck.

The intellectual cowardice of some should not blind the majority to the fact that the war in Afghanistan is morally indefensible and militarily unwinnable.

The decision of the US to continue with its brutal military adventurism in Afghanistan can only be understood in terms of its limited and highly selfish political logic.

Let us start by ruling out some of the ridiculous assumptions that have permeated this war since it began in 2001. First, we were told that the war was aimed at eliminating al-Qaida. However, a retied CIA Station Chief who has served in the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff, has claimed that, "al-Qaida is finished in Afghanistan." He further argued that, "the Obama administration, like its predecessor, claims we are fighting terrorism there. That is simply not true. It is a pure counterinsurgency issue."

Indeed, even the most ardent war hawks are exerting little effort to delineate the link between Taliban and al-Qaida. If the link is infused, it is readily unleashed to demonstrate al-Qaida’s links to Pakistan’s tribal areas, thus urging 'action’ in that part of the country, and not in Afghanistan.

Thanks to the random military 'strategy’ of the US and its allies, al-Qaida has spread in all sorts of directions and branched off to many al-Qaida offshoots in various parts of the world. Without a centralized leadership in the military sense, al-Qaida inspired groups and individuals now are now working for localized sets of objectives and respond to different stimuli.

So if it’s not al-Qaida that is inspiring the awesome, although largely futile firepower and military surges in Afghanistan, then what is? This is where the idealists come in. They talk of nation-building, Western-style democracy, regional security and so on. Some of them genuinely mean what they say, and some don’t believe the present military surges and Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s rural area fight to the death will yield its intended results. Still, they contribute to the illusion that good intentions – starting with the initial hype about saving Afghani women, then 'liberation’ from foreign terrorists, then democracy and nation-building, and so on – had anything to do with this bloody war. With their insistence on using such positive terminology, they continue to provide Washington’s political elites – and Kabul’s as well – with the benefit of the doubt that while we may disagree with their methods, we still trust their overall intentions.

It behooves those democracy-inspired, nation-building enthusiasts to remember that Washington has done much to stifle genuine democracy movements around the world since its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Palestine and Lebanon remain the most obvious examples. As for nation-building, compare the astronomical amounts invested in financing the destructive war in Afghanistan and to prop up the corrupt puppet regime in Kabul, to the miniscule sums devoted to enhancing the country’s stone-aged economic infrastructure. The US military budget for this year is set to exceed $693 billion, not counting the $42 billion set aside for Homeland Security. According to CostofWar.com, the financial cost of war in Afghanistan alone has exceeded the $256 billion; both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are approaching the $1 trillion threshold.

The war in Afghanistan cannot possibly be defended on any moral grounds. The official death count of Afghani civilians in 2009 is estimated at 2,412. The actual death toll is probably far, far higher, as polls do not account for the many more who perished in distance villages across the south and east, areas that are not accessible to outsiders. The death of these innocent people alone should silence the few who still speak of ethics and morality in relation to the disastrous war.

But not everyone is so overtly misguided in their assessment of the war. Some fully understand that the war in Afghanistan is a self-seeking, political and strategic venture. Still, they giddily welcome it, including one Con Coughlin whose recent article in The Telegraph was tellingly entitled, 'India and Pakistan must bury the hatchet for the Taliban to be crushed.’

The India-Pakistan rapprochement is seen as beneficial only insofar as its potential to 'crush’ someone else. And considering that that someone else is not a band of aimless terrorists, but a well-grounded, grass-roots, popular insurgency, the price of that "crushing" is likely to be tens of thousands of innocent people. Coughlin uses the same haughty and generalized language of "militant Islamist groups" to be crushed, failing to understand or appreciate the distinctiveness of each and every situation, whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else. Instead, Coughlin nonchalantly expresses concern about the danger these militants pose to "the survival of the ruling classes" in Islamabad. What a compelling reason to get Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s special envoy to the region all fired up over the need to preserve the survival of the ruling classes, not just in Islamabad, but in Kabul and Delhi as well.

The war in Afghanistan has turned into find-an-objective-as-you-go military march to nowhere. It is proving futile and indefensible on every ground, be it political or military or moral. Moreover, as Haviland Smith concluded in his grim assessment, "it doesn’t really matter that we think of ourselves as benevolent liberators, it only matters that Afghans think of us as foreigners occupiers." When will we all face up to this reality?

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.



 

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1-2-3 What Are We Fighting For? This?


BY DAVE LINDORFF

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63913&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 5, 2010



The stated goal of the US-led War in Afghanistan, according to the Obama Administration, is to defeat the Taliban and establish a stable democratic government over the entire country. Critical to that goal is establishing a professional Afghan army and police force that is not corrupt, and that has the respect of the Afghan people.

But reports out of Canada suggest that far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countries, and to avoid offending those organizations in Afghanistan.

The issue in question is routine rape and sodomy of children by Afghan soldiers and police operating on Canadian-run bases in the Kandahar region.

As reported last fall in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Canadian military chaplins and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sodomizing young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.

The paper reports that Canadian military police have also complained, as reported by Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, that they were being told "not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children."

According to the paper, the Canadian military command has argued that, even though sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan, the practice is culturally accepted and that the Canadian forces "should not get involved in what should be seen as a 'cultural’ issue."

Makes you wonder what other "cultural" issues involving Afghan security forces that the Western occupiers might not want to get involved in. Perhaps the oppression of women? That’s certainly part of the culture. How about bribery and extortion? Based on the evidence--that the police in Afghanistan are a wholly corrupt entity, and that the army is not much better--arguing that corruption is "culturally acceptable" would be easy to do. How about drug dealing? Again, that appears to be quite the culture in Afghanistan.

Kudos to the Canadian grunts, MPs and chaplins who found the sexual abuse of children more than they could stomach, and who brought their concerns to public attention at home in Canada when their own commanders sought to cover it up.

It makes me wonder, though, why here in the hyper-moralizing US, we haven’t heard a peep from our troops or their chaplins about similar behavior by Afghan forces on US-run bases. Remember, we're talking about a US military that still says if you admit to being homosexual, you have to quit the service or be tossed out, and yet nobody's raising a fuss about Afghan troops routinely raping young boys behind the barracks?

It’s hard, after all, to believe that a practice so common on a Canadian base that it provoked such outrage among Canadian soldiers is not also occurring elsewhere.

This leaves us with two possiblities:

1. US soldiers and marines are just not as willing to go outside the chain of command and go public with their complaints, or

2. The US media are not interested in investigating this kind of story. It involves only Afghans, and who cares about Afghans? What American journalism covers is Americans. (Remember the big spate of stories about the sex escapades of guards at the US embassy in Kabul?)

I’d say it’s probably a combination of the two.

At any rate, the picture painted of Afghanistan’s army and police in the Ottawa Citizen article does not bode well for any plan that hinges on their taking over from US and ISAF troops any time soon...or for the fate of young children of Afghanistan, if and when they do.



 

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New Afghan chief in Marjah has criminal record

By DEB RIECHMANN and KIRSTEN GRIESHABER (AP) –

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63924&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 6, 2010

KABUL — The man chosen to be the fresh face of good Afghan governance in a town just seized from the Taliban has a violent criminal record in Germany, but Western officials said Saturday they are not pushing to oust him.

Court records and news reports in Germany show that Abdul Zahir, the man appointed as the new civilian chief in Marjah, served part of a more than four-year prison sentence for stabbing his son in 1998. A U.S. official confirmed that he did serve time in Germany, though Zahir denies he committed any crime.

"I was not a killer. I was not a smuggler. ... I didn't commit any crime," Zahir told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday evening. He said allegations of a criminal record were "all a lie."

Zahir's integrity is an issue because his job is to convince residents of the town in Helmand province that the Afghan government can provide them with a better life than the Taliban, which were routed during a three-week offensive by thousands of U.S., NATO and Afghan troops. Marjah is the first major test of NATO's counterinsurgency strategy since President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 new American troops to try to reverse the Taliban's momentum.

Adm. Gregory Smith, director of communications for NATO, said the international alliance strongly supports Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal, who picked Zahir for the job. "Zahir, from our reporting, is doing good work down there," Smith said Saturday, adding that NATO is not pushing Afghan officials to oust him.

Zahir said he lived in Germany for 15 years before returning to Afghanistan in 2000. During his time in Germany, he said he worked in a hotel and at a laundry service.

Zahir, a leading member of the Alizai tribe, has lived with his family for the past four years in Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah, residents of the city said. He worked there with Jilani Popal, head of the Afghan Independent Directorate of Local Government, an agency seeking to boost the effectiveness and capacity of local governments.

He said he took the job as civilian chief in Marjah because "I love my country and my country needed me. My relatives, my tribe were here."

Zahir said his adversaries in Afghanistan were trying to tarnish his reputation.

"This news is coming from those people who are against me," he said. "They are against my relations with the foreigners. They want to sabotage me. They don't want such a person to serve the people, who has good relations with Americans, British, and foreigners."

In an interview last week, Mangal, the governor of Helmand, said he wasn't aware of anything illegal in Zahir's background.

"He is not being appointed forever, but he will be here for some time," he said.

Mangal said that a request was made of Interpol to check whether the new Marjah district governor had any outstanding warrants or was being sought. He said Interpol said he was not on any watch list or wanted for any crime.

Zahir has been tasked with bringing good governance to Marjah and ensuring that the new police in the area are symbolic of a new breed of Afghan policeman that is honest and committed to bringing security to the country.

"In Marjah we have a new strategy," Mangal said. "If we don't bring security and development and if we don't solve their problems, then they will think the Taliban is better than us."

If Zahir isn't up to the task, Mangal said, "We will dismiss him. If he doesn't have the ability, if he doesn't bring law and order and security, then we will dismiss him."

In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai's spokesman Waheed Omar said he wasn't familiar with Zahir but that Marjah's residents will support the government if it brings security and an administration free of corruption.

Omar warned that poor governance could drive residents back to the Taliban.

Court and news accounts from the late 1990s provide details of Zahir's past.

Annette von Schmiedeberg, a spokeswoman for the Offenbach branch of the prosecutor's office in Darmstadt in central Germany, said Friday that an Afghan citizen with the name Abdul Z. was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for attempted manslaughter by the county court in Darmstadt on Nov. 2, 1998. Von Schmiedeberg said that in accordance with German privacy laws she could not give the full name or details about the crime.

A person familiar with Zahir and the 1998 court sentencing in Germany identified him Friday for the AP after viewing a pair of photographs of him taken last month. He asked that his name not be published because he feared for his life.

An American official in Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, also confirmed that Zahir has a criminal record in Germany.

The newspaper Darmstaedter Echo provided three archived articles to the AP that confirmed a court hearing and sentencing of an Afghan citizen at the county court in Darmstadt on the same date, Nov. 2, 1998.

In an article from Nov. 3, 1998, it said the defendant from Afghanistan was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison because "he attempted to stab his 18-year-old son to death with a kitchen knife in the kitchen of his stepdaughter in Nieder-Roden on Dec. 15, 1997, around 4:45 p.m." Nieder-Roden is part of the small town of Rodgau in the central German state of Hesse.

The newspaper said the defendant, who was 47 years old at the time of the sentencing, confessed to the allegations.

He was described as a father of 13 children and husband of two wives.

"The court's chamber assesses that the attack, in which the young man received life-threatening injuries to his liver, was a deliberate attempt of manslaughter and it is therefore sentencing the accused to four years and nine months," the Darmstaedter Echo said.

According to the newspaper's account, the accused said he had been persecuted by the Taliban in Afghanistan and moved with his family to Rodgau in 1989. The court said the man could not cope with the fact that three of his stepchildren, among them two twin sons, turned away from him and moved into their own apartment in the fall of 1996, it reported.

In August 1997, he lured them back to Afghanistan saying he wanted them to attend a wedding there, the newspaper said. But once they arrived in Afghanistan, he took away their passports and plane tickets and abandoned them, it said.

In early December, the sons returned to Germany with financial help from somebody else, the newspaper said.

Back in Rodgau, the convicted man told other Afghans that his children had been kidnapped by an "archenemy in Afghanistan," the newspaper said. However, when one of his wives told him on Dec. 15 that his sons had returned to Germany, he beat her, it said.

One of his sons consequently confronted him about the beating, and he reacted by stabbing his son with an eight-inch (21-centimeter) kitchen knife, it said.

After the incident, the accused fled via the Netherlands and the Czech Republic to the German-Polish border where he was arrested on Jan. 7, 1998, near the German town of Goerlitz, it said.

In an earlier article about the ongoing court trial in Darmstadt, the Darmstaedter Echo reported on Oct. 15, 1998, that the accused was a driver for the defense minister in his homeland and also worked as a salesman.

Grieshaber reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon and Amir Shah in Kabul contributed to this report.





 

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Afghan resistance statement

Kabul Recent Attack, a Clear Reflector of Mujahideen’s Military Victory


Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63938&hd=&size=1&l=e

Rabi' al-awwal 20, 1431 A.H, Saturday March 06, 2010
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate

The recent attack of five armed heroes of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan at Ansari Square, in the heart of the Kabul city, on last Friday substantiated once again that Mujahideen can daringly target important centers of the internal hireling enemy by successfully evading their security and intelligence checkpoints, still more to kill a number of internal puppet soldiers and foreign nationals as well as injure many others.

The brave Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate used successful tactics of warfare to target the invading enemy and their coward supporters, even the enemy forces, which are armed to the teeth, could not prevent them from carrying out the attack. As a result, some high-ranking military and civil officials of the enemy were compelled to submit their resignation.

The successful attack of Mujahideen had this clear message for the invading enemy that the operations in Marjah by your moribund army of 15,000 soldiers under the name of "together" has no impact on the Mujahideen. The enemy is not able to remain safe and secure from the attacks of Mujahideen even in Kabul, the capital of the country.

The battles started by 15,000 American, British and NATO troops against a minuscule number of Mujahideen in a small area of Marjah and which still continues, have only harmed civilians by forcing them to leave their homes and hearths; killed and injured a dozens of common people. Except that, they had no other achievement.

All military and political analysts believe that the accurate and effective operations of Mujahideen in the heart of Kabul show that the current Marjah operations by the enemy have no negative impact on the morale and military preparedness of Mujahideen. If they try to extend the operations to other parts of the country in order to prevent attack of Mujahideen in the coming spring, they obtain no tangible results except as mentioned above.

On the other hand, after the beginning of the operations Mushtarak by the enemy, the Afghan people and the public of the world came to know the true face of the farcical endeavors of Obama and his war-mongering Allies in London, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi for restoration of peace in Afghanistan. Apparently, the Marjah operations were Obama’s peace gift to the residents of Marjah town! In fact, the Mushtarak brutal operations have been launched under the name of establishment of peace in the country. The soldiers’ mobilization and the military hardware preparation took place under the same name of peace. A well-known Afghan proverb which says " liars do not remember what they say," aptly applies to the organizers and implementers of these operations.

Two weeks before the inception of the military operations Mustarak, the invaders had launched a media war, claiming that they were making every effort to establish peace in Afghanistan. They said that they needed economic assistance from the international community to achieve this goal. When they received some assistance under this phony demand, then they forgot all about restoration of peace in the country. Instead, they used the fund to carry out the destructive operations. As a result, many foreign invading soldiers were either killed or injured. In addition to this, tens of thousand of Marjah resident were driven out of their homes; many were detained, injured and killed during the operations. Now the invaders are tending to extend the operations to other parts of the country.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, being at the front line of the strongholds of defense and resistance of Jihad, has the capability with the support of the Afghan Mujahid people and the help of the Almighty Allah (SWT), to strike back against the invaders. This time, the strike of the Mujahideen against the invaders will be more severe and tragic than the one they had been receiving during the past two months. According to the enemy’s own census and acknowledgement, their casualties now have crossed the limit of hundreds of soldiers.

It will not be good for the reputation of the internationals community that their funds should be squandered by Americans and their allies on operations which are aimed at oppressing the Afghans, driving them from their homes, killing and injuring them or that the money should end up in the hands of the invaders to ironically realize their personal goals of profit-mongering; whereas the funds were, in the first place, meant to establish prosperity and well-being of the Afghans.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan





 

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SAS in Afghanistan suffers worst losses for 60 years


by Michael Smith

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63943&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 6, 2010

BRITAIN’S special forces have suffered the worst blow to their fighting strength since the second world war, with 80 members killed or crippled in Afghanistan.

Serious injuries have left more than 70 unable to fight, while 12 have been killed. It means the forces have lost about a sixth of their full combat capacity.

The Sunday Times has established that the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Squadron (SBS) have mounted "several hundred" operations targeting Taliban leaders since 2007.

British special forces operations in southern Afghanistan now centre on persuading mid-ranking Taliban leaders that they are better off working with the Afghan government.This involves a mixture of "hard arrests" — snatch operations to grab key Taliban leaders to gather intelligence — and "offensive action" in which Taliban leaders are killed.

A senior special forces source said: "There are ops happening every day and very big ops, hard arrests, offensive actions — it’s having a lot of effect on the Taliban leadership."

Sources say commanders are putting pressure on the SAS and SBS reservists to fill the gaps in manpower. The high casualty rate is a result of both the scale of special forces operations in the past three years and the Taliban’s increasing use of roadside bombs.

"The operational pool has been severely depleted," the source said. "It’s largely because of the numbers of injuries. There are lots of Hereford [SAS] and Poole [SBS] guys walking round with missing limbs."

The death toll includes three from the SBS, one SAS officer, three SAS reservists, one member of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), and four members of the Special Forces Support Group (SFSG). That has added to the previous toll from Iraq, where seven members of the SAS and one SBS commando died and more than 30 members of the SAS suffered crippling injuries.

The Falklands claimed the lives of 19 SAS members — 18 of them in a helicopter crash.

The commanding officer of the SBS, in charge of British special forces operations in southern Afghanistan, has warned that the pace of operations is likely to continue. "Many of our team have been almost continually fighting our country’s enemies since 2001," he said, "and it is likely that our current scale of effort will continue for some time."

"Sabre" squadrons of SBS and SAS are based at the tactical group headquarters in Kandahar. Unlike Iraq, where the SAS was in the lead, Afghanistan has seen a dramatic increase in operations by the SBS, which has seen its budget increase from £17m in 2001 to £160m today. This winter the SBS reverted to arctic warfare skills, using skis to track down Taliban commanders above the snowline in the Hindu Kush.





 

 

:: Article nr. 63943 sent on 07-mar-2010 09:49 ECT

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America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan

by James Lucas, March 06, 2010
http://original.antiwar.com/james-lucas/2010/03/05/americas-nation-destroying-mission-in-afghanistan/


Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons, and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.   

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deteriorated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power. 

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, our nation’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible — making the situation even worse. But the most cataclysmic aspect of this chronology of events is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the image of the U.S. in the world is that of the leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth.

Afghanistan in the late 1970s was a predominantly poor, rural, and moderate Muslim nation. Although they were second class citizens, women were allowed to unveil and had the right to vote. From 1933-1978 women started to enter the workforce and become teachers, nurses, and even politicians. They worked to end illiteracy and forced marriages. Most of these advances were in Kabul, the most modern and populous city in Afghanistan, while in most of the rural areas women were treated as property.       

In the 1970s Afghanistan also had serious economic problems, one of which the concentration of ownership of most of the land in the hands of tribal and religious leaders (mullahs). Only 3% of the rural population owned 75% of the land.   

Labor unions were legalized, a minimum wage and a progressive income tax were established, and a separation of church and state was adopted.   

Then, in the latter years of that decade various progressive and communist groups struggled over how to modernize Afghanistan and resolve these inequities. Unfortunately, their efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rate of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

It was the revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan to pick up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.   

According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups.

By the spring of 1979, rebellion had spread to most of the country’s 29 provinces. On March 24, a garrison of soldiers in Herat killed a group of Soviet advisers (and their families) who had ordered Afghan troops to fire on anti-government demonstrators. From this point, the regime was no longer merely isolated from peasants in the countryside, but divided by open hostility from an overwhelming majority of all the people.   

The government’s secret police and a repressive civilian police force went into action across Afghanistan, and army troops were sent into the countryside to subdue "feudal villagers".

The situation was very grave in Afghanistan at that point, but the U.S. was destined to make it much worse. The initial conflict might have been resolved far short of a civil war if the U.S. had refrained from fostering the uprising. Even if the struggle had progressed to a civil war, the nation might eventually have recovered and moved ahead. Civil wars are disastrous for nations, but after great pain and suffering they can eventually overcome this setback, as the U.S. did after its civil war. 

The following is an account of how the U.S. laid the groundwork for its encouragement of the uprising and the enormous support that it gave later for the ongoing revolt that would lead to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. 

The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began in the 1950s and 1960s. The CIA used impressive bribes and threats to support this growing opposition to the progressive changes, and it also recruited Afghan students in the U.S. to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the U.S. and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the U.S. "are either CIA-trained or indoctrinated."   

According to Roger Morris, National Security Council staff member, the CIA started to offer covert backing to Islamic radicals as early as 1973-1974.

Subsequently, various other U.S. officials would also indicate their willingness to sacrifice the welfare of the Afghan people in the interest of the American goal of worldwide domination.

In August 1979, four months before the Soviet attack, a classified State Department Report stated: "the United States larger interests …would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan."

According to one senior official, "The question here was whether it was morally acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives for our geopolitical interests." Carter’s CIA director Stansfield Turner answered the question: "I decided I could live with that."

Judging by examples of U.S. interferences since World War II, it appears that replies similar to that of Turner may have been given with similar genocide-like results. 

In 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, came clean and admitted that indeed the U.S. had helped bring about the Soviet invasion. Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris in its January 15-21 issue carried the account of an interview with him in which he was asked if he had played a role in providing intelligence to the Mujahideen before the Soviets invaded. His reply was as follows:

"Yes, according to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

The Soviet Union at that time bordered Afghanistan on the north and had various ties with Afghanistan over the years. Those areas are now the nations of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Since these areas had large Muslim populations, when the Afghanistan civil war started the Soviet Union feared that the revolt could spread to within its own borders. Since they were not able to convince the factions of the communist government in Afghanistan to resolve their difference and go more slowly in their modernization program the Soviets invaded in December 1979 to quell the uprising.

To counter the Soviets, the U.S. deliberately chose to give most of its support to the most extreme groups. A disproportionate share of U.S. arms went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater. According to journalist Tim Weiner, "[Hekmatyar's] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him ’scary’, ‘vicious’, a ‘fascist’, definite dictatorship material."

The Mujahideen, while in power, killed or forced into exile most progressive-minded people, especially those suspected of being socialist or Marxist. Thus, the prospects of any progressive secular form of government in Afghanistan were eventually undermined. This continued after the Soviets left. Edmund McWilliams was sent to Afghanistan in 1989 as a semi-independent analyst of U.S. policy regarding the Afghan jihad. He discovered that as the Soviets left, Hekmatyar in alliance with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other groups, moved to eliminate his rivals, kidnapping and murdering Afghan opposition members.

The U.S. was quick to provide weapons to the Mujahideen. By February 1980, the Washington Post reported that they were receiving arms coming from the U.S. government.

The CIA purchased, mainly from China’s government, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light anti-aircraft weapons and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. The amounts were significant — 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983 which rose to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to Mohammad Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war from 1983-87.

Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was responsible for arming the Mujahideen, commented, "The U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan."

In October 1984, CIA director William Casey, who wanted to keep abreast of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, went by plane to the military air base south of Islamabad, Pakistan. Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched Mujahideen training.   

Pakistani officers also traveled to the U.S., for training on the Stinger missile launcher in June, 1986, and then set up a secret Stinger training facility. Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low-flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes, thereby curtailing the damage they could cause. By 1987 a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon officials were visiting the ISI.                                       

During the war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen, with U.S. and Saudi Arabia financial help, augmented the size of its military by securing additional recruits in two ways. First, fundamentalist Islamic religious schools for boys called madrassas were established in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Often they came from refugee camps and were orphans of the war.   

Although the subject matter of the schools was largely fundamentalist in content, structured to develop a fervor to expel the Soviets, the poverty-stricken families often had no other way to provide their boys with an education.   

The prospective students usually had not learned any farming or other skills from their fathers, nor did they have other job opportunities. They were only trained for fighting in wars and how to handle guns. Besides that, food, shelter, and military training were provided at no cost. Some boys who were as young as 13 or 14 saw a future stint in the military as a steady source of income. On several occasions madrassas were closed down so that all the students could join the troops on the battlefront. 

The other source of additional recruits for the Mujahideen was from a variety of nations around the world with sizeable fundamentalist Muslim populations. These were males who wanted to fight the "godless Russians," and some them expected to be martyrs in a holy war.

According to Central Asia specialist and journalist Ahmed Rashid in his book Taliban:

"Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujahideen. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad."

"As for the Mujahideen that this conflict created, they took on a life of their own, and have now spread throughout the Muslim world and are apparently in cells everywhere," says John Ryan, senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg. "About 5,000 of them were brought into Bosnia to fight the Serbs – even Osama bin Laden may have visited Bosnian president Izetbegovic in 1992.   The Mujahideen later helped the Kosovo Albanians. " 

In 1989 the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan and left behind 1.5 million dead Afghans and 14,000 of its own dead.   

But then a new war started, this time between the Mujahideen and the Afghan government. It lasted for three years, until the government was defeated in 1992. After that, the competing armies within the Mujahideen fought among themselves to control Kabul, using stockpiles of weapons that had been provided by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. About 50,000 people were killed and much of the city was left in shambles.   

Even today, little of Kabul has been reconstructed. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven into squalid refugee camps, and millions of exiles were blocked from returning.   

While the Mujahideen were in power there was a severe erosion of women’s rights. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was set up to control women’s dress codes and the length of men’s beards. Rape was a common tool of war for the fundamentalists. As one man said "young women who did not want to be raped by these zealots threw themselves off the top floors of tall buildings and preferred death to rape…Many families who had daughters didn’t want fundamentalists to rape them. So when the fundamentalists attacked their homes, they would kill their own daughters, because it was better for them to die than to be raped by these criminals."

Despite all of this brutality, women were still allowed to work, and get an education under the Mujahideen government. In fact, before the Taliban later took over Kabul, about half of the working population were women who were employed as teachers, doctors, as well as in other professional occupations.       

For the next four years there was a war between the Mujahideen and the Taliban with the latter emerging victorious in 1996. Many Afghans welcomed them, since they believed that they would end the corruption of the Mujahideen. But as fundamentalist Muslims, their policies were similar to those of the Mujahideen. 

A virtual war was declared on women under the Taliban, which had no basis in Islamic law. They were not allowed to participate in the work force or even have doctors treat them (without a male relative present), and girls were forbidden to go to school. They were forbidden to work or leave the house without a male escort, and were forced to cover themselves from head to toe, even covering their eyes. Women who were doctors and teachers before, suddenly were forced to be beggars and even prostitutes in order to feed their families. 

Trying to understand the mindset that allows such injustices to take place is not an easy undertaking. But one thing is obvious, as I have mentioned earlier in this article: the U.S. was the main force that created the conditions that allowed the Mujahideen and the Taliban to come to power because of the support it gave 20 to 30 years ago to the most violent and anti-democratic forces within Afghanistan who ruled ruthlessly, eradicating educated progressive leaders, driving others into exile, and corrupting the minds of many of its young males. 

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 the U.S. reacted by attacking Afghanistan, although none of the those who hijacked the planes in those attacks were Afghans.. The rationale given for the U.S. air attacks on Afghanistan was that the training of the hijackers was done by al-Qaeda in camps in Afghanistan. Although this retaliatory bombing supposedly achieved the stated goal of the U.S. government, it was decided to invade anyway and is still there eight years later. The Taliban was replaced by the Northern Alliance and now there is an Afghan government which is the surrogate of the U.S.

What do the Afghan people have to show now over 30 years after the Soviet invasion in the areas of democracy, women’s rights and economic and social progress? Nothing! In fact the Afghan people are worse off now. And the future of Afghans at the hands of the U.S. probably is horrendous.

Democracy has been undermined in Afghanistan, because many of the progressive leaders were either killed or forced into exile by warlords supported by the U.S. during and after the war with the Soviets. This new government has been formed in an undemocratic process promoted by the U.S. and now consists of some of the warlords who were deposed by the Taliban.   

Today the ordinary Afghan is caught between three forces: the U.S., the Taliban, and the puppet government composed of former members of the Mujahideen whom many Afghans would like to have tried as war criminals. Also, the Upper House of Parliament is not a democratic institution, its members being appointed by the President. Furthermore, the Afghan constitution, although it proclaims equality for men and women, is secondary to the supremacy of Islamic law, which can be used to squash dissent and human rights, including the rights of women. 

Furthermore, it is ludicrous to contend that a nation that is occupied by a foreign power is allowed to make the important decisions. In short, when the U.S. occupiers say "Jump!" the Afghan government replies "How high?"   

Malalai Joya, a young Afghan woman who was elected to the Lower House of Parliament and who was later barred from that body because of her criticism of some of its members, has estimated that up to 60% of the deputies in the Lower House are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses. 

Under the newly established government in 2001, women were allowed to once again work and go to school. Nevertheless, the abuse of women continues, since the government is too weak to enforce many of the laws, especially in the rural areas.   

According to Human Rights Watch, "The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her." 

According to Joya:   

"Women’s conditions in some cities have slightly improved since the Taliban regime. But if we compare it with the era before the rule of the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, it has not changed much. Afghan women had more rights in the 1960s to 1980s than today. Rapes, abductions, murders, forced marriages, and violence are increasing at an alarming rate never seen before in our history. Women commit self-immolation to escape their miseries, and the rate of self-immolations is climbing in many of the provinces. Afghanistan still faces a women’s rights catastrophe." 

The economic and social welfare status of Afghans today due to U.S. intervention that started over 30 years ago is abysmal. The U.S. is not the only culpable nation; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also played major roles in this deterioration.   

The Afghan people are in dire straits. They lost about one and a half million people in their war with the Soviet Union, according to Rashid, and tens of thousands more have died in civil wars. In addition 600,000 have been wounded. About one in ten Afghans is disabled, mostly due to the wars and landmines. Their life life expectancy is about 43 years. 

Many Americans explain this internal strife in Afghanistan by saying that "they have always been fighting among themselves." But the truth is that America has been more or less behind most of the violence, as this article demonstrates.

Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, according to an estimate made by University of New Hampshire Professor Mark Herold. Those who died after impact of an explosive are not counted.

Although more than 3.7 million Afghan refugees have returned to their homes in the past six years, several million still live in Pakistan and Iran. About 132,000 people are internally displaced as a result of drought, violence and instability. Furthermore, there are reportedly about 400,000 orphans in Afghanistan.   

Afghanistan suffers from an unemployment rate of 40% and most of those who have jobs earn only meager wages. Many youth joined the Mujahideen or Taliban in order to receive some food, shelter and income. The average educational level of Afghans is 1.7 years of schooling, which severely limits their job opportunities. As many as 18 million Afghans still live on less than $2 a day. 

Even today the Afghan people are confronted by many dangers. On their land there are still about 10 million mines which cause loss of life and limbs and reduces the amount of land available for farming.     

An estimated seven million people remain susceptible to hunger throughout the country, and Afghanistan is also prone to natural disasters as well as a high risk of diseases.     

Afghanistan needs economic development aid, health care, and educational assistance — not bombs.   

U.S. officials talk about nation-building in Afghanistan. But what they neglect to say is that the U.S. has actually done just the opposite: it has fostered the destruction of much of that nation and now poses a clear and imminent danger to what remains of the rest of that beleaguered country. 

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Fabled Afghan province of Nuristan keeps US at bay

by Ben Sheppard Ben Sheppard
Thu Mar 4, 2:44 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100304/wl_asia_afp/afghanistanunrestsocietynuristan

A US soldier patrols the mountains of Nuristan Province which is still celebrated for its fierce resistance to the Soviet occupation, and retains a strong identity separate from the rest of Afghanistan.

 
KALAGUSH, Afghanistan (AFP) – A region of soaring mountains, rare languages and isolated tribes, Nuristan in northeastern Afghanistan has long held a special fascination for writers and hardy travellers.

A British colonel in 1910 described it as "more impracticable than either of the poles," and in recent years the United States army has learnt that the area's formidable reputation is well-deserved.

Just 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) inside the provincial border, a convoy of US military vehicles comes to a halt on a rocky, winding track.

"It takes an act of God to get us to go further," says Captain Matthew Frye.

Any advance into Nuristan beyond the Gondalabuk bridge brings guaranteed rocket and gun attacks from insurgents who use the rugged terrain and their local knowledge to keep the US soldiers away.

The only permanent US military presence in Nuristan is now at Kalagush in the southwest corner of the province.

One US post, Camp Keating, was established in the mountains near the border with Pakistan in 2006 to disrupt insurgent safe havens and to tackle smuggling. Related article: India, Pakistan's 'proxy war' in Afghanistan

It was abandoned last October shortly after eight soldiers died when 300 militants nearly overran the camp -- though its closure was already scheduled as part of the US's "drawback" policy.

The military's bruising experience in Nuristan would have come as little surprise to the handful of Westerners who had previously ventured there.

Eric Newby's classic travel book "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" tells of his testing expedition to the region in 1956 when he had a chance meeting with legendary explorer and author Wilfred Thesiger.

Newby described a particular high ridge as "one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through".

Such awe-stuck sentiments are now shared by many in the US military.

They accept that it is impossible to ensure Nuristan is free of Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants, and they are implementing General Stanley McChrystal's new strategy of concentrating instead on population centres.

"It could appear to be a safe haven for the bad guys," admitted Major George Hammar, the acting commanding officer at Camp Kalagush.

"This is difficult country, with no roads, and it is back-breaking to patrol through on foot.

"Nuristani people are sceptical of outsiders. They haven't ever seen Americans, and no Westerners since they threw out the Soviets in the 1980s."

Nuristan is still celebrated for its fierce resistance to the Soviet occupation, and retains a strong identity separate from the rest of Afghanistan.

Rudyard Kipling, when looking for the ultimate remote and mysterious setting, used the region for his 1888 short story "The Man Who Would Be King," which was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Known as Kafiristan ('land of unbelievers'), it was renamed Nuristan ('land of light') when forcibly converted to Islam from paganism only in 1896.

Today, the US-led international coalition is trying -- as it is across war-torn Afghanistan -- to fund development schemes and promote local government structures in Nuristan through a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).

But security is too dangerous and transport too difficult for the PRT to operate in most of the province.

Compounding their problems, several officials confirm that relations between the coalition and Nuristan's governor Jamaluddin Badar have completely broken down over allegations of corruption and months of unpaid police salaries.

"We withdraw investment in places we cannot go," said US Commander Russell McCormack, head of the PRT.

"In one month, we cancelled 3.5 million dollars in schools because we could not go to the sites to verify what was happening to the money, but I am passionate about helping the people who deserve help."

The US efforts will struggle to produce any results, according to Richard Strand, an American academic widely considered to be the world's leading expert on Nuristan culture and society.

"The Taliban frankly have taken over the eastern side," he told AFP from Arizona.

"My old Nuristani friends tell me it is real tough for people like them who don't agree with the Taliban. They are afraid to go out of their houses."

-- No easy answers in a land of myths and legends --

Strand, who lived in a village in east Nuristan in the late 1960s and has visited regularly since, is reputedly the only Westerner to have ever mastered the province's five distinct languages.

He speaks all of them to some extent and specialised in the Kamviri language of the Kom tribe, which numbers fewer than 10,000 people.

Strand also dashes one of Nuristan's most enduring legends: that its people -- some of whom have red hair and pale skin -- are descendants of Alexander the Great who conquered the region in 327 BC.

"Total bunk," Strand said, pointing out that the people now known as Nuristanis moved into the mountains several hundred years after Alexander's invasion.

"Their appearance is probably due to being an isolated strain of people who have not bred much with others," he said.

Strand's expertise in Nuristan is unique, and the US government has sought his advice in its search for a resolution to Afghanistan's turmoil.

But he says he can offer only realism, not answers.

"It's a joke, and I hate to say that because I really feel for these soldiers," he said.

"They control one stretch of road (at Kalagush) for a few miles up and down, and that's it. If they make a foray further, they get their teeth kicked in.

"The truth is that they can't get to where true Nuristanis live at all."

Strand has identified a long-term growth of Taliban and Al-Qaeda influence in the province -- which he blames on extremist Islamic leaders in Pakistan, where many Nuristanis fled during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.

"In the years since, a certain number of younger people were totally bamboozled by radical Pakistani mullahs," he said.

"My elderly Nuristani friends often use the term 'brain-washed'.

"I have visited these refugee camps in Pakistan where Nuristanis stayed, getting 15 hours a day of propaganda over the mosque loudspeaker telling them what rotten people we kafirs (non-believers) are."

Nuristan may be a romantic wilderness to outsiders, but it is a painful reflection of the human condition today, says Strand.

"It was never easy to live there, but it is gorgeous and I always loved the place," he said.

"Right now, their culture and society are being destroyed by the fundamentalists."

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Hekmatyar’s Forces Battling Taliban Pledge to Join Karzai Government


By Rahim Faiez, Associated Press Writer

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63959&hd=&size=1&l=e

Afghan militants battling Taliban defect to gov’t

March 7, 2010

KABUL – Dozens of Islamist militants defected to Afghan government forces Sunday after armed clashes erupted between them and their one-time Taliban allies in a northeastern province, two police officials said.

Fighters for the Hezb-e-Islami militia, loyal to regional warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, pledged to join the government while under pressure during the fierce fighting with Taliban militants in Baghlan province, the officials said.

At least 50 militants and an unknown number of civilians have died in the battles that have raged for two days and continued Sunday night, as militants apparently fought over control of several villages where the government has almost no presence.

The factions were firing rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns in the battles, provincial Gov. Mohammad Akbar Barakzai said.

Violent clashes between anti-government Islamist factions are rare, although various militias have their own agendas and power struggles are relatively common.

Provincial police Chief Kabir Andarabi said more than 100 Hezb-e-Islami fighters have pledged to join the government forces that have massed on the edge of the battle zone. The regional police commander, Gen. Ghulam Mushtaba Patang, put the number of defecting fighters at 50 but said the situation was in flux and more could defect soon.

It was not immediately clear whether the clashes were a localized militant dispute or represented signs of a rift between Islamist insurgent groups that fight the government of President Hamid Karzai and international forces in the country.

Provincial deputy police chief Zalmai Mangal said reports from the area indicate that at least 50 militant fighters were dead, 35 from Hezb-e-Islami and 15 from the Taliban. It was unclear how many total militants were involved, he said by telephone from a district near the fighting where government forces have rushed to observe and try to help any wounded civilians.

Police had not yet entered the area of the clashes as of midday Sunday, but were standing by with mobile hospitals to help any wounded, he said.

It was unclear what touched off the fighting, which erupted Saturday morning and continued late into the night, resuming Sunday, Mangal said. However, he said that Taliban fighters reportedly had moved into villages that traditionally were controlled by Hezb-e-Islami.

Barakzai said the fighting centered around five to six villages west of Baghlan-e-Jadid district in the central part of the province.

He also said that 50 militants were reported killed, but did not have a breakdown of the casualties.

"We don’t know yet about casualties among civilians or damage to civilian houses," he said.





 

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Fiction of Marja as City Was US Information War


Monday 08 March 2010
http://www.truthout.org/fiction-marja-city-was-us-information-war57470
by: Gareth Porter  |  Inter Press Service

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

"It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

Richard B. Scott, who worked in Marja as an adviser on irrigation for the U.S. Agency for International Development as recently as 2005, agrees that Marja has nothing that could be mistaken as being urban. It is an "agricultural district" with a "scattered series of farmers' markets," Scott told IPS in a telephone interview.

The ISAF official said the only population numbering tens of thousands associated with Marja is spread across many villages and almost 200 square kilometres, or about 125 square miles.

Marja has never even been incorporated, according to the official, but there are now plans to formalise its status as an actual "district" of Helmand Province.

The official admitted that the confusion about Marja's population was facilitated by the fact that the name has been used both for the relatively large agricultural area and for a specific location where farmers have gathered for markets.

However, the name Marja "was most closely associated" with the more specific location, where there are also a mosque and a few shops.

That very limited area was the apparent objective of "Operation Moshtarak", to which 7,500 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops were committed amid the most intense publicity given any battle since the beginning of the war.

So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 people get started?

The idea was passed on to the news media by the U.S. Marines in southern Helmand. The earliest references in news stories to Marja as a city with a large population have a common origin in a briefing given Feb. 2 by officials at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base there.

The Associated Press published an article the same day quoting "Marine commanders" as saying that they expected 400 to 1,000 insurgents to be "holed up" in the "southern Afghan town of 80,000 people." That language evoked an image of house to house urban street fighting.

The same story said Marja was "the biggest town under Taliban control" and called it the "linchpin of the militants' logistical and opium-smuggling network". It gave the figure of 125,000 for the population living in "the town and surrounding villages". ABC news followed with a story the next day referring to the "city of Marja" and claiming that the city and the surrounding area "are more heavily populated, urban and dense than other places the Marines have so far been able to clear and hold."

The rest of the news media fell into line with that image of the bustling, urbanised Marja in subsequent stories, often using "town" and "city" interchangeably. Time magazine wrote about the "town of 80,000" Feb. 9, and the Washington Post did the same Feb. 11.

As "Operation Moshtarak" began, U.S. military spokesmen were portraying Marja as an urbanised population centre. On Feb. 14, on the second day of the offensive, Marine spokesman Lt. Josh Diddams said the Marines were "in the majority of the city at this point."

He also used language that conjured images of urban fighting, referring to the insurgents holding some "neighbourhoods".

A few days into the offensive, some reporters began to refer to a "region", but only created confusion rather than clearing the matter up. CNN managed to refer to Marja twice as a "region" and once as "the city" in the same Feb. 15 article, without any explanation for the apparent contradiction.

The Associated Press further confused the issue in a Feb. 21 story, referring to "three markets in town - which covers 80 square miles…."

A "town" with an area of 80 square miles would be bigger than such U.S. cities as Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Cleveland. But AP failed to notice that something was seriously wrong with that reference.
Long after other media had stopped characterising Marja as a city, the New York Times was still referring to Marja as "a city of 80,000", in a Feb. 26 dispatch with a Marja dateline.

The decision to hype up Marja as the objective of "Operation Moshtarak" by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city would not have been made independently by the Marines at Camp Leatherneck.

A central task of "information operations" in counterinsurgency wars is "establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative", according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.

That task is usually done by "higher headquarters" rather than in the field, as the manual notes.
The COIN manual asserts that news media "directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency." The manual refers to "a war of perceptions…conducted continuously using the news media."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of the counterinsurgency manual, saying, "This is all a war of perceptions."

The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a "large and loud victory."

The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message.

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Afghanistan War Strategy Facing 'Serious' Setbacks

Shortage of Qualified Personnel, Housing and Planning Threatens Civilian Surge in Afghanistan


By KRISTINA WONG
WASHINGTON, March 8, 2010—
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Afghanistan/afghan-civilian-surge-faces-challenges-report-concludes/story?id=10037189

The Obama administration was so successful in adding to the ranks of U.S. civilians on-the-ground in Afghanistan that it overlooked key challenges that may undermine its progress, according to a new report.

"Even with the able leadership of Kabul's senior officers, the best of intentions and the most dedicated efforts, Embassy Kabul faces serious challenges in meeting the administration's deadline for 'success' in Afghanistan," said the report, released Friday by the State Department inspector general's office.

Problems such as a shortage of housing, lack of qualified personnel and a lack of organization, are taxing an overworked U.S. civilian workforce. There are nearly 1,000 U.S. civilians in Afghanistan representing at least 10 different U.S. agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, Agriculture, Justice, Treasury, Homeland Security, as well as the CIA, FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. From working in ministries to military teams, the personnel behind the surge in the U.S. civilian force is part of President Obama's civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

"The unprecedented pace and scope of the civilian buildup, the need for these new officers to arrive in Kabul before support infrastructure expansions have been completed, and the complexity of establishing arrangements to equip the new subject-matter experts for success in the field will constrain the ability of these new officers in the short-term to promote stability, good governance, and rule of law (ROL) in Afghanistan," the report said.

The report came after two months of inspections at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last fall, from September to November. At the time, about 600 U.S. direct-hire employees were in Afghanistan, a doubling of civilians since January 2009. The number had increased to nearly 1,000 by this January.

"The need to expand the already over-burdened life support systems (housing, food, security, transport) in Kabul and in the field to support the new staff has itself become a major short-term challenge," said the report, which described members of provincial reconstruction team staff deployed outside of Kabul housed in makeshift lodgings with no heat or running water.

Temporary duty officers in Kabul were housed in 65-bed modified cargo containers with common bath facilities for months at a time, according to the report.


Apartments Are Offered as Incentive to Stay Two Years in Afghanistan
"Embassy leadership is fully aware of these shortcomings and actively engaged in negotiations with coalition partners and Department of Defense commanders to rectify them," the report concluded. "However, it is not likely that accommodations available for this civilian upsurge will be adequate in the short term absent support by interagency officials for embassy efforts. Conditions on the embassy compound are already strained beyond capacity, and, despite the embassy's efforts, there will be serious challenges in residential and office space."

There were three apartment buildings with a total of 144 single and double occupancy units, and occupants of the "well-appointed apartments universally reported satisfaction with their units, and stated that living in one of the apartments made a significant difference in their morale and quality of life," according to the report.

An assignment to an apartment is highly prized, and is offered as an incentive to employees who volunteer for a two-year tour in Kabul, the report explained.

At the time of the inspections, the embassy had presented a request for an additional 307 U.S. direct-hires for fiscal years 2010 and 2011. According to the special representative's office, those numbers have been revised, and could perhaps be even higher than 307.

Besides shortage of resources, a lack of planning by the administration threatens to hinder success of the surge. "Because the [State] Department committed to complete the first phase of this plus up before the end of 2009 with a second phase to begin in early 2010, new staff is arriving in Afghanistan before the embassy can prepare position descriptions, ready housing, and office space, or adequate on-site supervision for the subject-matter experts (3161s), many of whom have never worked in the government," the report stated.

And while some of these civilians oversee implementation of grants and development projects across Afghanistan, "the deteriorating security situation in many areas of the country limits the embassy staff 's exposure to Afghans other than regular government interlocutors and constrains the reporting and advocacy work that U.S. direct-hires from all agencies were brought to Afghanistan to undertake," the report said.

Traveling outside the embassy or outside of a military base can be onerous, requiring about 15 to 16 military personnel and three to four armored vehicles.


Report Cites Lack of Communication, Coordination
Furthermore, the 131-page report describes a lack of communication and coordination between civilians deployed to provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) outside of Kabul, and members of the embassy in Kabul, resulting in poor reporting back to the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington, D.C. The report also described a lack of communication and coordination between the special representative's office and the Kabul embassy.

Exacerbating this lack of communication and coordination are one-year deployment terms, the report said. The lengths -- which include at least two "rest and relaxation" breaks -- are so brief that they disrupt continuity in policy and project implementation, many of which take more than one year to complete.

"Because the majority of assignments to Kabul are for only one year with multiple R&R breaks, most U.S. staff spend approximately two months of their one-year tours on leave. The one-year assignment scenario limits the development of expertise, contributes to a lack of continuity, requires a higher number of officers to achieve the administration's strategic goals, and results in what one former ambassador calls 'an institutional lobotomy,'" the report said.

The report also cited lack of qualified personnel, such as in the political affairs section.

"The biggest challenge facing the [PAS] section is the combination of one-year tours, inexperienced officers, and simultaneous rotation of all personnel," the report concluded. "As the inspection began, no officer had been in the job for longer than two months. Almost all except the counselor and deputy were on their first political reporting tour. Many had not received a hand-over memo from their predecessor, and most did not receive an orientation to the section's work although they did receive the mission's overall administrative orientation."

Other quality-of-life issues threaten to reduce the effectiveness of U.S. civilians in Afghanistan, such as long days and inconvenient work hours. "Continual 80-hour work weeks, even with periodic R&Rs, may, in fact, reduce productivity as staff reaches the half-way point in their tours of duty. The time difference between Kabul and Washington regularly extends Kabul's workday with a flurry of late-night requests to clear briefers, or provide information for Washington's consumption first thing in the morning, Washington time," the report said.


Report: Quality of Life at Embassy Kabul Is Difficult
"In addition, Washington's often preferred time for video conferences or telephone calls is at the end of their day, which equates with 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. Kabul time," according to the report. "Last-minute requests that Kabul be prepared to participate in information sharing meetings or policy discussions in the middle of the night sap the energy of the senior staff, disrupt the next day's meeting or travel schedule, and add to already long work days."

Along with highlighting problems and potential challenges, the report made 89 recommendations, and 46 informal recommendations.

But it makes clear there is no easy short-term rectification, especially with only more civilians to come over the next two years.

"The quality of life at Embassy Kabul is difficult and will remain so for the indefinite future as the arrival of even more personnel increases the stresses on the infrastructure," the report said.

"Permanent office buildings are already filled to capacity. Basic systems are at or near capacity. Management, with the strong support of the department, including [Bureau of South and Central Asia] and [Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations], copes on a day-to-day basis," it read.

"There is some concern that the additional civilian personnel now arriving in Kabul will outstrip the ability of the embassy's infrastructure to meet the demands placed upon it in the short term. While the management section has a carefully orchestrated plan for construction of both permanent and temporary office and housing units for the civilian uplift, a slight delay in any one phase could result in a serious shortfall in life support."

The report is available online at http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/138084.pdf.

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Gates visits Afghanistan to prepare US offensive against Kandahar


By Joe Kishore

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64004&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, March 9, 2010

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Monday to discuss preparations for a major military offensive against Kandahar, the country’s second largest city.

At a joint press conference in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Gates warned of a new round of bloody violence against the Afghan people. "People do need to understand there is some very hard fighting and some very hard days ahead," he said. "I worry people will get too impatient and think things are better than they actually are."

The US is in the midst of a "surge" in southern Afghanistan, under the direction of the Obama administration. The main target will be Kandahar, a city of some 900,000 people and the birthplace of the Taliban. The US is amassing troops for the offensive—so far only 6,000 of Obama’s additional 30,000 troops have arrived.

While "Kandahar has not been under Taliban control, it’s been under a menacing Taliban presence," Gates warned. He discounted any effort to open up negotiations with sections of the Taliban until much more violence had been unleashed. Any peace deal would have to wait until opposition groups saw clearly that the odds "are no longer in their favor," he said.

In addition to meeting with Karzai, Gates held meetings with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal indicated that there would be a steady increase of repression in the area surrounding Kandahar over the coming months. "There won’t be a D-Day that is climactic," he said. "It will be a rising tide of security as it comes."

Gates’s trip was also evidently intended to preempt a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had a previously scheduled meeting with Karzai the same day. Iran announced early on Monday that Ahmadinejad was postponing his visit.

Gates used his visit as an opportunity to issue new threats against Iran. En route to Afghanistan, he accused Iran of "playing a double game in Afghanistan." He continued, "They want to maintain a good relationship with the Afghan government. They also want to do everything they possibly can to hurt us, or for us not to be successful."

Gates accused Iran of aiding the Taliban, "whether they are providing money" or "some low level of support." Typically, he provided no evidence of such aid.

In a clear threat of aggressive action, Gates warned, "They also understand that our reaction, should they get too aggressive in this, is not one they would want to think about." The Pentagon later "clarified" this statement, claiming it was meant to refer to US actions in Afghanistan, not a military action against Iran itself.

However, the charges are the latest in a series of moves designed to escalate pressure on Iran. Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that Iran is "moving toward a military dictatorship." The Obama administration is currently seeking to push through stronger sanctions against Iran in the United Nations, while intensifying charges that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Gates’s visit also comes a day after elections in Iraq, where the Obama administration has sought to undermine what it considers to be the more pro-Iranian faction, the United Iraqi Alliance coalition.

Plans for the new offensive in Kandahar follow the formal ending of major combat operations in Marjah, a much smaller city chosen as the first step in the southern campaign. In the course of the campaign dozens of civilians were killed, despite US claims that it was seeking to limit civilian casualties.

Over the weekend, Karzai visited Marjah, where he was besieged with complaints about the US military and corruption in the Afghan government.

The New York Times quoted the comments of one local Afghan leader, Hajji Abdul Aziz, denouncing the warlords associated with the Afghan government: "We will tell you that the warlords who ruled us for the past eight years, those people whose hands are red with the people’s blood, those people who killed hundreds—they are still ruling over this nation."

In an indication of the disaster brought on by the US offensive, the Times added that the local officials "outlined newer complaints: Innocent farmers arrested by the Americans. No doctors. Destroyed irrigation canals. Schools and homes taken over by American troops. Other homes wrecked."

"You have said on the radio that you want our children to be educated," Aziz said. "But how could we educate or children when their schools are turned into military bases? The Taliban never build their military bases in the schools."

Reports have also emerged that the new district chief picked by Karzai to head Marjah, Jajji Abdul Zahir, had previously been arrested in Germany on charges of stabbing his stepson. While Zahir has denied the reports, US and NATO officials have indicated that such criminality would be a good thing. "This country is not going to be run by choir boys," the senior NATO official in Kabul is quoted as saying.

Gates added, "The question is, if the guy committed a crime and served the time, then does that automatically rule him out?"

The preparations for Kandahar make clear that the US is in the midst of a protracted and expanding occupation, which will have devastating consequences for the people of Afghanistan.




 

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Published on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 by The Washington Post


House Liberals Force Vote on Pullout From Afghanistan

by Perry Bacon Jr.

Liberals in the House, who have spent much of the past year complaining that other congressional Democrats and the White House are insufficiently progressive, will get a chance this week to vent about one of their biggest concerns: the war in Afghanistan.

House leaders will allow three hours of formal debate, probably Wednesday, on an antiwar resolution written by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), one of the leading antiwar voices in Congress. The resolution, which has 16 co-sponsors, calls for the United States to remove all of its troops from Afghanistan in 30 days -- or by the end of the year, if it is determined that trying to do so in a month would be too dangerous.

The resolution will invoke the 1973 War Powers Act, which Congress passed in protest of the escalation of the Vietnam War by a series of presidents without formal congressional authorization. It requires congressional approval for a president to put troops in a military conflict for more than 90 days. Congress passed a resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, and some congressional scholars doubt Congress can invoke the act now to force changes to President Obama's war policy.

Whether or not it would have any legal force if enacted, the resolution has almost no chance of being approved in the House, where nearly all Republicans and many Democrats support maintaining or increasing troop levels.

But the lawmakers supporting the resolution, a group that includes antiwar Republicans such as Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), say Congress needs to have a formal debate on the war.

"We haven't had a real debate," Kucinich said in explaining why he was pushing the resolution. "We want to light the fire of the American peace movement." (And, he added, "get out of there!")

Democratic leaders support bringing the measure to a vote to give antiwar lawmakers an opportunity to register their frustration with Obama's decision to increase troop levels by 30,000 before Congress approves the funding for the surge.

The administration has requested $33 billion to boost the U.S. force in Afghanistan from about 70,000 to 100,000, a request that could be debated and approved by Congress as soon as next month. A $96.7 billion funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drew 60 "no" votes in the House last year, 51 of them from Democrats.

"There are many members in the caucus who are eager to have a vote soon on Afghanistan," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said when Kucinich proposed the measure. "This may satisfy that need."

The vote will be a measure of the depth of opposition to Obama's war policy, because it is not tied to troop funding, which lawmakers in both parties are loath to vote against.

© 2010 The Washington Post Company

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/09-4

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South Asia
Mar 11, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC11Df01.html 
 
Marjah fears return of warlords


By Mohammad Elyas Daee and Abubakar Siddique

MARJAH - Azizullah Khan might be this town's best example of civic-mindedness. He is a middle-aged farmer in this area, at the center of a recent large-scale military effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province.

His dedication to a community under the most trying of circumstances earned him the respect of Marjah's locals, who long depended on his pharmacy in the town's dusty bazaar as their only healthcare option.

When news came that Afghan President Hamid Karzai would be visiting on March 7, following the anti-Taliban operation carried out by Afghan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, it was Khan who was entrusted to speak for Marjah's residents. With their marketplace in ruins as a result of the offensive, the feeling was that Khan would be well-suited to present their demands and concerns based on first-hand experience.

Addressing the president inside the community's main mosque, Khan peppered his message with salutations and blunt grievances, even reminding the Afghan leader of his oft-repeated promises to step down if he failed to deliver security and services.
"We are not asking you to resign, but our patience is running thin," Khan told the only president that Afghans have ever elected. "For the past eight years the warlords have been ruling us. Their hands have been stained with the blood of innocents and they have killed hundreds of people. Even now they are being imposed on the people in the name of tribal and regional leaders. People are afraid to convey the real feelings of locals because they sense themselves to be in danger from all sides."

Khan pleaded for the government to ensure security, remove any military presence from schools and private homes, compensate locals for losses resulting from the recent fighting and help rebuild schools, clinics and irrigation canals.

His most impassioned and telling appeal, however, was for Karzai to avoid repeating a past mistake: do not hand over control of local affairs to former militia commanders or other "people with influence".

The plea, met with cheers and nods of approval by the hundreds of locals assembled at the mosque, highlights a window of opportunity that has been opened in Marjah, a town that in many ways is a microcosm of what has gone wrong in much of southern Afghanistan.

Early backlash
War-weary locals initially welcomed the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001, but their feelings soon began to change. After finding themselves ruled by former mujahideen commanders installed by the government in 2001, many of Marjah's youth went to the other side; joining the insurgent ranks who paid well and protected the opium-poppy crops on which many of the town's farming families depended.

Kabul and its international backers tried to improve the situation. The governor, police chief and other key officials were removed and 5,000 British troops were tasked with controlling the area.

The Taliban, however, filled the vacuum of governance. Many locals welcomed the development, preferring the stability provided by the Taliban over the chaos of life under draconian local strongmen. The Taliban enforced hardline religious edicts and did not tolerate crime or feuds among the communities they controlled. Justice was cheap, swift and decisive.

But locals were aware of the shortcomings as well. The Taliban offered no education, healthcare or prospect of future development. The group was seen as controlled by foreign militants - Arabs and Pakistanis in particular.

Many of those concerns are only coming to light following operation "Moshtarak" ("Together"). If it turns out that locals are confident enough to look past their fears of a Taliban return and toward a better future, the transformation could prove to be the joint military offensive's greatest success.

Familiar story
Marjah-area residents appear eager for a fresh start, despite the fact that 25,000 of them have been displaced and scores killed during the recent fighting. But they are clearly voicing their demand that honest local officials - untainted by corruption and attentive to their needs - be in control of local affairs.

The man whose return to power they might fear most is 57-year-old former Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Jan. Jan is typical of the powerbrokers dominating local affairs in rural communities across Afghanistan. Once an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander, his rise to power in the 1990s and again after the ouster of the Taliban eight years ago led to local suffering. Members of his militia pillaged, raped and engaged in the drug trade, according to locals.

Since 2007, when the Taliban overran his Marjah stronghold, Jan has lived in Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, with his extended family of 12 children and grandchildren. Marjah residents want it to stay that way, but the bearded patriarch is already hinting that he might soon return to his sprawling home and farmland in Marjah.

Jan has formed a 35-member Marjah shura, or tribal council, in anticipation of renewed control of Marjah. While his return was made possible by the recent offensive, which cleared the agricultural town of insurgents, Jan has been openly critical of the effort's results.

"People were very optimistic that this offensive would free us from the clutches of the terrorists, but as the offensive advanced hardly any Taliban [fighters] were killed or captured," Jan laments. "Only two Taliban were killed and one was injured. There were around 470 [small] Taliban groups but none of their members were captured. Few weapons or mines were recovered."

His past might help explain his dour appraisal of the military operation. Formerly allied with Helmand strongman and former governor Sher Muhammad Akhudzada, Jan was appointed as the provincial police chief after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. After that, Helmand slowly descended into a downward spiral as the former mujahideen cabal took the opportunity to recoup financial and personnel losses they had incurred during the Taliban regime, when Jan was chased across Afghanistan by his Taliban enemies.

Haunted by the past
When thousands of United Nations-mandated British troops moved into Helmand in 2006, Jan was among the first officials fired because most locals were tired of the excesses of his tribal militia.

During the same period, a reinvigorated Taliban made inroads into much of southern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. Then Marjah and Nade-Ali, an adjacent district in western Helmand, fell to the Taliban, who dissipated only after the arrival of 15,000 Afghan and NATO troops in February.

Locals now see Jan busily lobbying in Helmand and Kabul to be given control of his former Marjah stronghold in return for having kept the region under nominal government control while in power. Many suspect him of using his influence within his Noorzai tribe against the Ishaqzai, who over the years have provided manpower to Taliban ranks to counter his influence. (Both Pashtun clans are part of the larger Durrani Pashtun tribal grouping, which populates much of southern Afghanistan and has played a central role in the country's politics.)

It is clear that when pharmacy owner Khan conveyed Marjah residents' demands to Karzai, his advice against returning "people with influence" or former militia commanders to power was aimed squarely at people like Jan.

Karzai, who considers southern Afghanistan his home constituency because he was born and raised in a prominent ethnic Pashtun lineage in neighboring Kandahar province, has indicated that he is listening.

In remarks to journalists after hearing complaints from Marjah residents for more than two hours on March 7, the president appeared to understand their concerns.

"They felt as if they were abandoned, which in many cases is true, and this sense of abandonment has to go away," Karzai said. "We have to address their problems, we have to give them what we have not [given them] so far, and provide them with the security that they require."

Anxious days
But this new approach to deliver good governance is fraught with difficulty, as the provincial government's appointment of one of Marjah's own to run the town's affairs has shown.

The candor of Haji Abdul Zahir Aryan, who was chosen to be Marjah's governor, appears to have won over the town's residents. The appointment has caused a stir outside Afghanistan, however, where reports have alleged that he served four years in a German prison after being convicted of stabbing his stepson.

Largely due to a name variation, the details remain murky. The Washington Post, which has investigated the reports, writes that the case being cited corresponds to that of "an Afghan man who went by [the name of] Abdul Zahar" while in Germany.

Brushing aside any talk of controversy, the soft-spoken 60-year-old Marjah elder tells RFE/RL that he indeed lived in Germany for years, legally and with a visa. But he categorically denies having been convicted of or serving time for such a crime.

Looking ahead, he says the future of Marjah and its residents depends on how Kabul responds to their demands.

"As far as the issue of the return of the Taliban is concerned, it depends on the performance of the government," Aryan says. "If the government continues delivering on its promises and carries on reconstruction and winning over Marjah's people, then the Taliban will find no space here in the future. But if the government turns its back on Marjah, as it did in the past, then the Taliban will rebuild their sanctuary here."

Aryan's message, seconded by people like Khan, clearly carries weight among Marjah locals. For Afghanistan's international backers, the message - and the messages of others from a region largely silent in recent years - will be tainted until they know for sure who is delivering it.

It's a tightrope that Kabul and its NATO allies must walk as they try to develop a formula that can work not only in Marjah but throughout southern Afghanistan.

 
 
 

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South Asia
Mar 11, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC11Df01.html 
 
Marjah fears return of warlords


By Mohammad Elyas Daee and Abubakar Siddique

MARJAH - Azizullah Khan might be this town's best example of civic-mindedness. He is a middle-aged farmer in this area, at the center of a recent large-scale military effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province.

His dedication to a community under the most trying of circumstances earned him the respect of Marjah's locals, who long depended on his pharmacy in the town's dusty bazaar as their only healthcare option.

When news came that Afghan President Hamid Karzai would be visiting on March 7, following the anti-Taliban operation carried out by Afghan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, it was Khan who was entrusted to speak for Marjah's residents. With their marketplace in ruins as a result of the offensive, the feeling was that Khan would be well-suited to present their demands and concerns based on first-hand experience.

Addressing the president inside the community's main mosque, Khan peppered his message with salutations and blunt grievances, even reminding the Afghan leader of his oft-repeated promises to step down if he failed to deliver security and services.
"We are not asking you to resign, but our patience is running thin," Khan told the only president that Afghans have ever elected. "For the past eight years the warlords have been ruling us. Their hands have been stained with the blood of innocents and they have killed hundreds of people. Even now they are being imposed on the people in the name of tribal and regional leaders. People are afraid to convey the real feelings of locals because they sense themselves to be in danger from all sides."

Khan pleaded for the government to ensure security, remove any military presence from schools and private homes, compensate locals for losses resulting from the recent fighting and help rebuild schools, clinics and irrigation canals.

His most impassioned and telling appeal, however, was for Karzai to avoid repeating a past mistake: do not hand over control of local affairs to former militia commanders or other "people with influence".

The plea, met with cheers and nods of approval by the hundreds of locals assembled at the mosque, highlights a window of opportunity that has been opened in Marjah, a town that in many ways is a microcosm of what has gone wrong in much of southern Afghanistan.

Early backlash
War-weary locals initially welcomed the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001, but their feelings soon began to change. After finding themselves ruled by former mujahideen commanders installed by the government in 2001, many of Marjah's youth went to the other side; joining the insurgent ranks who paid well and protected the opium-poppy crops on which many of the town's farming families depended.

Kabul and its international backers tried to improve the situation. The governor, police chief and other key officials were removed and 5,000 British troops were tasked with controlling the area.

The Taliban, however, filled the vacuum of governance. Many locals welcomed the development, preferring the stability provided by the Taliban over the chaos of life under draconian local strongmen. The Taliban enforced hardline religious edicts and did not tolerate crime or feuds among the communities they controlled. Justice was cheap, swift and decisive.

But locals were aware of the shortcomings as well. The Taliban offered no education, healthcare or prospect of future development. The group was seen as controlled by foreign militants - Arabs and Pakistanis in particular.

Many of those concerns are only coming to light following operation "Moshtarak" ("Together"). If it turns out that locals are confident enough to look past their fears of a Taliban return and toward a better future, the transformation could prove to be the joint military offensive's greatest success.

Familiar story
Marjah-area residents appear eager for a fresh start, despite the fact that 25,000 of them have been displaced and scores killed during the recent fighting. But they are clearly voicing their demand that honest local officials - untainted by corruption and attentive to their needs - be in control of local affairs.

The man whose return to power they might fear most is 57-year-old former Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Jan. Jan is typical of the powerbrokers dominating local affairs in rural communities across Afghanistan. Once an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander, his rise to power in the 1990s and again after the ouster of the Taliban eight years ago led to local suffering. Members of his militia pillaged, raped and engaged in the drug trade, according to locals.

Since 2007, when the Taliban overran his Marjah stronghold, Jan has lived in Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, with his extended family of 12 children and grandchildren. Marjah residents want it to stay that way, but the bearded patriarch is already hinting that he might soon return to his sprawling home and farmland in Marjah.

Jan has formed a 35-member Marjah shura, or tribal council, in anticipation of renewed control of Marjah. While his return was made possible by the recent offensive, which cleared the agricultural town of insurgents, Jan has been openly critical of the effort's results.

"People were very optimistic that this offensive would free us from the clutches of the terrorists, but as the offensive advanced hardly any Taliban [fighters] were killed or captured," Jan laments. "Only two Taliban were killed and one was injured. There were around 470 [small] Taliban groups but none of their members were captured. Few weapons or mines were recovered."

His past might help explain his dour appraisal of the military operation. Formerly allied with Helmand strongman and former governor Sher Muhammad Akhudzada, Jan was appointed as the provincial police chief after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. After that, Helmand slowly descended into a downward spiral as the former mujahideen cabal took the opportunity to recoup financial and personnel losses they had incurred during the Taliban regime, when Jan was chased across Afghanistan by his Taliban enemies.

Haunted by the past
When thousands of United Nations-mandated British troops moved into Helmand in 2006, Jan was among the first officials fired because most locals were tired of the excesses of his tribal militia.

During the same period, a reinvigorated Taliban made inroads into much of southern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. Then Marjah and Nade-Ali, an adjacent district in western Helmand, fell to the Taliban, who dissipated only after the arrival of 15,000 Afghan and NATO troops in February.

Locals now see Jan busily lobbying in Helmand and Kabul to be given control of his former Marjah stronghold in return for having kept the region under nominal government control while in power. Many suspect him of using his influence within his Noorzai tribe against the Ishaqzai, who over the years have provided manpower to Taliban ranks to counter his influence. (Both Pashtun clans are part of the larger Durrani Pashtun tribal grouping, which populates much of southern Afghanistan and has played a central role in the country's politics.)

It is clear that when pharmacy owner Khan conveyed Marjah residents' demands to Karzai, his advice against returning "people with influence" or former militia commanders to power was aimed squarely at people like Jan.

Karzai, who considers southern Afghanistan his home constituency because he was born and raised in a prominent ethnic Pashtun lineage in neighboring Kandahar province, has indicated that he is listening.

In remarks to journalists after hearing complaints from Marjah residents for more than two hours on March 7, the president appeared to understand their concerns.

"They felt as if they were abandoned, which in many cases is true, and this sense of abandonment has to go away," Karzai said. "We have to address their problems, we have to give them what we have not [given them] so far, and provide them with the security that they require."

Anxious days
But this new approach to deliver good governance is fraught with difficulty, as the provincial government's appointment of one of Marjah's own to run the town's affairs has shown.

The candor of Haji Abdul Zahir Aryan, who was chosen to be Marjah's governor, appears to have won over the town's residents. The appointment has caused a stir outside Afghanistan, however, where reports have alleged that he served four years in a German prison after being convicted of stabbing his stepson.

Largely due to a name variation, the details remain murky. The Washington Post, which has investigated the reports, writes that the case being cited corresponds to that of "an Afghan man who went by [the name of] Abdul Zahar" while in Germany.

Brushing aside any talk of controversy, the soft-spoken 60-year-old Marjah elder tells RFE/RL that he indeed lived in Germany for years, legally and with a visa. But he categorically denies having been convicted of or serving time for such a crime.

Looking ahead, he says the future of Marjah and its residents depends on how Kabul responds to their demands.

"As far as the issue of the return of the Taliban is concerned, it depends on the performance of the government," Aryan says. "If the government continues delivering on its promises and carries on reconstruction and winning over Marjah's people, then the Taliban will find no space here in the future. But if the government turns its back on Marjah, as it did in the past, then the Taliban will rebuild their sanctuary here."

Aryan's message, seconded by people like Khan, clearly carries weight among Marjah locals. For Afghanistan's international backers, the message - and the messages of others from a region largely silent in recent years - will be tainted until they know for sure who is delivering it.

It's a tightrope that Kabul and its NATO allies must walk as they try to develop a formula that can work not only in Marjah but throughout southern Afghanistan.

 
 
 

[bigron]

Decade Of The Drone: America's Aerial Assassins


by Rick Rozoff

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64013&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 9, 2010

2010 is the last year of the new century and millennium and is the tenth consecutive year of the United States' war in Afghanistan and in the 15-nation area of responsibility subsumed under Operation Enduring Freedom. In early March American military deaths in the Greater Afghan War theater -Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen - surpassed the 1,000 mark.

This year is also the tenth year of the first ground and the first Asian war fought by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which wages wars from and not to protect the nations of the northern Atlantic Ocean.

2010 is the tenth and deadliest year in Washington's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for targeted assassinations and untargeted "collateral damage."

Originally designed for battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance, albeit often to call in lethal military strikes, drones have been employed by the U.S. since 2001 to identify and kill human targets.

The first "hunter-killer" unmanned combat air vehicle, the Predator, was used by the Pentagon in Bosnia in 1995 and later in the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

In 2001 Predators were equipped with Hellfire missiles and were deployed from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to launch attacks inside Afghanistan. The following year they were flown from the U.S. military base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti for the same purpose in Yemen.

The Predator and its successor, the Reaper, capable of carrying fifteen times more weaponry and flying at three times the speed, have been used for deadly attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and with particularly murderous effect in Pakistan since the autumn of 2008. They are equipped with cameras connected by satellite links to bases in the United States.

In October Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, deputy commander of U.S. Africa Command, announced that Reapers, "capable of carrying a dozen guided bombs and missiles," [1] were deployed to Seychelles off the eastern coast of the African continent to patrol the Indian Ocean.

Radio Australia ran a story on March 8 that stated "US President Barack Obama may have taken his time to decide on his Afghanistan policy, but he's also now become more of an enthusiast for drone missile strikes than his predecessor." [2] In both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as in Yemen.

Discussing a report by the New America Foundation, the station documented that deadly U.S. drone missile strikes on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been increased by 50 per cent since the Obama administration took over the White House a year ago January 20.

Citing the above-mentioned think tank, the Radio Australia report said there have been 64 drone strikes in South Asia in the past fourteen months compared to 45 under the George W. Bush administration between the invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001 and January of 2009.

Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, was interviewed and said "there is an average five to seven strikes a month although in January there were 11."

He was further quoted describing the qualitative as well as the quantitative escalation of American drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan: "The main drone is the 'Predator' which carries the 'Hellfire' anti-tank missile.

"The 'Reaper,' the older brother of the Predator, they made that so it could carry larger Hellfire missiles as well as it can carry, again, the 500 pound GPS (global position system)-guided bombs. So they're very, you know, this is sort of a revolution in air warfare." [3]

The Reaper carries a thousand pounds of munitions and is also equipped for the Sidewinder heat-seeking air-to-air missile. Plans for adding Stinger air-to-air missiles are underway.

In terms of the human cost of Obama's 2008 Afghan war campaign pledge - "If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot" - at the beginning of this year Pakistan's influential Dawn News published an account of what that policy has meant to Pakistanis. In an article titled "Over 700 killed in 44 drone strikes in 2009," the source, quoting Pakistani government statistics, wrote:

"Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal
areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their
actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians."

For each alleged al-Qaeda or Taliban member killed by missiles fired from U.S. drones "140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities....On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day." [4]

The dead may have been armed or unarmed, males or females, adults or children. What they have in common is that they were targeted based on "actionable intelligence" provided by someone on the ground, not necessarily a disinterested party.

Last October, as the killing had begun in earnest, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston warned:

"My concern is that these drones, these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

"The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons." [5]

Undaunted, the U.S. substantially intensified the attacks.

This January China's Xinhua News Agency interviewed Pakistani political analyst Farrukh Saleem, who said that American drone missile attacks in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas had increased from 17 in 2008 to 43 in 2009 with more than 70 expected to be delivered this year.

Saleem was quoted warning that "Such attacks always trigger violence, suicide attacks and casualties in Pakistan. So more drone attacks mean more violence in Pakistan." [6]

On the same day Senator John McCain was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and praised the drone attacks as "an effective part of the U.S. strategy." [7]

It was reported last December 17 that a U.S. drone strike had killed at least 20 people in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency and on the 27th that 13 more were killed in the same region.

Since the New Year began the lethal attacks have only intensified. The following is not an attempt at a comprehensive account, but is gathered from assorted press reports.

On January 1 it was reported that five people were killed and several more injured by two American drone attacks east of the North Waziristan capital. As to the identities of the slain, Reuters quoted a local security official as saying, "The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity." [8] The previous night two more were killed and several injured in another strike.

Reports continued to detail missile strikes and deaths in the nation's tribal areas.

January 3: Five more people were killed in North Waziristan in a drone attack.

January 6: At least thirteen were killed and eight wounded by two back-to-back missile strikes. "According to Pakistan's Geo News, a suspected drone fired two missiles at a house in the Datta Khel region in the first attack, killing seven people.

"Another strike occurred as local people began retrieving bodies from the rubble of the house, killing five people. The identities of those killed in the attacks were unknown." [9]

January 8: Five were killed in a village in North Waziristan.

January 9: An American drone fired two missiles into a village, Ismail Khan, in North Waziristan which killed four people.

January 13: Thirteen people were killed in the village of Tappi in the same agency. "A senior security official confirmed the death toll, and said four missiles were fired from unmanned planes in the remote area." [10]

January 15: Fifteen were killed in the village of Zannini in North Waziristan. Six were killed in the village of Bichi.

January 17: At least twenty were killed in the Shaktoi area of South Waziristan.

January 19: Six people were killed in the village of Booya in North Waziristan according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

January 24: Pakistani insurgents claimed to have shot down a U.S. drone in North Waziristan, one of eight drones seen flying over the area.

January 29: Between six and fifteen people were killed in the North Waziristan town of Muhammad Khel in a reported attack on the Haqquani Network by three American missiles.

February 2: The U.S. fired as many as eight missiles into four villages in North Waziristan, killing twenty nine people.

February 14: Five people were killed in a drone attack in the same agency. At least three others were wounded.

February 15: A drone strike allegedly killed a Chinese Uighur separatist leader in the same district.

February 17: A U.S. missile strike killed three and injured two victims in North Waziristan.

February 18: Four people were killed in a missile strike on a vehicle in the same agency.

February 24: At least thirteen alleged militants were killed in a U.S. drone attack in the Dargah Mandi area of North Waziristan.

March 8: An American drone fired five missiles into a house near Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, killing at least five people and wounding four.

Approximately 160 people have been killed in drone missile strikes in Pakistan in slightly over two months this year. If that pace continues, 2010 will be far deadlier than the year before: 960 to 700. If, as seems more likely, the amount of the attacks increases, the death toll will be even higher than the nearly 140 per cent increase the above extrapolation threatens.

Drone missile attacks are increasingly becoming the weapon of choice of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (as in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq), the Joint Special Operations Command (Yemen) and the Air Force, which as of last year had 195 Predators and 28 Reapers.

All indications are that they will soon have more.

This year the Obama administration has sought from Congress $33 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year." [11]

With the new Quadrennial Defense Review, "The pilotless drones used for
surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with a goal of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expansion of Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013." [12]

A February 1 article called "China, Iran Prompt U.S. Air-Sea Battle Plan in Strategy Review," revealed that in line with the new Quadrennial Defense Review a "joint Air Force-Navy plan would combine the strengths of each service to conduct long-range strikes that could utilize a new generation of bombers, a new cruise missile and drones launched from aircraft carriers." [13]

As the U.S. is massively expanding its military buildup on the Pacific island of Guam, "The Army is building a missile defense system on the island and the Air Force is adding more drones." [14]

In mid-January prominent U.S. senator Carl Levin called for "using drones to launch airstrikes" in Yemen, adding the demand for "everything from physical actions that could be accomplished in terms of use of drones or air attacks" to "clandestine actions." [15]

Regarding the strengthening of military ties between the U.S. and Yemen, a Russian news source disclosed that "Under a new classified cooperation agreement, the U.S. would be able to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in the country, but would remain publicly silent on its role in the airstrikes." [16]

In late January the Wall Street Journal reported:

"The U.S. military's involvement in Yemen has already begun to grow....[T]he U.S. has increased the number of surveillance drones flying over Yemen, as well as the number of unmanned aircraft outfitted with missiles capable of striking targets on the ground, according to a senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of the deployments.

"Most drones operating outside of Iraq and Afghanistan are controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency, but the official said the drones operating over Yemen belong to the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command." [17]

The commander of Joint Special Operations Command until 2008 was now General Stanley McChrystal, military chief of what will soon be 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Drone missile assassinations and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians that often accompany them are an integral component of his counterinsurgency strategy in South Asia. The qualitative escalation of drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan began when McChrystal replaced David McKiernan as top U.S. and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force commander in Afghanistan last June.

In other parts of the world, the Pentagon is to contribute military drones for the Northern Coasts maneuvers in Finland this September, the "largest naval military exercise that has ever been seen in Finnish territorial waters." [18]

A resolution issued by the Finnish Peacefighters in Lapland last month mentioned "a program on Finnish TV about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles being tested in Lapland at the Kemijarvi Airfield. This actual training area stretches to the Russian border and follows the border for tens of kilometers.

"The strategy for Star Wars, which the US is developing, means that the pilotless plane is directed from a command center in Nevada, and follows the terrain and movements on a data screen thousands of kilometers away and maneuvers the drones. These drones have been used in Afghanistan and they have killed a lot of civilians." [19]

While Stanley McChrystal was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command the U.S. conducted eleven deadly predator attacks in Iraq in April of 2008. At the time "Defense Secretary Robert Gates prodded the Air Force to do more to rush drones to the war zone."

An American newspaper reported at the time that "Commanders are expected to rely more on unmanned systems as 30,000 U.S. troops sent last year are withdrawn. The military has dozens of Predators in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all it operates 5,000 drones, 25 times more than it had in 2001." [20]

Last December the government of Venezuela called on the world community to condemn incursions into its airspace by U.S. military drones operating from Aruba and from Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles. The type of drones that flew for several days over Venezuelan territory wasn't specified, but under both bilateral and NATO military obligations the Netherlands would not refuse the U.S. the right to station Predator and Reaper drones on bases in their Caribbean island colonies.

The United States has not only increased its arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles by twenty five times over the past decade, it has massively increased the range and lethality of its hunter-killer drones. A recent report disclosed that beginning in 2008 the Air Force Research Laboratory started to "build the ultimate assassination robot," described as "a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating 'high-value targets.'" [21]

Formerly special forces teams were deployed or cruise missiles were fired to assassinate intended victims. In the case of the second and frequently the first the risk was that they couldn't be used twice.

Predator and Reaper drones return after missions and their supply of Hellfire missiles is replenished for further deadly attacks.

They have become Washington's preferred 21st century weapons for perpetrating international assassinations.


1) Associated Press, October 25, 2009
2) Radio Australia, March 8, 2010
3) Ibid
4) Dawn News, January 2, 2010
5) BBC News, October 28, 2009
6) Xinhua News Agency, January 8, 2010
7) Ibid
Reuters, January 1, 2010
9) ADN Kronos International, January 6, 2010
10) Agence France-Presse, January 14, 2010
11) Associated Press, January 12, 2010
12) Ibid
13) Bloomberg News, February 1, 2010
14) Voice of America News, January 19, 2010
15) Press TV, January 13, 2010
16) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 30, 2009
17) Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2010
18) Helsingin Sanomat, January 28, 2010
19) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/44296
20) USA Today, April 29, 2008
21) Wired, January 5, 2010




 

[bigron]

Obama’s Potemkin Afghanistan

It's as phony as he is

by Justin Raimondo, March 10, 2010
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/03/09/obamas-potemkin-afghanistan/



In a message to US troops in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised the soldiers who fought in the recent Marjah offensive, averring: "

“You all have had a very tough time. You came into an area totally controlled by the Taliban. You fought for a critical battle space, you bled for it and now you own it.”

Yes, we own it – but what is it, exactly, that we own?

Marjah, by all accounts appearing in the US media, is supposed to have been a city, or at least a major town. Described as containing some 80,000 inhabitants – and a bustling center of insurgent activity, a Taliban stronghold that had to be taken – Marjah was depicted as a rather large target, and our glorious "victory" was therefore portrayed as a major triumph. The only problem with this narrative is that it bears no relation to reality.

As Gareth Porter points out in a piece published on this site, Marjah, far from being a major city or even a town, is a minor hamlet consisting of one mosque and a few other buildings, mostly stores. There is no city of 80,000 souls, as Western "reporters" have been telling us, there are no "neighborhoods" as described in countless news dispatches from the "mainstream" media, and the imagery of house-to-house fighting imparted by these reports is a total fiction.

It wasn’t quite as elaborate a production as in Wag the Dog, a movie in which a President in trouble on the home front cooks up an overseas "crisis" – complete with phony footage of US soldiers in action – to divert attention away from his own foibles.

Sure, there was a battle, but the stakes weren’t nearly as high as we were led to believe, and the scope of this largely imaginary "offensive" was deliberately hyped.

Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion that this mighty offensive was launched, not against the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, but against the natural skepticism of the American people. While not quite measuring up to the production values of Wag the Dog, "Operation Marjah," or whatever they’re calling it, comes awfully close. In effect, the "Marjah offensive" – hailed as a great victory by US-NATO propagandists – was cooked up in the news rooms of the "mainstream" media, and dished out to the American people.

See? We’re making progress, the War Party assures us. Marjah was a glorious "victory," and we’re on the road to ultimate success. That is the "lesson" this administration hopes we’re learning. Forget truth and falsehood: we’re talking about war propaganda, which is concerned with neither.

As Porter points out in his piece, "A central task of ‘information operations’ in counterinsurgency wars is ‘establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative,’ according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006." But just who is this narrative aimed at?

The primary targets, I would argue, are not the Afghans, but us – we, the American people, who after all have to give their tacit consent to Obama’s war, however passively and reluctantly. The insurgency the Pentagon is concerned with preemptively countering isn’t in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, but right here in the good ol’ US of A. With an economic recession fast turning into a full-blown depression, and US troops still in Iraq, an antiwar insurgency on the home front is the Pentagon’s worst nightmare. Their field manual [.pdf] aims at neutralizing it, and reflects the view of their top strategists that it’s just a matter of creating – and disseminating – the right "narrative."

Like all government programs in a democratic society, the tendency toward self-perpetuation is inevitable: it’s notoriously true that once a subsidy is granted, it becomes almost politically impossible to get rid of it. That’s because the beneficiaries of these programs mobilize quickly to defend their interests, while the majority barely notices, or, if they do notice, are rarely stirred to action.

In the case of ordinary thievery, i.e. most domestic government spending, this works well for the beneficiaries, because the consequences of their profiteering rarely include thousands of deaths. When it comes to war, however, there is usually a bit more scrutiny – and, one would think, especially at this point, when we’re fresh from the Iraqi WMD fraud.

That’s what has the Pentagon’s strategists scratching their heads trying to preemptively de-energize a rising insurgency of American taxpayers, who are sick and tired of paying for this nonsense.

This war is just another "job-creating" government program to keep restless youth off the streets – and, in these hard times, record numbers are signing up. Imperialism as a way to solve the unemployment problem: it’s military Keynesianism, the latest in "progressive" chic.

So much of what this war is about has nothing to with Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or the very real and deadly serious issue of terrorism – it’s all about politics, and economics, i.e. money and power. This war is being driven by the internal political dynamics of the West, and the "enemy" – in the Pentagon’s view – isn’t so much the fanaticism of the Taliban, or the devilish nihilism of al-Qaeda, but the natural skepticism and "isolationism" of their own countrymen.

In short, it’s all about us.

When it comes to individuals, such extreme narcissism would be diagnosed as a form of mental illness, or at least a disabling idiosyncrasy of the sort that would generally keep one well out of polite company. However, when certain powerful nations act out their internal obsessions and unnatural drives on the global stage, wreaking havoc and causing untold death and destruction, they become a danger not only to the whole world but to themselves. It therefore falls on the citizens of that rogue nation to rein in their government.

This rising possibility is precisely the main concern of our top military strategists, who want to overcome the infamous "Vietnam Syndrome" by concentrating their efforts on the war skeptics at home, rather than the armed enemy abroad. The last thing they want is a "tea party" movement against the biggest, most tragically wasteful, and certainly the costliest current government program in every sense: our "war on terrorism," which commits us to fighting a generation-long conflict in multiple theaters simultaneously. And we’re not just talking about special operations, limited forays to get particular bad guys: Obama’s wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are massive undertakings, and getting bigger by the day.

The human and material costs are so great that a reaction is bound to ensue. The War Party realizes this: that’s why they spend so much of their time, energy, and resources on war propaganda, even tailoring their military strategy to create the right "narrative" for the American public.

Yet this war is more than a story we’re telling ourselves: real people are dying, and being maimed, daily, and for reasons that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Our invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan hasn’t deterred or even slowed down the efforts of terrorist organizations to reach into a major military base on American soil and take down more than a dozen of our soldiers. Obama’s wars merely provide the terrorists with more human cannon fodder to hurl against us. The wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan must end, not because there is no terrorist threat, but precisely because there is one – and this is no way to fight it.

One year into Barack H. Obama’s presidency, it’s fair to say that George W. Bush’s grand strategy of effecting a massive "transformation" of the Middle East, by conquering and occupying much of it, is being continued – and expanded – by his Democratic successor. Under Obama’s tutelage, the conflict is spilling over into neighboring countries as we pursue a highly mobile and adaptable enemy throughout Central Asia. US military bases are already ringing the periphery of the Af-Pak theater, in preparation for a regional conflict.

We are, in short, embarking on a major turn in US foreign and military policy, largely without much public discussion – although Dennis Kucinich and a small band of antiwar members of Congress, including Ron Paul, will get a few hours of formal debate on the House floor. Kucinich’s resolution calling for a US withdrawal will come up for a vote, and so put our solons on record as supporting this disastrous turn, which future historians will be perfectly justified in comparing to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

The Kucinich resolution is a political masterstroke, and it’s great to see the Democratic party leaders having to sit still for it. Let us see who is for this massive expansion of our nascent Middle Eastern empire, and mark their names well. Before history judges them, let us judge them at the polls – and spare no effort in turning them out of office, no matter what party or what other views they may uphold. If that means the veritable decimation of incumbents – well, wouldn’t that be sending them a message they’re not likely to forget?

Obama’s Potemkin village in Afghanistan may succeed in fooling some people for a limited period of time, but the flaw in the COIN strategy embraced by this administration is that it overlooks a key point. A self-serving and demonstrably false "mainstream" narrative invariably provokes a counter-narrative, one much closer to the truth. The War Party may be able to rely on the "mainstream" media to go along with the fraud for a good long time, but they would have to shut down the Internet to preemptively kill the counter-narrative and silence its adherents. Although, I hear, they’re working on that ….

[bigron]

The Truth Blurts

by Jeff Huber, March 10, 2010
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2010/03/09/the-truth-blurts/


Individuals in the upper level of the Pentagon and media polloi are beginning to commit a cardinal sin. They’re blurting the truth – sort of. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military’s senior spin surgeon (his father was a Hollywood publicity agent), says that "Afghans are in the lead" of the Marjah offensive. But not everybody involved in writing the narrative is willing to tell a lie that big.

New York Times journalist C.J. Chivers, a former Marine, was among the first mainstream media voices to shoot down claims the Afghan army was leading the operation. In a Feb. 20 article posted from Marjah, Chivers reported that Marines were doing the "heavy lifting" while the Afghans lagged behind. They lagged so far behind, Chivers noted, that the Marines coined a new acronym: WOA (waiting on the Afghans).

"Statements from Kabul have said the Afghan military is planning the missions and leading both the fight and the effort to engage with Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and the newly arrived troops," Chivers wrote. "But that assertion conflicts with what is visible in the field. In every engagement between the Taliban and one front-line American Marine unit, the operation has been led in almost every significant sense by American officers and troops."

In response to truth-outs like Chivers’, unnamed "senior military officials" tell us via NPR that the U.S. definition of "in the lead" means the Afghans are "planning the operation" and are "sitting down with Afghan elders in mosques or in meetings known as shuras."

If the Afghans are sitting down with elders in mosques, it’s because U.S. planners told them to go find another babysitter. Planning a military operation like the Marjah madness involves a lot of things; talking to old civilians isn’t really one of them.

The logistical complexity of moving and equipping and feeding a force the size of the one Gen. Stanley McChrystal drove into Marjah is something far beyond anything the Afghans are capable of. Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson blurted to NPR that the quality of Afghan troops and police is so poor that "probably 3 to 4 out of every 10 we have probably need to really go home.”

That assessment jibes with a Jan. 31 60 Minutes report on U.S. Army Green Berets attempting to train Afghan commandos. These Afghan commandos were supposedly the best of the best recruits the Afghan army has, um, recruited. On top of that, the Afghan commandos received three months of "advanced training" before coming to the Green Berets for graduate-level studies. The best of the best Afghan soldiers turned out to be a battalion of Sad Sacks. One night one of the Afghan commandos accidentally shot the unit’s American medic in the leg. The next night one of the Afghan commandos shot himself in the foot, a haunting analog of what we’re doing to ourselves in Afghanistan.

Frustrated, the Green Berets began retraining the Afghans in basics of loading their rifles and carrying them safely. When the best-of-the-best Afghan troops couldn’t even handle that, the Green Berets put them back in "boot camp," attempting to teach them by yelling at them, by making them do strenuous exercise until they vomited, and probably by roughing them up a considerable bit (60 Minutes didn’t show the roughing-them-up part).

James Danly, a retired Army officer who trained Iraqi forces, told NPR, “You don’t forge armies out of nothing." That’s disheartening, since it sounds like "nothing" is precisely what we’re trying to forge the Afghan army out of. It’s not a simple thing, Danly says, "for units to become cohesive" and to learn to do tasks like load and carry their rifles tasks properly. “It could take a long time,” Danly says.

It could take forever. Afghan forces are starting from prenatal stage compared to where Iraq’s security force started – prior to the Iraqi Freedom invasion, Iraq had an actual army that had won an actual war with one of its neighbors – yet the Iraqis haven’t progressed much past the Gomer Pyle level themselves.

In July 2009, five years after "King" David Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the U.S. Army’s Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, blurted a memo lambasting the Iraqis’ lack of combat readiness. Corruption in the Iraqi officer corps is "widespread," Reese said. Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are "rampant." Laziness is "endemic." Lack of initiative is "legion." Iraq’s forces are "unable to plan," and their "near total effectiveness" prevents them from becoming self-sustaining.

After Iraq’s fourth election since U.S. psychological operations forces staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad nearly seven years ago, violence is once again rampant and the hapless Iraqi forces are helpless to stop it. Conditions in Iraq are so bad that Petraeus’ pet ox, "Babe" Odierno, who always makes me think of John Candy’s character in the film Stripes, is again echoing the mantra that he may have to delay the timeline for sending combat troops home. (Lean-mean-fightin’ Odierno has been the official mascot of the Long War Society since February 2009, when he went on record with Petraeus hagiographer and former journalist Thomas E. Ricks as wanting to scrap President Obama’s withdrawal plan and keep 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2015 or whenever.)

As investigative correspondent Gareth Porter notes, the main purpose of the Marjah offensive was not to gain a military advantage over the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan. The operation was geared to influence U.S. public opinion. In operational art, this sort of thing is called an incremental victory, a success (usually a meaningless one) designed to dupe the folks on the home front to continue to support an unjustifiable war.

Ricks blurted in a February Washington Post piece clearly aimed at pleasing the war mafia that Petraeus, as commander of the surge in Iraq, never had any intention of "creating conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage,” as he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Petraeus’ intention was to use cherry-picked violence statistics and other incremental victory stratagems to make Congress and the public think he was making progress so the Pentagon could make its Long War longer.

The modus is the same in Afghanistan. Marjah is a "test" that will tell us if the much-touted clear-hold-build counterinsurgency strategy will work. Marjah will pass the test, of course. At least, it will in the press releases McChrystal’s psyops czar Rear Adm. Gregory Smith hands out to the mainstream media’s stenography pool. And in Smith’s version of history, the Afghan army will have led the victory, no matter how many people blurt that they did so from their safe haven in the rear echelon.

Petraeus himself did a bit of blurting recently on Meet the Press when he explained that the Marjah offensive was "just the initial operation of what will be a 12- to 18-month campaign." That would put the campaign right up against President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for beginning to withdraw troops, a deadline that the Petraeus mob is taking as seriously as it’s taking Obama’s Iraq deadlines. Petraeus also noted that the 12- to 18-month campaign has been "mapped out" by Gen. McChrystal and his team. Petraeus apparently didn’t get the memo about how he’s supposed to say the Afghans are doing all the planning now.

Tsk, tsk, General.

[bigron]

Afghanistan war: Fight for Kandahar won't be like fight for Marjah

In the next stage in the Afghanistan war, coalition forces are expected to build up gradually on the outskirts of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, perhaps for months. That strategy departs from the one executed in the Marjah offensive, in which troops entered quickly.



Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaks with Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, at Combat Out Post Cafereta, Tuesday. Gates told troops they would be part of a "decisive phase" in the Afghanistan war - an operation in Kandahar province.
(Jim Watson/Reuters)


By Gordon Lubold Staff writer
posted March 9, 2010 at 7:29 pm EST

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2010/0309/Afghanistan-war-Fight-for-Kandahar-won-t-be-like-fight-for-Marjah

Washington — The operation that American and coalition forces are planning for Kandahar in southern Afghanistan won’t look like D-Day, the top commander there said Tuesday.

Fresh off a recent success, so far, in Helmand Province, American military planners are thinking ahead to the next phase of challenging the Taliban in southern Afghanistan: Kandahar. But the fight for Kandahar – described as the New York City of Afghanistan for its cultural, political, and economic significance – is expected to be more measured than the operation in Marjah in Helmand, which was a precision strike that began with the insertion of hundreds of US marines by helicopter.

“There won’t be a D-Day that is climactic,” said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander there told reporters in Kabul, during a trip in which he escorted Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “It will be a rising tide of security when it comes.”

The operation in Marjah included about 2,500 marines and 1,500 Afghan soldiers – with as many as 10,000 troops in support. The top Marine commander in Marjah said last week the objective there was to come in “big, strong, and fast, [to] put the enemy on the horns of a dilemma.”

By contrast, the mission in Kandahar, expected to begin by summer, will be more gradual. Few details are clear, even in a counterinsurgency in which the NATO command has telegraphed its intentions before starting an operation, such as in Marjah last month. But military officials say Kandahar will require a more nuanced, measured approach in which forces will build up slowly, probably on the outskirts, before entering the city itself perhaps months later.

Kandahar is a much larger city and province, and coalition forces will take their time to enter due to the area's more complex political and tribal nature.

Marjah in 'hold and build' phase
McChrystal has had his eye on Kandahar, which the Taliban took over years ago, for a long time. But when he took charge of the mission last year, many American forces were already amassed in Helmand to the west.

While Helmand was a Taliban stronghold and much of the poppy crop that provides financial support for the insurgency grows there, many experts say it is not a strategic prize. Nonetheless, McChrystal mounted his first operation there under the new US strategy (and increased troop strength), as a demonstration of what could be done. Citing the clear-hold-build approach, military officials say that most combat operations are over in Marjah and that it is now in the “hold and build” phase.

That leaves room to begin planning for Kandahar and the districts that surround it, including Zhari, Panjawai, Khakrez, Arghandab, and Dand. (Monitor report: the importance of Kandahar to winning the Afghanistan war.)

Counterinsurgency experts say these outer areas hold the key to success for coalition forces entering Kandahar itself.

Gates warns of 'dark days' ahead
While not referring to operations in Kandahar specifically, Secretary Gates sought to prepare the military and the American and international community for the likelihood that the next few months will be no cakewalk.

“There is still much fighting ahead, and there will assuredly be more dark days,” Gate said at a press conference Tuesday with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, in Kabul. But there is reason to be hopeful that Afghan and coalition forces can rout the hardest elements of the Taliban and establish security for the rest of the population, he said.

“Looking forward," Gates said, "there are grounds for optimism as our countries pursue what President Karzai has called an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned initiative to ensure peace and stability.”

[bigron]

US Forces Hold Afghans Back to ‘Prove’ Town Safe for Gates Visit

By Ron Brynaert

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24954.htm


Masrch 09, 2010 "Rawstory" - - The National Security writer for the Associated Press saw through the propaganda, but she apparently decided to run with it anyway.

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates, aiming to show progress in the expanded war against insurgents in south Afghanistan, took a brief, heavily guarded walk Tuesday down a rutted street in this scruffy market town where the Taliban lobbed mortars at U.S. forces only weeks ago," Anne Gearan reports for the AP.

Now Zad was the scene of first significant military push following President Barack Obama's announcement in early December that he would add 30,000 troops atop 17,000 reinforcements he had already sent into the flagging war.

With the additional firepower, Marines moved into Now Zad last December and quickly pushed out Taliban fighters who had seized the town four years ago and forced every civilian to flee. Families that had lived in Now Zad for generations fled their houses with laundry still on the lines, said the top U.S. officer in the district, Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson.

"A few months ago this place was a ghost town, a no-go zone," Gates is quoted as saying. "Now, as I saw for myself, stores are opening, people are returning."

After eight paragraphs, the AP reporter notes that "Gates' walk" required "armed guards in front of and behind him and soldiers dressed for battle posted all along his short route."

After thirteen paragraphs, Gearan finally observes, "Ironically, to demonstrate that the town is safe enough for Gates to visit, U.S. forces held at bay the very Afghan townspeople Marines fought to bring back."

On Monday journalist and historian Gareth Porter wrote about how the media had fallen for the bait "to hype up Marja as the objective of 'Operation Moshtarak' by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city."

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

Porter noted that the propaganda campaign had probably been ordered from the top.

A central task of "information operations" in counterinsurgency wars is "establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative", according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.

That task is usually done by "higher headquarters" rather than in the field, as the manual notes.

The COIN manual asserts that news media "directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency." The manual refers to "a war of perceptions…conducted continuously using the news media."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of the counterinsurgency manual, saying, "This is all a war of perceptions."

The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a "large and loud victory."

The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message.

Last year, RAW STORY's Brad Jacobson reported,

A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in the same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations.

In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request -- which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.

....

The program was ostensibly run out of the Pentagon’s public affairs office for community relations, as part of its outreach, and attended to by political appointees, most visibly in these records by then community relations chief Allison Barber and director Dallas Lawrence.

But as Barstow noted in his report, in running the program out of that office rather than from the agency’s regular press office, “the decision recalled other Bush administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” In addition to concealing the true nature of the program and the retired military officers’ participation in it, this tactic produced one other effect.

It provided Bryan Whitman, a career civil servant and senior Defense Department official who oversees the press office and all media operations, cover if and when the program was revealed.
 
 

 

 

[bigron]

Child Rape in Afghanistan?


by DAVE LINDORFF


 

(Photo: TSgt Laura K. Smith / U.S. Air Force; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

t r u t h o u t, March 10, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64035&hd=&size=1&l=e


The stated goal of the US-led war in Afghanistan, according to the Obama administration, is to defeat the Taliban and establish a stable democratic government over the entire country. Critical to that goal is establishing a professional Afghan Army and police force that is not corrupt and that has the respect of the Afghan people.

But reports out of Canada suggest that, far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countries and to avoid offending those organizations in Afghanistan.

The issue in question is routine rape of children by Afghan soldiers and police operating on Canadian-run bases in the Kandahar region.

As reported last fall in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Canadian military chaplains and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sexually assaulting young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.

The paper reported that Canadian military police have also complained, as reported by Brig. Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, that they were being told "not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children."

According to the paper, the Canadian military command has argued that, even though sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan, the practice is culturally accepted and that the Canadian forces "should not get involved in what should be seen as a 'cultural' issue."

Makes you wonder what other "cultural" issues involving Afghan security forces that the Western occupiers might not want to get involved in. Perhaps the oppression of women? That's certainly part of the culture. How about bribery and extortion? Based on the evidence - that the police in Afghanistan are a wholly corrupt entity, and that the Army is not much better - arguing that corruption is "culturally acceptable" would be easy to do. How about drug dealing? Again, that appears to be quite the culture in Afghanistan.

Kudos to the Canadian grunts, MPs and chaplains who found the sexual abuse of children more than they could stomach, and who brought their concerns to public attention at home in Canada when their own commanders sought to cover it up.

It makes me wonder, though, why here in the hyper-moralizing US we haven't heard a peep from our troops about similar behavior by Afghan forces on US-run bases.

It's hard to believe that a practice so common on a Canadian base that it provoked such outrage among Canadian soldiers is not also occurring elsewhere.

This leaves us with two possibilities:

1. US soldiers and marines are just not as willing to go outside the chain of command and go public with their complaints, or

2. The US media are not interested in investigating this kind of story. It involves only Afghans, and who cares about Afghans? What American journalism covers is Americans. (Remember the big spate of stories about the sex escapades of guards at the US embassy in Kabul?)

I'd say it's probably a combination of the two.

At any rate, the picture painted of Afghanistan's Army and police in the Ottawa Citizen article does not bode well for any plan that hinges on their taking over from US and ISAF troops any time soon ... or for the fate of young children of Afghanistan, if and when they do.



 

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US calls on Iran to play 'constructive role' in Afghanistan


AFP
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64052&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

Hamid Karzai (L) embraces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he arrives at The Presidential Palace in Kabul


March 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — The United States on Wednesday called on Iran to play a "constructive role" in Afghanistan, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Kabul for talks with his Afghan counterpart.

"The future of Afghanistan has a regional dimension and we hope that Iran will play a more constructive role in Afghanistan in the future," said State Department spokesman Philip Crowley.

The United States and Iran have "cooperated constructively" in the past on Afghanistan, he said, but added that US-Iranian relations had rarely led to similar cooperation since then.

"We have issues with respect to Iran, not only within Afghanistan but more broadly in the region," he said.

"They have declined to engage seriously in response to the president's offer of engagement out of mutual interest and mutual respect."

Crowley said the United States understands that Iran has "a legitimate interest in the future of Afghanistan," adding: "We understand fully that the leaders of neighboring countries need to have dialogue."

The US comments came as Ahmadinejad visited Afghanistan and criticized the presence of NATO forces in the country.

The outspoken Iranian leader also mocked US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was visiting Kabul at the same time.

"You are 12,000 kilometers (7,400 miles) away on the other side of the world," Ahmadinejad said. "What are you doing here? This is a serious question."

Gates, who was visiting Kabul before heading to Saudi Arabia, has accused of Iran of providing low-level support to militants in Afghanistan.





 

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Published on Thursday, March 11, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

War in a Box

by Norman Solomon

The event on the House floor Wednesday afternoon was monumental -- the first major congressional debate about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since lawmakers authorized the invasion of that country in autumn 2001. But, as Rep. Patrick Kennedy noted with disgust on Wednesday, the House press gallery was nearly empty. He aptly concluded [1]: "It's despicable, the national press corps right now."
Sure enough, the Thursday edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.

Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort -- a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.

"Apparently, as with many issues in Washington," Congressman John Conyers said in a written statement hours before the vote, "those who are forced [to] bear the costs of war are the first to recognize a flawed policy, while those who profit from perpetual war do their best to blunt any change in course."

Yet the three-hour debate was a step forward, offering a basic clash of assumptions. Cogent eloquence came from many who spoke in support of the antiwar resolution, introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich. The 65 votes for it should serve as a floor to build on.

But among the obstacles are snappy wooden constructs of language and attitude. Consider how a glib phrase now in vogue among Pentagon boosters and journalists -- "government in a box" -- mirrors the jaw-dropping arrogance of imperial power.

At the outset of its March 8 cover story "Taking on the Taliban," Time magazine recounts that Gen. Stanley McChrystal developed a clever plan for the U.S.-led counterinsurgency forces taking Marjah: "He described how these troops would protect the town while a ‘government in a box' -- a corps of Afghan officials who had been training for this moment for months -- would start administering the town."

Three pages and 19 paragraphs later, the article gets around to a less uplifting fact: "It can hardly be reassuring to the residents of Marjah that their newly appointed mayor, Haji Zahir, has only recently returned from 15 years of living in Germany."

That's "government in a box" for you -- akin to the illusion that war can be sequestered in some kind of container -- the sort of feat that's possible only in fantasies.

Martin Luther King Jr. aptly likened the Vietnam War to a "demonic suction tube." And demonic suction tubes can't be boxed. In the real world, war's ripple effects lead to a kaleidoscope of terrible consequences, near and far. You can't keep a war in a box any more than you can deliver a government in a box.

With enthusiasm for war thriving on abstraction, its facile backers are eager to cheer on activities that bring terror, anguish and death as a matter of course.

That's what Congresswoman Barbara Lee was driving at when she spoke for a minute on the House floor just before the blank check for carnage in Afghanistan sailed through Congress with only her vote dissenting. "As we act," she said, "let us not become the evil that we deplore."

More than 100 months later, watching video of her prophetic statement may be enough to make you weep.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf1N-y9Mbo4&feature=player_embedded

And it might strengthen your resolve to help end the military occupation that she tried to prevent.

 

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death [2]" has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is "Made Love, Got War. [3]" He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare [4] campaign. In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay; www.GreenNewDeal.info [5].
[5]


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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/11-1

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South Asia
 Mar 13, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC13Df01.html 
 
  A titanic power struggle in Kabul


By M K Bhadrakumar

The flurry of diplomatic activity in Kabul during the past week heralded the opening shots of a titanic power struggle, the outcome of which will largely determine the contours of an Afghan settlement.

In what is shaping up as a multi-layered power struggle, the principal protagonists are the United States and Britain, Pakistan, Iran and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The struggle is set to accelerate during the coming weeks and will lead all the way to the Afghan loya jirga (the traditional tribal council), which by present indications is expected to take place in Kabul on April 29. Undoubtedly, the stakes are high for all protagonists and the battle lines are being drawn.

The sudden dash by Pakistani army chief Pervez Kiani to Kabul last Friday to discuss "matters of mutual interest" with Karzai, the two-day unannounced mission on Monday by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (whose primary intent was to check out on the intensifying exchanges between Kabul and Tehran), Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's consultations in Kabul on Wednesday ostensibly to discuss the bright prospects for Afghan-Iranian economic cooperation, and Karzai's own two-day trip to Islamabad from Wednesday - all served to highlight the overlapping templates of the power struggle.

Karzai digs in ...
In a fashion, forming part of the mosaic was London's timely decision last week to place Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's special representative for Afghanistan and formerly ambassador in Kabul, in the Afghan capital as its suave Man Friday in the crucial time until the loya jirga is safely home and dry. Ideally, this role could and should have been US special representative for AfPak Richard Holbrooke's by birthright, but then, his type of muscular diplomacy may prove counterproductive in the sensitive times ahead. Cowper-Coles, on the other hand, can be equally tough as Holbrooke, while smiling all the way.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband's major speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Wednesday, "The war in Afghanistan: How to end it", assertively underscored that London intended to be very much in the driving seat in steering Afghanistan politically to a new era.

Several templates are discernible in the power struggle. First and foremost, Karzai insists on his legitimate leadership as elected president under the Afghan constitution to lead national reconciliation which can bring the war to an end.

This translates as his prerogative to convene the loya jirga, and decide its composition. Karzai also holds a mandate from the January 28 international conference in London to draw up the "reintegration" plan for the Taliban, which he is expected to present and seek approval at the loya jirga. Karzai has said his confidante, Ghulam Farooq Wardak will handle the "reintegration" plan.

Karzai hand-picked Wardak for education minister in his new cabinet in December. Having previously held the post at the ministry, a large recipient of Western aid, Wardak was not one of the new faces that the US and Britain had sought.

The choice of Wardak as mentor for the "reintegration" plan is significant. He comes from an influential Pashtun family in Wardak province adjacent to Kabul and Parwan, which forms the gateway to Bamiyan. Wardak is a base of Deobandis and Hezb-i-Islami, and the Taliban have been strongly entrenched in the province.

Conceivably, Karzai would have considered while deciding on Wardak's appointment that he was educated in Peshawar and lived and worked there for a decade. Wardak should be acceptable to Pakistan. This is important as Karzai needs maximum cooperation from Pakistan in ensuring that the loya jirga endorses his road map for the reconciliation of the Taliban. There is always an inherent risk that the assembly turns out to be "uncontrollable" once in session and throws up nasty surprises.

Therefore, Karzai is making preparations with great circumspection, no matter how the Americans and British attempt to force the pace. Washington and London were originally not in favor of Karzai's plan to hold the loya jirga. Now they are stuck with it - and are determined to influence its proceedings.

Their preference will be that the loya jirga leads to a consensus favoring formation of an "interim government", which would force Karzai to step down from the presidency.

... as Miliband baits Pakistan
Karzai, on the other hand, hopes to conduct the parliamentary elections soon after the loya jirga, which would consolidate his power base for the following four years. He has already decreed that no more will there be any US or British proxies in the Afghan election commission.

The fact of the matter is that while both the US and Britain may have grudgingly accepted Karzai's re-election as president, they estimate that he has long since ceased to be anything other than an obstacle to the kind of Afghan settlement that fits their geopolitical agenda towards Central Asia.

Miliband's lecture at the MIT on Wednesday was, in fact, intended to send a loaded "message" to Karzai. "The international community will judge him [Karzai] by his actions, not his words ... The Afghans themselves must own, lead and drive such political engagement [with the Taliban]," Miliband pointed out.

Miliband's speech stopped short of calling for an interim government. He urged Karzai to consider bringing Taliban supporters into the political system and argued that "now is the time for the Afghans to pursue a political settlement with as much vigor and energy as we are pursuing the military and civilian effort".

The Western countries view Karzai's idea of holding a loya jirga as a move by the astute leader to extract legitimacy for continuing as president by heading off the need for an interim government that would require he step down. They anticipate that if Karzai has his way with the loya jirga, he will set the political calendar for the coming years, which would in turn devolve on his presidency till 2013 at a minimum and block any chance of "regime change".

Miliband in his speech literally appealed over the head of Karzai to the participants of the loya jirga when he underlined the framework of a "political outreach", which he saw in terms of a sustainable Afghan government with more inclusive ethnic Pashtun participation, primacy on regional governors and governing councils, a pronounced shift of the locus of constitutional power away from the president to the parliament and a political leadership in Kabul that will forcefully address the "pervasive problem of corruption" in the Afghan government.

Miliband made an undisguised pitch for rallying Islamabad's support by stressing that Pakistan "holds many of the keys ... [and] clearly has to be a partner in finding solutions to Afghanistan". Interestingly, he also called on countries with "vested interests" in Afghanistan - including India, Russia, Turkey and China - to recognize the basic fact that "the status quo in Afghanistan hurts all".

With Miliband's speech, the US and Britain have literally prompted the loya jirga to dictate the peace terms to Karzai.

Iran stands by Karzai ...
As the Afghan leader sizes up the challenge ahead. so too is Tehran, which is extremely concerned that if the US-British game plan succeeds, it will lead to an open-ended presence of American troops in the region bordering eastern Iran, which Washington can always put to use to pressure Iran.

Ahmedinejad's visit to Kabul on Wednesday was primarily intended to make a big statement of solidarity with Karzai, urging the latter to stand up to the challenge and conveying Tehran's willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder by his side .

In essence, Tehran abhors the idea of a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and wants a settlement that duly reflects Afghanistan's plural society. Tehran shares Karzai's thinking that while the Taliban can participate in any inclusive settlement, that has to be on the basis of a willingness to lay down arms and accept the Afghan constitution, which provides for a democratic plural society safeguarding the interests of all religious and linguistic groups.

The US and Britain have been trying to tarnish Karzai by caricaturing him as an appeaser of the Taliban, but Tehran sees through the Western ploy.

Thus, Karzai can hope to tap into Iran's influence with various Afghan groups, which traditionally focused on the Persian-speaking Tajiks and Hazara Shi'ites but today also extends to segments of the Pashtun population. Significantly, Ahmedinejad was received on Wednesday at Kabul airport by the Northern Alliance leader Mohammed Fahim, who has become the first vice president in Karzai's new government despite strong opposition from the US and Britain.

On the other hand, the US and Britain can count on Afghanistan's former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah to raise the banner of revolt against Karzai in the loya jirga. They can also count on sundry disgruntled old war horses like Sibgatullah Mojaddidi and Burhanuddin Rabbani to criticize and isolate Karzai. Some circles have already floated the name of Mustafa Zahir Shah, a grandson of the late Afghan king, as the head of an interim political dispensation in Kabul to succeed Karzai.
 

But with help from Iran (and Turkey and Russia), Karzai can hope to have the bulk of the Northern Alliance extending support to him. Besides, Karzai has also reached out to Hizb-i-Islami leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who is interested in a political accommodation in the power structure in Kabul.

... but all eyes are on Islamabad ...
The "swing factor" nonetheless will be the extent of Pakistan's cooperation.

Iran and Turkey, which remain supportive of Karzai's leadership, have been working with Pakistan to form a sort of regional condominium that offers a regional solution to the Afghan conflict. Ultimately, Pakistan's mind will be swayed by the extent of confidence it has in Karazi's ability to accommodate its legitimate interests in Afghanistan.

And right in the first circle of Pakistan's interests falls Islamabad's demand that Karzai should not stand in the way of a rollback of Indian influence in Afghanistan.

From the available reports, Karzai used his visit to Islamabad to assure Islamabad will have a critical role in any reconciliation with the Taliban. He acknowledged publicly that without Pakistan's cooperation, his reconciliation plan would not get anywhere.

Karzai also seems to have extended assurances as regards Pakistan's legitimate strategic interests. Of note, he had a separate meeting with Kiani.

In his press conference in Islamabad on Thursday, Karzai drew a subtle distinction between India and Pakistan in the Afghan perceptions. Karzai said, "India is a close friend of Afghanistan but Pakistan is a brother of Afghanistan. Pakistan is a twin brother. We are conjoined twins, there's no separation."

Karzai also stressed Afghanistan's neutrality. "Afghanistan does not want any proxy wars on its territory. It does not want a proxy war between India and Pakistan. It does not want a proxy war between Iran and the US on Afghanistan."

However, Pakistan will still closely watch how Karzai goes about fulfilling his assurances that its concerns on India would be addressed, while drawing satisfaction that his tone and tenor on Wednesday and Thursday were exceedingly positive.

The Pakistani leadership went out of the way to roll out the red carpet for Karzai. Almost the entire cabinet turned up at the airport to receive him. A cosmetic outcome of Karzai's visit is that the two sides have agreed to revive the two-year-old idea of holding joint jirgas. Thus, a mini-jirga ("Jirhagai') will be held in Kabul following the April 29 assembly, and another loya jirga in Islamabad later on with a view to narrow down the differences between the two countries and to delineate the role of Pashtun tribes straddling the border areas.

Quintessentially, Pakistan has put its demands vis-a-vis Karzai on the table: Islamabad seeks the "stabilization" of Afghanistan with a minimal Indian role and presence and expects traditional Pashtun influence in the power structure in Kabul will be restored.
The Pakistan army has also offered to help train the Afghan army, which will be a key instrument of power for the Afghan state. "I cannot afford to have Afghan soldiers on my western borders trained by the Indians with an Indian mindset," Kiani is reported to have remarked recently.

... as it bargains with the US
Speaking to the media in Islamabad, however, Karzai left the door open on Kiani's offer. He said, "We have discussed this offer from Pakistan where some equipment has also been offered. We accepted this [equipment]. As far as the training of Afghan soldiers, my minister of defense will study and we will come back on this." He pointedly recalled that the Soviets had also "trained" the Afghan army and "so, we are careful".

Without doubt, Islamabad will now turn towards Washington and assess what it has to offer. There is much satisfaction in Islamabad that recent US statements have virtually acknowledged Pakistan's drive for gaining "strategic depth" in Afghanistan.

Almost the entire Pakistani leadership is going to Washington for consultations in the coming weeks. Pakistani navy chief Admiral Noman Bashir reaches the US capital on March 17, followed by Kiani and Inter-Services Intelligence chief Shuja Pasha, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at the end of the month, and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in the second week of April. Pakistan-US strategic dialogue is also scheduled to take place in Washington in the last week of March at the level of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Beyond the Indian presence in Afghanistan, beyond Karzai's political future, beyond imponderables over the loya jirga, and even beyond the fortunes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Islamabad will calculate that the time has come to assess if, how and to what extent the US is prepared to accommodate Pakistan's aspirations as a regional power.

Specifically, Islamabad expects parity with India as regards the US strategic partnership.

Islamabad estimates that with the endgame in progress in Afghanistan, the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bandwagon is already preparing to roll onto the Central Asian steppes, and the great game for the containment of Russia, China and Iran is about to commence in earnest.

The first moves on the Central Asian chessboard have been made already. Washington won over to its side Uzbekistan, a key country in Central Asia, and has significantly eroded Russia's traditional ties with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The US Embassy in Bishkek last week confirmed the sensational news that Washington proposes to build up a counter-terrorism training center in Batken in southern Kyrgyzstan, close to China's border, which ironically enough will be in immediate proximity to a proposed Russian base.

That is to say, the US estimates that Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is in reality much ado about nothing. At any rate, Tashkent has succeeded in paralyzing the CSTO's proposed activities with regard to mobilizing a rapid reaction force that would have rivalled NATO as a guarantor of regional security.

According to the US ambassador in Bishkek, Tatiana C Gfoeller, "Brand new, modern military equipments ... are arriving in Kyrgyzstan daily and being distributed to Kyrgyzstan's armed forces." It seems the crack Scorpion Battalion of the Kyrgyz military has received "extensive training from US forces".

Close on the heels of Holbrooke's Central Asia tour last month, Central Command chief David Petraeus paid a two-day visit to Kyrgyzstan this week. Following the talks in Bishkek, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said that "all the main challenges and security threats to Central Asia" come from Afghanistan and "therefore, Kyrgyzstan is interested in providing security and stability in this country, and will continue its efforts to offer its endeavor for rebuilding Afghanistan - along with the international community".

Pakistan will carefully factor in all these trends, which unmistakably suggest that the Barack Obama administration has quietly expanded its AfPak brief to include Central Asia so as to bring it in harmony with NATO's future enlargement.

Islamabad will assess that progression of the AfPak policy will involve greater US (and NATO) dependence on cooperation from Pakistan, which is the strategic "beachhead" to the Central Asian hinterland.

All in all, therefore, Pakistan will take a final call on the developing Afghanistan situation only after the series of intense consultations in Washington. Karzai would have estimated that Pakistan is keeping its trump cards in readiness for playing at a penultimate stage in the titanic power struggle unfolding in the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan's future depends on the US-Pakistan strategic nexus.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

 
 
 

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Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion


by Chris Floyd

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64093&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 11, 2010



Rep. Dennis Kucinich's proposal to withdraw from Afghanistan was debated, heatedly, for hours in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. After the debate, dozens of Representatives cast their vote to end the war immediately. This was an unprecedented event in the history of the conflict, now in its ninth year.

Think about that for a moment: an unprecedented event, on the floor of the House, going on for hours, involving a question of supreme national importance. Regardless of one's position on the issue, is this not the very definition of "news"? But on Thursday morning, you could search high and low on the front pages (print and web) of both the New York Times and the Washington Post -- our national arbiters of serious newsworthiness -- yet find no mention whatsoever of this event. This, even though the web fronts -- unlike the paper versions -- contain headlines for dozens of stories, including sections devoted entirely to Washington politics.

You would have had to know about the debate already -- or else trawl diligently through piles of pixels or print -- to reach the small stories that our papers of record deigned to release on the subject. No ordinary newspaper reader -- someone who has a more than passing interest in current events but also has a life to live -- would even know that such a debate took place, much less learn anything about the powerful arguments against the war delivered on the floor of the national legislature. That is to say, it is entirely possible that a reasonably informed and engaged citizen of the Republic would not even be aware that dozens of elected officials at the highest level of government voiced their support for the most radical position on the war: immediate withdrawal.

But such is the way of our imperial system. Our ruling class does not want the citizenry to know there are any alternatives to the grand bipartisan consensus on the true aims of government: servicing the needs of Militarism and Money. And so what cannot be ignored entirely is buried "certain fathoms in the earth ... deeper than did ever plummet sound."

And as we noted yesterday, our rulers are greatly assisted in these efforts by "savvy" progressives who constantly belittle anyone who actually challenges this stifling and disastrous status quo. Anything that goes beyond a bit of mild tinkering and "tweaking" at the margins of the system is rejected by our savvy progs as "unrealistic." The modern "progressive" ethos seems to boil down to this: You must take whatever little thrice-chewed tidbit of cud the elite is willing to dribble out onto your plate -- and be happy about it. That clump of green viscous slime known as the health care reform bill? Why, that's a "great progressive victory!" Didn't you know?

The sad, degraded, destructive state of the "left" in modern America is clearly shown by this vignette from Seth Ackerman, writing of how a previous generation confronted health care reform:



The last big, ambitious measure [in social legislation], Medicare, was a government-run single payer program that displaced or preempted private health insurance coverage for about one in ten Americans. That’s why the AMA, Ronald Reagan, and the nascent conservative movement spared no effort to decry it as socialism.

Yet none of that prevented Medicare from passing in 1965 with 13 out of 32 Senate Republicans voting in favor. Nor did it stop the bill from winning the support of half the senators from the Deep South (5 out of 10, or 7 out of 14, depending on whether you count Texas and Florida). And what about the Mark Pryors, Blanche Lincolns, Ben Nelsons, Mary Landrieus of the world? In 2009, we were told they fought the Senate bill’s mildly progressive elements because they represented states that are “obviously� too conservative to support even such tepid liberalism. But in 1965, three of the six senators from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Nebraska voted for or pledged support for single-payer Medicare, a.k.a socialism.


Today? Dennis Kucinich opposes the corporate-coddling health care boondoggle pushed by the White House -- and he is called an accomplice in mass death by progressive paladin Markos Moulitsas. Kos even levelled the most dread epithet in the entire progressive canon at Kucinich's opposition: "It's definitely a very Ralph Nader-esque approach .. a very unrealistic and self-defeating approach."

So this is where we've come to. Ralph Nader, who has spent decades fighting corporate power, often successfully (which is more than Kos can say), is now a figure of scorn and derision -- his very name a perjorative term -- among our leading "progressives."

And why? Because Nader dared to offer an alternative to the bipartisan consensus of Militarism and Money in the 2000 election. And this, according to the unrealistic and self-defeating mythology of serious progressives, is what threw the Florida vote -- and thus the election -- to George W. Bush. This fairy tale persists despite the fact that the recounts carried out by the media consortium after the election clearly showed that Al Gore received more votes than Bush in Florida, regardless of Nader's total. It was Al Gore and his fellow establishment Democrats who "threw" the election to George W. Bush by refusing to challenge the result in Congress, by refusing to confront the transparent fraud and corruption at the very heart of the political process, and to use the tools provided them by the Constitution to uphold the will of the electorate.

What they did uphold with their timidity, however, was the true governing system of the country: not the Constitution but the empire of military domination and unrestrained money power.  And this system is precisely what the timidity of our progressive paladins is upholding today. Or as that evil old devil Ralph Nader put it just last week:



The twin swelling heads of Empire and Oligarchy are driving our country into an ever-deepening corporate state, wholly incompatible with democracy and the rule of law.


Oh come on, Ralph! Democracy and the rule of law? Don't be so unserious! Don't be so unrealistic! Don't you like the taste of cud? Here, try a little spoonful, just a taste ... You'll soon get used to it --  just like the rest of us. 




 

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As US death toll hits 1,000 in "Operation Enduring Freedom"

Congressional Democrats back expanded war in Afghanistan

By Patrick Martin

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64084&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, March 11, 2010

The US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Wednesday evening against a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan and begin a withdrawal of US troops within 30 days. The roll call vote, with only 65 in favor and 356 against, showed top-heavy majorities of both Democrats and Republicans opposing an early end to the war.

House Democrats voted against the resolution by 189 to 60, House Republicans voted against by 167 to 5. The leaders of both parties lined up in unanimous opposition to the resolution, which would have invoked the 1973 War Powers Act. This provides that the president can send US armed forces into war abroad only with the authorization of Congress or if the US is already under attack.

The measure, introduced by a handful of liberal Democrats led by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, would have had no effect even if it had passed, since the bill would still require Senate passage and then face a certain presidential veto.

Moreover, the bill would have allowed President Obama to keep US troops in Afghanistan through December 31 if he determined this was necessary for “national security.� In other words, the deadline set by the “antiwar� resolution is only seven months earlier than the nominal deadline announced by Obama in his speech last December, when he claimed that some US troop withdrawals would begin by July 2011.

The perfunctory debate and swift defeat of the resolution were a demonstration of the enormous gulf between the great mass of American people and the representatives of big business who comprise the congressional delegations of both parties.

A majority of the American population opposes the war in Afghanistan and wants it to end as soon as possible. But even a symbolic gesture in the direction of this mass antiwar sentiment finds little support in Congress.

Despite the toothless character of the congressional opposition, there was an effective media blackout on even the most tepid criticism of the escalating US military operations in Afghanistan. There was no reporting of the debate or vote on the network newscasts, although the roll call ended just after 6 p.m.

There were only two reporters sitting in the press gallery during the debate, a fact taken note of and denounced by one congressman, Democrat Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, who is retiring from Congress and may thus feel less politically constrained.

The House vote came two days after the Pentagon reported that the death toll among US troops engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, the official title of the Bush-Obama “war on terror,â€� has passed the 1,000 mark. Of these, about 930 were killed in the course of operations in Afghanistan, with the balance consisting of soldiers killed in a dozen other countries, mainly in accidents, where they were deployed allegedly against Al Qaedaâ€"including Yemen, Somalia the Philippines, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Of the 930 deaths in the Afghanistan theater, which includes Uzbekistan and Pakistan, some 726 are classified as combat deaths, with the rest due to helicopter and plane crashes, weapons malfunctions and disease. More than 5,000 US soldiers have been wounded, more than half of them severely enough to require evacuation from the war zone.

The US death toll in Afghanistan has risen rapidly over the past year, and according to an analysis of the deaths over the last three months, one third of those killed had previously been deployed in Iraq. US troops are being killed this year at the rate of slightly more than one per day.

According to the tabulation by icasualties.org, the US death toll rose from 117 in 2007 to 155 in 2008 and doubled to 316 in 2009. In the first two months of 2010, another 70 US soldiers have been killed. The US-led NATO forces have lost another 670 soldiers since the war began in November 2001, including 272 from Britain and 140 from Canada.

Casualties among the occupying forces have been concentrated in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, with 671 deaths in those two provinces alone, the heartland of Taliban resistance, nearly 40 percent of the combined US-NATO losses.

The death toll among Afghan civilians and guerrilla fighters opposing the US occupation is far less accurately tallied, but undoubtedly amounts to tens of thousands.

The House vote to uphold the Obama administration’s escalation of the war coincides with a visit to Afghanistan by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who met with the puppet president Hamid Karzai in Kabul, then toured Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south, the focus of the US escalation.

Gates met with US troops at a base just north of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, which is to be the target of a major US offensive in the coming months. He told them they would play a lead role in that offensive, declaring, “Once again you will be the tip of the spear.�

The 800 soldiers in the Stryker battalion have suffered 21 dead and 62 wounded, a casualty rate of 10 percent, in heavy fighting against entrenched Taliban forces in the rural area outside the city.

An equivalent casualty rate for the 30,000 troops ordered into Afghanistan by Obama would mean 750 dead and 2,250 wounded just among the new forces, not counting the casualty toll among the nearly 100,000 US and NATO troops already deployed.

According to press accounts, Gates and Karzai discussed the details of the coming offensive into Kandahar with General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal told reporters that the military operations in Kandahar would be conducted differently than the recent offensive against Marjah, in neighboring Helmand province.

Unlike Marjah, a largely rural area, Kandahar is a large city of an estimated 900,000 people, where Taliban forces operate covertly rather than openly, at least in the daytime. McChrystal said that only 6,000 of the 30,000 troops ordered in by Obama have arrived and moved into position. The Kandahar operation would require several more months of preparation.





 

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Taliban opens to relief agencies?

IRIN News

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64103&hd=&size=1&l=e

AFGHANISTAN: Talking to the Taliban

KABUL, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) - The insurgents in Afghanistan have shown interest in negotiating with the UN and aid agencies on humanitarian access and aid distributions, according to a purported Taliban spokesman.

"If aid agencies contact our local Mujahedin and reach an agreement we would vouch for the safety of their workers and convoys," Qari Yosuf Ahmadi told IRIN on the phone from an undisclosed location.

"Whether it’s a vaccination campaign or food aid distribution they [aid agencies] can do their activities in consultation and agreement with us," he said.

"Support letters" issued by the insurgents have reportedly helped vaccinators to immunize children in areas controlled by the Taliban over the past year.

Taliban leaders have rejected all offers of talks with the government over the past few years, but in recent months the momentum behind efforts to search for some kind of negotiated settlement has increased.

Kai Eide, the former special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan, backed high-level political negotiations with the insurgents in order to end armed violence in the country.

"The overall strategy must be de-militarized and a political process of reconciliation must be launched," Eide said in his last policy paper in March.

Read more :http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64103&hd=&size=1&l=e
 Driven into the arms of the Taliban
 Dip in civilian deaths in first two months of 2010
 A tight squeeze on humanitarian space
 Warning over heightened risk to NGO staff in 2010
 Could foreign troop surge exacerbate vulnerability? 
 Over 2,400 civilian deaths in 2009 - UNAMA
 Top five humanitarian needs


How to negotiate?

Antonio Donini, a humanitarian expert and senior researcher at the Feinstein International Center, says aid agencies should not rush, individually, to the negotiating table with the Taliban because that could cause confusion.

He said one agency, ideally the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), should lead and manage access talks on behalf of the humanitarian community.

"In a conflict situation like Afghanistan, OCHA needs to be in touch with, and negotiate with, all parties to the conflict," Donini told IRIN, citing UN General Assembly Resolution 46/182.

Direct negotiations with the insurgents, who have been accused of deliberate attacks on aid workers, could be risky as the insurgency is structurally disorganized, some experts say. Others say such negotiations would be worth a try.

"Perhaps the Taliban would use this in their propaganda, but the risks are minimal and there is no alternative that respects humanitarian principles," said Donini.

Negotiations in themselves may not necessarily lead to improved access: Even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which maintains contacts with all warring parties, does not have unrestricted access to all parts of the country.

Insurgents have not intentionally attacked ICRC staff and facilities - not the case with the UN and other aid agencies.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing of five UN staff at a private guest house in Kabul in October 2009, but they unconditionally released four ICRC staff (two Afghans and two foreigners) after they were abducted in Wardak Province in September 2007.



Photo: Fardin Waezi/UNAMA 
Former UN envoy Kai Eide backed negotiations with insurgents Armed escorts

Purported Taliban spokesman Ahmadi warned that aid should not be used for political ends. "Aid must not be distributed by government officials as a way of luring recipients to support the government," he said.

He confirmed the insurgents would attack aid convoys which use armed escorts from the Afghan police or private security companies.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which hires private truckers to transport food items and uses armed escorts in some parts of the country, reported a 30 percent reduction in attacks on food aid convoys in 2009 compared to 2008. Only two attacks have been reported so far this year.

"We work closely with local communities to ensure that WFP food assistance reaches the people it is intended to help. In a few areas, if the transporters request it, we ask the Afghan National Police to escort convoys of commercial trucks carrying WFP food," Challiss McDonough, a WFP spokeswoman in Kabul, told IRIN.

WFP does not exclusively blame the insurgents for all the attacks on food aid convoys: "Food is a valuable commodity, especially in a country with so much poverty and food-insecurity, and so convoys of food assistance can be an attractive target for a variety of different groups."

The use of armed escorts is not welcomed by humanitarian experts who say the military can only be involved in aid activities as a last resort.

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Afghanistan: Nato accused of cover up over killing of pregnant women

By JEROME STARKEY in Khataba

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64120&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 12, 2010

THE survivors of a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which five people, including two pregnant women, died have accused Nato of trying to cover up the atrocity.

In a statement issued after the raid last month, it was claimed Nato staff found the women's bodies "tied up, gagged and killed", and hidden in a room. The statement was headed: "Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery".

However, more than a dozen survivors, local officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain the women were killed by the same unknown US and Afghan gunmen who killed two male relatives and another woman during a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman's compound a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.

The operation, in the early hours of 12 February, came more than a fortnight after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan issued strict new guidelines designed to limit the use of night raids.

Special Forces and western intelligence agencies who operate covert paramilitary forces in Afghanistan have been criticised for launching night raids on dubious or false intelligence, often leading to civilian casualties.

The men killed in the raid were Commander Dawood Sharbubbin, 43, a long-serving policeman recently promoted to head of intelligence in one of Paktia's most volatile districts, and his brother, Saranwal Zahir, a district attorney in Ahmadabad district. Dawood was killed in a doorway while trying to protest their innocence.

Three women crouched behind him were hit by the same volley. Bibi Shirin, 22, had four children under the age of five. Bibi Saleha, 37, had 11 children. According to relatives, both were pregnant and were killed instantly. The third woman, Gulalai, 18, was engaged to be married. She later died of her injuries.

Although the pregnancy claims were impossible to verify, the reports were supported by the head of Paktia's influential Religious Council, Maulavi Mohammed Khaliqdad Haqqani.

All five bodies were brought to the main mosque in Gardez for prayers, before they were buried.

The family say Dawood and Gulalai might have survived if relatives had been allowed to drive them to a nearby hospital.

Nato said the soldiers were part of a joint "Afghan-international" force, but despite rules requiring raiders to leave leaflets identifying their unit, the family said they left nothing. US troops stationed locally denied involvement. Troops are supposed to inform local authorities before they strike.

"Nobody informed us," said deputy provincial governor Abdul Rahman Mangal. "This operation was a mistake."

Dawood and Zahir's youngest brother, Mohammed Sabir, 26, was in the hallway when his wife was killed. With his nephew Izzat and the two dead men's wives, they began shrouding the bodies. Sabir said they tied the feet together in accordance with custom, and tied scarves under their chins to keep their mouths shut.

Nato's director of communications in Kabul, Rear Admiral Greg Smith, last night denied there was a cover-up. He said the men killed were armed and showing "hostile intent", but admitted "they were not the targets of this raid".

He said the statement was poorly worded and confirmed the "gags" were in fact funeral preparations, but insisted the women appeared to have been dead for "several hours".





 

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A Different Concept of Justice


What's Behind the New Mission in Afghanistan?


By MIKE PRYSNER

Weekend Edition
March 12-14, 2010
http://counterpunch.com/prysner03122010.html

The Pentagon generals have warned that we should be braced for hundreds of U.S. casualties every month in this new phase of the war in Afghanistan.

We are told that we must risk life and limb—that tens of thousands of us must flood into Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have skyrocketed year after year. The generals and politicians tell us we must die and be maimed to defeat an enemy, the Taliban, that threatens our "freedom" and our "way of life."

And this is the main explanation and justification for why we must fight and die endlessly in Afghanistan: to drive the Taliban from any chance at political power, for their unacceptable Islamic extremism, anti-U.S. hatred, repression of women and friendship with al-Qaeda.

Why, then, at the same time we are being sent to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, are the politicians sitting down to dinner with the same people we are being sent to fight?

Are the Taliban and al-Qaeda the real reasons for the war on Afghanistan?

When President Obama announced the vast escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his speech made clear that the fate of the United States, and its allies around the world, rested with a U.S. victory in Afghanistan.

He invoked the 9/11 attacks and the fear of another al-Qaeda attack.

General Petraeus, General McChrystal and other Pentagon brass have openly admitted to the media that al-Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan.

Although al-Qaeda claims to operate in approximately 100 different countries, the generals and politicians maintain that controlling Afghanistan is the key to preventing another al-Qaeda attack.

As former-President Bush explained in his announcement of the invasion of Afghanistan, it was not only al-Qaeda that needed to be defeated, but the Taliban government, which was supposedly equally responsible for the attacks. We were told by Bush, and now told the same story by Obama, that if the Taliban is not defeated they will allow al-Qaeda to return and launch more attacks against the United States.

The Taliban was once a friend of the U.S. government, emerging as an outgrowth of the brutal U.S.-funded and trained "Mujaheddin," and continued to receive U.S. funding up until the 9/11 attacks. They had absolutely no role in the attacks, and in fact offered to extradite bin Laden to face trial. In their short history, the Taliban has never expressed any desire to attack the United States, and even today its leaders maintain that they have no interest in launching attacks against the United States—they are fighting to drive out what they rightfully see as a colonial-type occupation by foreign invaders.

We are expected to believe that it is just a coincidence that Afghanistan is an enormous economic prize for Wall Street and oil giants, and a significant geopolitical and military prize for the Pentagon. President Obama went so far as to state on national TV during his escalation speech that the United States is not an empire, not a colonizer.

But the U.S. relationship with the Taliban exposes the truth about U.S. foreign policy and military intervention: The war on "terrorism" is a war for colonial-style control of Afghanistan and Iraq and many other countries deemed important to a U.S.-dominated network of global domination. We live in the era of capitalism, which has as its natural extension the oppression of workers and whole peoples in the pursuit of profit and control of resources, markets and trade routes. Plain and simple: The United States is an imperialist country.

In 1996, when the Taliban was locked in a civil war with other factions vying for state power, U.S. officials began visiting the country. Among others, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel met with Taliban leaders. Her meeting reveals the true nature of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

She stated to those she met with that "we are … concerned that economic opportunities here will be missed, if political stability cannot be restored." At that time it was unclear which faction would succeed in the civil war, and while the United States was supporting the Taliban, they wanted to chum it up with all factions—it is not the nature of the government that concerns U.S. imperialism; only whether or not the victors will be welcoming of the proposed "economic opportunities."

The "economic opportunities" that Raphel was sent to Afghanistan to work out was a proposed gas pipeline that the oil giant Unocal wanted to build, that would spell hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for Unocal, countless other businesses that would cash in, and their paid representatives in Washington and in the Pentagon.

Afghanistan itself is rich in natural resources, and is in a key location for hugely lucrative oil pipelines. But more valuable is its positioning in the region, giving U.S. imperialism a crucial foothold to exert dominance over Central Asia, shifting the balance of power in favor of U.S. interests.

Permanent military bases in Afghanistan would allow Washington to dominate the region, in particular the natural gas-rich former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan’s western border is the Caspian Sea coast directly across from Azerbaijan, also brimming with oil profits. Each of these countries has a wealth of natural resources to be plundered by U.S. capital.

When the Taliban won state power, it eventually became clear that the vast "economic opportunities" that U.S. officials fantasized about would not be realized. The 9/11 attacks provided a pretext to seize control of the country.

The Bush administration arrogantly thought that Afghanistan would fall easily and become a new bastion of U.S. interests. Military bases in Afghanistan would secure those "economic opportunities" within its borders, and give the United States a launching pad to gain access to the economic opportunities throughout the region. But the excitement about the new balance of power in Central Asia was premature, as mounting resistance in both Afghanistan and Iraq began to crush the dreams of the Wall Street CEOs and their functionaries in the White House and the Pentagon.

Year after year, the resistance grew, as more and more Afghans were compelled to fight the occupation in response to endless bombings, raids and dead civilians.

By last year, it was clear that the U.S./NATO force was being defeated at the hands of not only the Taliban, but over 140 different armed organizations that sprouted out of the horrific conditions of living under occupation. When General McChrystal issued his assessment of the war effort after he took command, it was exceedingly grim, and predicted a complete U.S. defeat if there was not a dramatic shift in the size and scope of the operation.

Pentagon’s frustration leads to escalation

The new phase of the war will more than triple the size of the occupation, and focuses on storming urban centers and occupying the cities, as we have just witnessed in Marja. The generals have admitted that this new phase will be extremely bloody, as droves of young men and women will return from Afghanistan dead, maimed or psychologically disabled.

But the official posturing in relation to the Taliban has shifted significantly. The first phases of the war were characterized by chest-thumping slogans of "smoking them out of their caves" and "no mercy" for those who "harbor terrorists." The media pumped out stories of the Taliban’s brutality to justify thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. occupation.

In this new phase, however, the tone has changed. General McChrystal said recently that "if [the Taliban] want to fight, then obviously that will have to be an outcome. But if they don’t want to fight, that’s fine, too, if they want to integrate into the government." A far cry from "no mercy." (New York Times, Feb. 4)

On Jan. 8, a U.N. official met with several senior Taliban officials to discuss a deal with the U.S./NATO occupiers that includes giving the Taliban a place in the Afghan government. In addition to that meeting, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials are taking the first steps to push those talks forward.

Afghan puppet-President Hamid Karzai has also publicly confirmed that, acting as a functionary of Washington, he will begin begging the Taliban to make a few concessions in exchange for awarding them political power.

Over 1,000 U.S. troops have now perished in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands have endured life-changing injuries—they all died because they were told that driving the Taliban from the government was crucial to the safety of the United States.

So why the change? How come after eight years of ruthless battle, after thousands of dead civilians, after more than 1,000 dead GIs—all under the justification that the Taliban was unacceptable and had to be driven from any sliver of political power or influence—why now do the generals and politicians want to award them seats in the Afghan government?

Even with the 30,000 additional troops, the United States will not be able to defeat the Taliban. That is the reason for the change. Washington and the Pentagon are faced with the reality that they cannot win militarily in Afghanistan.

Because the real aim in Afghanistan is to create an area friendly to U.S. business interests and to secure military bases for future imperialist wars, a deal with the Taliban is on the table. The only political position that the U.S. government cares about is whether or not U.S. capitalism is allowed access—so if the Taliban will take seats in the government in exchange for making some concessions to U.S. interests, then the U.S. politicians and the Taliban can become friends once again.

But getting the Taliban to agree to a deal is not possible now—the Taliban are clearly winning the war, so it has no need to make concessions.

As Afghan puppet-President Hamid Karzai put it, striking a power-sharing deal with the Taliban is the new goal, but cannot happen "without an atmosphere conducive to it." (McClatchy News, Feb.

That "conducive atmosphere" means getting the Taliban into a defensive military position, where they are more likely to be receptive to a deal. That is what is behind the troop surge and the new strategy in Afghanistan.

We need a new independent fighting movement

The new strategy in Afghanistan, both the massive troop surge and attempts to rekindle the friendship with the Taliban, is a move of desperation on the part of the United States. It is the admission that the United States is losing the war, with fading hopes of regaining control.

The quagmire in Afghanistan, coupled with the devastating and deepening economic crisis here at home, puts the U.S. government in an increasingly fragile position. It is now, when they are in crisis, that a fighting mass movement of the people must emerge in order to take advantage of Washington’s plummeting credibility.

The current situation puts the people in a possibly much more advantageous position to force the war to end and win jobs, health care and more. Now is the time to capitalize on the mounting resistance to U.S. imperialism abroad and growing frustration with the capitalist system here at home.

On March 20, tens of thousands of people will take to the streets of Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles to say 'NO' to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 'YES' to spending money on education, health care, and other human needs here at home.

Mike Prysner is an Iraq war veteran and co-founder of March Forward!, an organization of veterans and service members fighting to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (www.MarchForward.org).

 

 

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Nato ‘covered up’ botched night raid in Afghanistan
that killed five (including two pregnant women)

by Jerome Starkey, Khataba

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64126&hd=&size=1&l=e
 

Bibi Shirin and her daughter Tamana. The woman's face has been blurred at the request of her familes


March 12, 2010

A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times.

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

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

The raid came more than a fortnight after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan issued new guidelines designed to limit the use of night raids. Special forces and Western intelligence agencies that run covert operations in Afghanistan have been criticised for night raids based on dubious or false intelligence leading to civilian casualties.

The first person to die in the assault was Commander Dawood, 43, a long-serving, popular and highly-trained policeman who had recently been promoted to head of intelligence in one of Paktia’s most volatile districts. His brother, Saranwal Zahir, was a prosecutor in Ahmadabad district. He was killed while he stood in a doorway trying to protest their innocence.

Three women crouching in a hallway behind him were hit by the same volley of fire. Bibi Shirin, 22, had four children under the age of 5. Bibi Saleha, 37, had 11 children. Both of them, according to their relatives, were pregnant. They were killed instantly.

The men’s mother, Bibi Sabsparie, said that Shirin was four months pregnant and Saleha was five months. The other victim, Gulalai, 18, was engaged. She was wounded and later died. "We had already bought everything for the wedding," her soon-to-be father-in-law, Sayed Mohammed Mal, the Vice-Chancellor of Gardez University, said.

On the night of the attack about 25 male friends and relatives had gathered at Commander Dawood’s compound in Khataba, a small village, to celebrate the naming of a newborn boy. Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. "Someone shone a light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taleban were outside," Mr Sediq said.

Lieutenant-Colonel Zamarud Zazai, the Gardez head of police intelligence, said: "Both sides thought the other group was Taleban." Commander Dawood ran towards the family quarters with his son Sediqullah, 15. Halfway across the courtyard they were shot by a gunman on the roof. Commander Dawood was killed. Sediqullah, his uncles said, was hit twice but survived.

The shooting stopped and the soldiers shouted in Pashto for everyone to come outside. Waheedullah, an ambulance driver, said that their accents sounded Kandahari.

Nato said that the troops were part of a joint "Afghan-international" force but, despite new rules requiring them to leave leaflets identifying their unit, the family said they left nothing. US troops denied any involvement.

In the hallway on the other side of the compound, women poured in to tend to the casualties. Commander Dawood’s mother said: "Zahir shouted, 'don’t fire, we work for the Government’. But while he was talking they fired again. I saw him fall down. I turned around and saw my daughter-in-law and the other women were dead."

Mohammed Sabir, 26, the youngest brother of Commander Dawood and Zahir, was one of eight men arrested and flown to a base in neighbouring Paktika province. They were held for four days and interrogated by an American in civilian clothes who showed them pictures of their suspect. "I said, 'Yes, it’s Shamsuddin. He was at the party. Why didn’t you arrest him?’ " Sabir said. After they were released without charge Shamsuddin — who had spent five months fixing generators at the local American base — turned himself in for questioning. He, too, was released without charge.

Nato’s original statement said: "Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed." The family maintain that no one threw so much as a stone. Rear Admiral Greg Smith, Nato’s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up.

He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing "hostile intent" but admitted "they were not the targets of this particular raid".

"I don’t know if they fired any rounds," he said. "If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back."

He admitted that the original statement had been "poorly worded" but said "to people who see a lot of dead bodies" the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours.

The family were offered, through local elders, American compensation — $2,000 (£1,300) for each of the victims.

"There’s no value on human life," Bibi Sabsparie said. "They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won’t bring our family back."


 

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Censorship in Afghanistan: Death to journalists


by Robert Maier

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64134&hd=&size=1&l=e

New book by author and Kabul Press founder, Kamran Mir Hazar, details the sad history and current supression of Afghan media by Afghan leaders

March 12, 2010

Since the beginning of the Karzai regime in 2002, twenty Afghan journalists have been murdered, and more than 200 violent physical attacks against journalists have been logged. Scores have fled Afghanistan after receiving threats against them and their families. Journalists have been sentenced to death, and several remain in jail after being arrested for their work. Radio and television stations, print media, and Internet services have been attacked, blocked, damaged, and even burned to the ground by government and other politico-religious agents and gangs.

As dozens of governments around the world pour billions of dollars and 100,000+ troops into Afghanistan to defend the Karzai government, it is an appropriate time to explore the human rights and legal issues regarding censorship and freedom of the press there.

Kabulpress’ founder and editor-in-chief’s most recent book, "Censorship in Afghanistan" just published by Norway’s IP Plans e-Books addresses this issue in a thorough manner. Written in the Dari language, it is the first book to explore the systematic suppression of free speech in Afghanistan that has been a feature of its ruling authorities for hundreds of years. Kamran experienced censorship first hand when he established Kabulpress.org in 2004, which was aimed at revealing corruption in the Afghan government and NGOs who were mis-handling millions of development dollars flowing into Afghanistan. He was detained several times by government agents and received numerous anonymous warnings about his work. The Afghan Secret Service tried to bribe him as a paid informant before he finally fled to India, where he was granted political refugee status by the U.N. and re-settled in Norway.

There is a special focus on the administration of Hamid Karzai over the past nine years, when after the fall of the Taliban, Afghans hoped that a new era of freedom of speech was beginning. To the contrary, under the Karzai regime, the newly freed media has been suppressed through government statutes and actions, and violent extra-legal autocratic political and religion-based organizations, which the government has been unable or unwilling to control.

The content of "Censorship in Afghanistan" makes it clear why it is the first book ever on the topic. Censorship in Afghanistan has been constant, harsh and violent. Any media that discusses censorship and government or religious corruption and misdeeds is punished both physically and economically. TV, radio, and print media have learned that their staffs will be threatened, assaulted, and/or imprisoned, and their property will be confiscated or destroyed, if they present views contrary to or critical of the Afghan power structures (government, religion, and illicit drug industry). Staff journalists have learned, usually painfully, that they will be demoted or fired if they continue disfavored work. Independent journalists have been threatened, jailed, and murdered, if they displease the powers that be.

"Censorship in Afghanistan" includes interviews with several exiled Afghan journalists, including Parwiz Kambaksh, the 20-year old student whose death sentence for sharing an article about women in Islam spawned a global outcry over the Karzai administration’s stifling of free speech. Journalists who have fled to the West and been granted political asylum, even though they may work for international organizations such as Voice of America and the BBC, are afraid to speak out because their families back in Afghanistan may be harmed as a result. The arm of Afghan censorship proves to be quite long and effective.

Private businesses that advertise in censored/disfavored media are threatened by the same powers, receiving visits or anonymous communications from the gangs and officials who support the status quo. Therefore, media censorship is a black hole from which little or no information escapes, with a few exceptions, like Kabul Press and IFEX, which are based outside Afghanistan. The Afghan Communications Ministry categorizes Kabulpress.org as "pornography," and with increasing success, blocks access to it on the Afghan Internet. This level of censorship of Kabulpress.org occurs in only two nations, Iran and Afghanistan, ironically at polar opposites in terms of support from the West. However given the growing cozy relationship of Karzai and Ahmadinejad, it is logical.

Currently, "Censorship in Afghanistan" is published only in Dari. It was funded by a grant from the Norwegian Non-fiction Writers and Translators Association to encourage Afghans to understand the depth and breadth of censorship in their country. Due to censorship, Afghan citizens and journalists have little knowledge of the problems. There is simply too much fear in the Afghan media to document these abuses.

As an e-book, "Censorship in Afghanistan" can be downloaded on personal computers in Afghanistan, thus avoiding the certain violent attacks Kabul booksellers would receive if they carried it. Printed copies are also available from the publisher for Dari speakers living in non-censoring countries.

Funds are not available now for an English version, but the author is hopeful they will surface. It would be an eye-opening source of information for Westerners whose governments spend billions to support the Afghan government, and for families with relatives risking their lives in the military or in NGOs that support the Karzai administration and its censorship. The 219 page book will be updated annually with relevant censorship news and information.
"Censorship in Afghanistan" includes the following nine chapters:

Chapter 1 focuses on the long, sad history of crimes against humanity and human rights abuse in Afghanistan of which censorship and illiteracy has been a centerpiece.

Chapter 2 introduces the general topic of censorship and specifically what occurs in Afghanistan. It discusses the enormous amounts of money that governments and NGOS have poured into Afghanistan to support a free media. Consultants have been paid huge sums of money to do this, but the net result over the past nine years is a situation that is nearly as bad under the Taliban.

Chapter 3 discusses who carries out the censorship, including Afghan security forces, the Taliban, the Ministry of Culture, various governors, warlords, commanders, and those involved in the massive drug trade. Add to that list, international troops, the Attorney General, Interior Ministry, Education Ministry, Finance Ministry, Parliament and other governmental institutions.

Chapter 4 discusses the phenomenon self-censorship for self-preservation, involving security, political and economic considerations, and social and cultural elements that must be considered by persons contemplating speaking out.

Chapter 5 catalogs the names and circumstances of journalists killed in Afghanistan since 2001. It includes both Afghan and foreign journalists. Additionally, it includes a list of journalists who fled Afghanistan after threats and attacks due to their work, and a calendar of both fatal and non-fatal attacks from 2001 to 2009.

Chapter 6 reviews the development of mass media in Afghanistan, after the fall of Taliban, including radio, TV, print, news agencies, independent journalists, the Internet, the mass media audience, and the quality of journalistic efforts.

Chapter 7 concerns journalists and other individuals and organizations dedicated to defending freedom of information in Afghanistan. They include the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, the United Nations, the International Freedom of Expression eXchange, and Reporters Without Borders, which globally publicize attacks on journalists and free speech in Afghanistan.

Chapter 8 presents an overview of Afghan media law, and its various permutations including the creation of the government news agency Bhaktar, a history of various media laws going back fifty years, military censorship, Taliban media laws, and current trends in media law enabling legal censorship by the Afghan government.

Chapter 9 discusses possible solutions to opening up Afghanistan’s closed media world. They include programs to eliminate illiteracy, the transitional justice project espoused by former Finance Minister and 3rd place 2009 presidential candidate Dr. Ramazan Bashardost. It also provides a list of additional resources and sources used. Additional attachments include the latest media laws in Afghanistan enacted last year by its Parliament and copies of original government documents that encourage and promote official censorship.

"Censorship in Afghanistan" is a remarkable book that could spur needed change in Afghanistan. Afghans have suffered long and hard under the control of corrupt governments, war lords, drug lords, and religious autocrats. It is knowledge like this that will help set them free. It is particularly sad that the leading global news media and writers have been so silent on this topic for so long.






 

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Saturday, March 13, 2010
22:03 Mecca time, 19:03 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/201031316756363636.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deadly blasts rock Afghan city  
 
 

At least 35 people have been killed after a series of explosions rocked the centre of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, an interior ministry spokesman has said.



Saturday's attacks also left 45 people, including policemen and civilians, injured.



Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Kabul, the Afghan capital, said: "We spoke to the spokesman of the governor to the city of Kandahar [and] it appears to be a co-ordinated attack.

"In the city, an explosion happened near the police headquarters, the second one was heard near the provincial guest house in an area where also president Karzai's half brother [Ahmad Wali Karzai] lives.

"Now he [Wali Karzai] is in Kabul; we did speak to him and he did not have much more information than that.

"The third explosion was apparently heard  ... next to Kandahar prison."

High alert

Kandahar hospital was put on full alert and appealed for blood donations.

Several old buildings near the prison collapsed and there were fears that people may be trapped in the rubble.

Kandahar is Afghanistan's third biggest city, after Kabul and Herat, and was the spiritual capital of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their overthrow in the 2001 US-led invasion.

Remnants of the movement have regrouped to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency, which last year killed more than 500 foreign soldiers.