Stopwar.ca

Harper rally in Burnaby to be met by anti-war protesters

2011-04-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

Conservative leader Stephen Harper is campaigning in the Lower Mainland today, and local anti-war activists say they will be there to greet him.

What: Anti-war protest outside Stephen Harper campaign rally
When: Saturday, April 16 · 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Where: 3030 Gilmore Diversion, off Canada Way just south of Hwy 1

With just over two weeks to go in the election campaign, Harper's visit is targeting key swing ridings like the one in Burnaby-Douglas.

"Burnaby has long been home to Members of Parliament who have had a strong tendency to oppose aggressive and expensive wars abroad -- it's the perfect place to greet Harper with an anti-war rally," said Derrick O'Keefe, StopWar Coalition and Canadian Peace Alliance co-chair, in reference to outgoing Burnaby-Douglas NDP MP Bill Siksay and his predecessor Svend Robinson.

StopWar activists plan to carry placards and distribute flyers opposing the purchase of F-35 fighter jets, Canada's role in the NATO intervention in Libya, and the Harper government's extension of the war in Afghanistan. The protest follows an anti-war Day of Action coordinated by the Canadian Peace Alliance last Saturday, April 9, which saw protests held in ten Canadian cities and towns.

The protesters have received a helping hand from the 'Shit Harper Did' campaign, whose website has received over 3 million hits in just three days, and has become a social media sensation which could have a serious impact on the election campaign. The ShitHarperDid.ca Facebook page posted a link to the StopWar rally, and this is generating extra interest in the last-minute rally.

"It's a hastily thrown together protest but we expect a sizable and spirited crowd," said O'Keefe. "Harper's people have been accused of keeping regular people out of his rallies, so we're inviting everyone to join our gathering instead," O'Keefe.

Rally Against Harper: Say No to Billion$ on War and Fighter Jets

2011-04-14T16:04:00.001-07:00

Harper's holding a "Rally for Canada" in Burnaby Sat... Let's show him we oppose his spending on war and occupation instead of on human needs.

Saturday, April 16 · 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: 3030 Gilmore Diversion, off Canada Way
Burnaby, British Columbia

Please spread the word and make plans to join us Saturday.

***

Links for further info

-Canadian Peace Alliance page:

http://www.acp-cpa.ca/en/April9.html

-$30 Billion on fighter jets = election issue:

http://stopwarblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/monday-for-people-not-for-fighter-jets.html

-"Kill Teams in Afghanistan: The Truth, by Malalai Joya:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/30/kill-team-photos-afghanistan-us

***

Background on the war: Harper lied, Canadians and Afghans died

Time and time again, Stephen Harper assured the public that Canadian troops would withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011. Up to 1000 Canadian military staff will be staying until at least 2014...

The war in Afghanistan has reached new levels of brutality. Civilian casualties spiked in 2010 and the rate of killing is increasing each month. It's time for it to end. After almost ten years of occupation and a half a trillion dollars spent by NATO, Afghanistan still suffers from a lack of basic services and a corrupt NATO backed government.

The statistics are shocking. According to the Afghan Rights Monitor: “Almost everything related to the war surged in 2010: the combined numbers of Afghan and foreign forces surpassed 350,000; security incidents mounted to over 100 per week; more fighters from all warring side were killed; and the number of civilian people killed, wounded and displaced hit record levels.”

The NATO forces continue with air strikes that kill civilians such as during the 4 days of attacks on Ghazi Abad which started on February 16 and killed more than 60 civilians - 30 of which were children. In a single two week period between the 12th and 26th of February, 200 civilians were killed.

The Canadian deployment of another 1000 soldiers to act as trainers will only compound the problems faced by the Afghan people. Any support for the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai works against the aspirations of the Afghan people to live in a free and democratic society.

An Evening with Tom Hayden and Rodney Watson Jr.

2011-04-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

An event taking place next week in Vancouver that StopWar is helping publicize, looking at anti-war movements from Vietnam to Iraq.

Big Dreams of Peace: An evening with special guest Tom Hayden

Wednesday, April 20, 7:30pm
First United Church, 320 East Hastings (at Gore)

Hosted and organized by Rodney Watson Jr., Iraq War veteran now war resister living in sanctuary at The First United Church

You are invited to hear Tom Hayden speak on peace building today and how he began his quest in the 60's. Hayden was a leader of Students of the Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, and remains a peace and justice activist and writer today.

Tickets $20 or $30 (includes V.I.P meet and greet with Tom Hayden)

Tickets available for sale at People's Coop Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Dr, Ph: 604.253.6442

More Information:

-Check out this recent feature article in Vancouver Magazine on Rodney Watson Jr:

-Tom Hayden's Peace and Justice Resource Centre

Monday for people, not for fighter jets

2011-04-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

It's a simple sentiment that needs repeating during this ongoing federal election campaign. This article by StopWar recording secretary Kimball Cariou was published in rabble.ca.

Last June, I wrote an article for the Georgia Straight in B.C. about the skyrocketing costs of purchasing new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets from U.S. munitions giant Lockheed Martin.

At the time, the news had just broken that the price tag had jumped from $3.8 billion for 80 F-35s when the deal was first proposed back in 2008, up to $9 billion for just 65 jets, plus another $7 billion on "ancillary costs" such as future parts and maintenance. The total price tag had more than quadrupled within just two years! Now we understand from Pentagon figures that the total cost of this purchase over a 30-year period is expected to hit $29 billion, a staggering sum for a country with serious social and economic problems.

Just three years ago, the individual jets were priced at $47.4 million each. Now the price for each jet, plus parts and maintenance, has jumped over $400 million, at a time when the Harper Conservatives are slashing social program spending.

And it gets worse. The original plan by the Conservatives was to replace the Canadian Forces' current fleet of CF-18 fighter jets. Since then, $2.6 billion has been spent to upgrade the CF-18s.

A Commons committee has investigated the purchase of the new fighters, including the price tag and whether Canada actually needs these weapons. Eyebrows were quickly raised over the news that there would be no other bids for the contract. Another controversy has focused on the fact that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a single-engine aircraft, unsuitable to patrol the Canadian Arctic. (The CF-18s have two engines, which many pilots consider an important safety feature.)

But the NATO war against Libya has raised even more serious issues over this massive boondoggle. With its payload of heavy armament, the F-35s are useful for only one purpose: to engage in modern warfare, bombing "enemy" nations.

A year ago, a survey conducted by Leger Marketing asked "With Canada's military role ending in Afghanistan next year, what should the focus be on the government's military spending?" Almost 60 per cent agreed with this answer: "Canada should take a peace dividend and cut back on military spending to focus on other more pressing social issues at home." Only 28 per cent of respondents wanted to "sustain or increase spending on the military because security in a post-9/11 world is of the highest priority".

Yet according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, "the Canada First Defence Strategy, unveiled by the Harper government in 2008, promises that Canada's military spending will continue to grow by an average of 0.6% in real terms (adjusted for inflation) and an average of 2.7% in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation) per year from FY 2007-08 to 2027-28."

Total spending over the 20-year life of this plan would likely be in the $415-440 billion range (2009 dollars), or about $13,000 per Canadian, surely enough to cause us to rethink the quaint notion that this country's military spending is negligible.

Imagine what could be done with the $29 billion in savings by scrapping the F-35 deal! To give just a few examples, the public transportation systems of Canadian cities could be provided with 10,000 fuel-efficient new buses for just $5 billion.

We could restore the start-up cost of the cancelled national child-care program, for another $5 billion. To build 30,000 social housing units, at a cost of $200,000 each, would take another $6 billion -- an investment which would immediately save millions spent by provinces and municipalities on emergency services for homeless people.

The federal government could provide free post-secondary tuition for 50,000 students annually, for a total of about $8 billion over three decades. That would still leave another $5 billion for urgent needs such as providing clean drinking water to indigenous communities, or emergency aid to countries hit by natural disasters. These initiatives would create jobs, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce provincial government spending.

But Canada is governed today by a party which opposes these urgent priorities. The Harper Conservatives deny the environmental crisis, reject the concept of public childcare, and refuse to fund social housing.

In effect, Canada is ruled by a minority regime which places top priority on war making at the expense of the people. When we go to the polls on May 2, Canadians should send the message to all parties in Parliament that the shocking fighter jet purchase plan is a scandal and must be scrapped immediately.

Vancouver Rally: People Power, Not War!

2011-04-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, April 9, StopWar Vancouver took part in a pan-Canadian Day of Action against the war in Afghanistan. At least ten Canadian cities and towns held events. In the United States this weekend featured anti-war rallies in New York City and San Francisco.

Here is the statement that StopWar distributed at the Vancouver rally.

People Power, Not War!

StopWar, Vancouver's broad-based anti-war coalition, is taking part in the cross-Canada day of action against the war in Afghanistan on April 9 with a rally and march starting from Library Square at 1 pm. We are demanding an end to the brutal and callous war in Afghanistan, cancellation of the proposed $29 billion purchase of F-35 fighter jets, and for solidarity with the peoples of the Arab world struggling for peace, democracy and social justice in their homelands.

The Canadian Peace Alliance and the Collectif Échec à la guerre (antiwar coalition in Montreal) issued the call for the April 9 day of action, to demand an end to the Afghanistan war and to bring Canadian troops home now. The majority of Canadians support this demand. They want governments to invest in health care, education and social housing, not more weapons of war. During the current federal election, these critical issues must be a key topic of debate and action.

The war in Afghanistan has reached new levels of brutality. Civilian casualties spiked in 2010 and the rate of killing is increasing. After almost ten years of occupation and a half a trillion dollars spent by NATO, Afghanistan still suffers from a lack of basic services and a corrupt NATO-backed government.

According to the Afghan Rights Monitor, "Almost everything related to the war surged in 2010: the combined numbers of Afghan and foreign forces surpassed 350,000; security incidents mounted to over 100 per week; more fighters from all warring side were killed; and the number of civilian people killed, wounded and displaced hit record levels."

The continued deployment of 1,000 Canadian soldiers in the guise of 'trainers' of the fledgling Afghan army and police will only compound the problems faced by the Afghan people. Canada's support for the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai works against the aspirations of the Afghan people to live in a free and democratic society. Self-determination for the Afghan people is the only solution to the current crisis.

In the words of former Afghan MP, Malalai Joya - "No nation can donate liberation to another nation. These values must be fought for and won by the people themselves. They can only grow and flourish when they are planted by the people in their own soil and watered by their own blood and tears. "

Events in the Middle East and North Africa provide an inspiring example of people struggling to create a new society without intervention and against regimes supported by the big imperial powers. StopWar is absolutely opposed to the NATO bombing of Libya, which is a shocking violation of the UN Charter and an act of war against a sovereign country, under cover of a so-called "no fly zone". We condemn Canadian military involvement in Libya's internal civil conflict, which is the latest example of intervention to bolster imperialist control of energy resources in the region.

Canadian Peace Alliance: Most Afghans want NATO troops out of their country

2010-12-13T11:13:00.000-08:00

Toronto - The most recent poll of Afghan attitudes towards NATO shows that a huge majority want NATO to leave their country. In fact, only 17 per cent want the West to stay after 2011.

“With violence increasing at alarming rates throughout the country and each new deployment of soldiers only making matters worse, these poll results are no surprise,” said Canadian Peace Alliance Co-Chair Chris Jones.

The poll, conducted in November by four major news agencies including the BBC, also showed a dramatic increase in the number of Afghans who think that attacks on foreign forces are justified, a four-fold increase compared to one year ago. This makes increasingly unlikely the notion asserted by Defence Minister Peter MacKay that Canada’s “training mission” after 2011 will take place in a “safe”, non-combat space in Afghanistan.

“The Afghan people have spoken and they are asking us to leave their country, and the Canadian people have spoken and they want the troops brought home,” said Derrick O’Keefe, Co-Chair of the Canadian Peace Alliance. “The questions is, who was Stephen Harper listening to when he decided to extend the Canadian troop deployment for another three years?”

One answer is U.S. Ambassador David Jacobsen who worked to broker the deal between the Conservatives and Liberals to extend the mission. It is also true that Canadian mining corporations have expressed interest in exploiting part of the nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral resources in the country. In short, the rich and powerful want Canadian troops to stay longer, against the wishes of the people in Afghanistan and in the NATO countries.

The Canadian Peace Alliance promises to continue its efforts to end the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan. “We have the backing of a clear majority of Canadians -- and this includes the involvement of increasing numbers of Afghan Canadians and military family members – as we carry on our push to bring the troops home,” said Jones.

-30-

Afghans don't trust Canadian forces

2010-10-12T23:14:00.000-07:00

Canadian journalist Brian Hutchinson has reported from Afghanistan on a number of occasions since 2006. On returning recently to the country, he penned an interesting assessment of the situation on the ground:

The counterinsurgency is failing in the hinterland. Rural Afghans are still wary of foreign troops, even after almost nine years of intervention. ...

The situation is worst in rural Kandahar, where Canadian soldiers have operated since early 2006 and where they have never been made to feel welcome. Coalition soldiers no longer speak of winning local “hearts and minds.”

Kandaharis are in “self-survival mode,” a senior Canadian officer serving in Kandahar told me recently. “They’ve lived with war for 30 years,” the officer said. “They don’t trust anyone outside of their immediate family.” ...

[Disgraced former Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance's "model village" approach is the] most successful counterinsurgency measure introduced to Kandahar in the past four years.

Unfortunately, that isn’t saying much. Only one “model village” in Kandahar has seen any progress, in terms of stability and development. Deh-e-Bagh in Dand district, just south of Kandahar city, is not trouble-free, but it was peaceful enough this summer that Brig.-Gen. Vance could bring civilians there to walk about. We removed our body armour but we were not without armed escort.

Deh-e-Bagh is just one little village. It’s only a few kilometres removed from Afghanistan’s second largest city, which since July has been ringed by a network of walled vehicle checkpoints, manned by U.S. and Afghan soldiers.

The security ring looks impressive but inside Kandahar city, insurgents continue to target and kill government workers. “People do not look to ISAF forces as a source of protection and security, especially in the city itself,” says Peter Dimitroff, a former Canadian military officer who works as a civilian security advisor inside the provincial capital. ... (link)

Afghan protesters burn NATO base

2010-09-15T14:49:00.001-07:00

Over the past several days, protests in Afghanistan reportedly stemming from threats to burn copies of the Koran in the US have met with armed police reactions which have resulted in injuries and at least four deaths. In the latest protest (Sept 15), Reuters reports that "thousands" of Afghans gathered in Kabul to denounce the United States and that such demonstrations are putting the upcoming Afghan elections in jeopardy.

Here I will look back on recent Afghan protests against the western-led occupation of that country, where it would appear that protesters' tactics have escalated. We saw last month that a spontaneous demonstration against American security contractors saw the crowd set fire to a couple of Dyncorp vehicles. One August protest went well beyond that, aiming to burn down a NATO base.

In late August, an incident in Afghanistan's northern province of Baghlan sparked a riot which targeted the Spanish-run NATO contingent there.

The trigger for the riot was an attack on Spanish troops by an apparent Afghan infiltrator. On August 25, an Afghan driver working for an Afghan police officer shot and killed three Spanish nationals (two police trainers and one Iranian-born translator). The attacker had been working for an Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) officer who was being trained by Spanish Civil Guard officers stationed in Qala-E Naw, the capital of Badghis province in Afghanistan's north. Reports emerged soon after that the Afghan attacker had relatives in the insurgency while Spain's El Pais noted that the same is true of most Afghans. However, some reports said the man had been picked up several times in the past on suspicion of being an insurgent. Others said he had even declared beforehand that he would attack the foreigners.

The attack is the latest in a spate of infiltration-style attacks on foreign forces in the country, so it is not so unusual. What distinguishes this attack is the riot which followed.

More from Reuters:

[According to Badghis governor Dilbar Jan Arman] at least 1,000 protesters tried to storm the base, which lies near the border with Turkmenistan.

Residents however said thousands of protesters had set fire to one part of the base.

One protester, who identified himself only as Abdullah, said there were also casualties among the protesters after troops inside the base fired on them. ... (link)

The Associated Press reports:

Afghans angry at the driver's death stormed the base in northwestern Badghis province with stones and set fire to at least one vehicle, underscoring the brewing resentment among many Afghans over the presence of foreigners on their soil and the problems in rapidly expanding Afghanistan's security forces. ...

When word of the shooting spread, several hundred angry men gathered outside the walls of the Spanish compound, shouting "Allahu Akbar," or God is Great, hurling stones and ripping down fences around the installation, Associated Press Television video showed. Gunshots rang out, although it was unclear who was firing.

Provincial health director Abdul Aziz Tariq said 25 people were wounded in the protest, most of them by bullets, with two in critical condition. Seven of those hospitalized were under 18 years old but their wounds were not life threatening, he said.

Police strung barbed wire in the streets to contain the crowd and restored order by mid-afternoon, said provincial government spokesman Sharafuddin Majidi. He said shots had been fired both from and toward the base, but NATO spokesman James P. Judge said there was no indication NATO soldiers had fired. ... (link)

Radio Free Europe:

[Radio Free Europe's] correspondent in the area, Sharafuddin Stanakzai, reported that angry demonstrators tried to storm the PRT compound after the initial shooting incident.

He said that demonstrators on the scene said they broke through the compound's outer perimeter and set fire to part of the base.

One witness told RFE/RL that Spanish troops fired on rioters who were storming the base, injuring several of them.

However, Saberi confirmed that hundreds of demonstrators later marched on the provincial government's headquarters in Qalay-e Naw -- smashing several windows of the building and forcing local authorities to call for the deployment of troops from the Afghan National Army and national police. ... (link)

Javed Hamim Kakar of Pajhwok Afghan News:

Following the incident, hundreds of angry people hurled stones at the ISAF office in Qala-i-Naw, the provincial capital, and smashed its windowpanes. The demonstrators tried to set the office on fire.

The protestors also torched two civilian houses in the city, [deputy governor] Abdul Ghani revealed, saying the demonstrators were prevented from marching towards the governor's office, police headquarters and the intelligence department.

The enraged men threw stones at the policemen, who had to fire into the air to disperse them. At least 21 protestors were wounded, the deputy governor said.

Without naming anyone, he alleged elements behind the demonstration wanted to damage government offices and private properties. ... (link)

AP:

Fences around the base were torn down and fires set. At least one truck was torched. NATO said it was monitoring the demonstration. ... (link)

You can see video of the protest following the shoot-out here. It shows male demonstrators young and old throwing paving stones and seems to include the sound of gun fire. In response to the Badghis incident and its aftermath, NATO helicopters moved 150 ANCOP officers to Qal-E Naw, the capital of Badghis.

A couple of earlier protests are of note as well:

US troops fire shots to disperse Afghan protesters
By Rahim Faiez

DATELINE: KABUL, Aug 24 (AP) - U.S. troops fired warning shots to disperse a protest in eastern Afghanistan over the arrest of a religious leader suspected of a rocket attack, NATO said Tuesday.

The alliance said no civilian injuries were reported from the protest Monday, but Gen. Faqir Ahmad, the deputy police chief of Parwan province, said one civilian was killed by shots fired from an unknown source.

NATO said about 300 people surrounded a patrol and attacked vehicles with rocks and iron bars outside the massive coalition air base at Bagram, in Parwan province.

"After several attempts to stop the attack and disperse the crowd, coalition troops received small-arms fire directed at them," NATO said in a news release. Coalition forces then fired the warning shots.

Gen. Ahmad said the only gunfire came from the coalition. He said the shots enraged the crowd, with some then using rocks and sticks to attack police and the head of the district government, Kabir Ahmad, who had tried to calm the situation. The deputy police chief said Ahmad and a police officer had serious but not life-threatening injuries.

The man arrested Monday by Afghan police was a religious teacher suspected of taking part in a rocket attack on a coalition patrol two weeks ago, Gen. Ahmad said. About 50 students from his religious school began the protest, which then attracted up to 2,000 villagers, he said. (link)

The unmistakable Orwellian character of the Afghan government's response to the Parwan protest is of particular interest:

BBC Worldwide Monitoring
Text of report by state-owned National Afghanistan TV on 23 August

[Presenter:] The announcement by the National Directorate of Security's press office on the demonstration by a number of the residents of Bagram District of Parwan Province dated 23 August 2010:

Our compatriots know that it is the National Directorate of Security's responsibility to ensure a peaceful and trusty atmosphere in the country, fight those who carry out terrorist activities that result in the killing of innocent people and tackle any threats against internal and external security in Afghanistan in line with penal law.

The vigilant personnel of the National Directorate of Security arrested Qari Mohammad Kazem son of Mohammad Taher, a resident of the Meyan Shakh area of Parwan Province, on 21 August 2010 on charges of carrying out terrorist activities in this province. He was the head of the Hazrat-e Belal seminary. He confessed to his crime as follows:

... [Mohammad Kazem, talking to camera:] My name is Mohammad Kazem son of Mohammad Taher, resident of the Meyan Shakh village of Parwan Province. I am the head of the Hazrat-e Belal seminary. Nur Agha had encouraged me to carry out such actions. ...

[Presenter] Earlier, Shah Mohammad was arrested in relation to this terrorist case. He also confessed to be a member of this terrorist network and wage terrorist attacks.

A limited number of individuals launched a demonstration aimed at abusing the pure sentiments of the residents of the Bagram District. This demonstration was aimed at releasing the arrested terrorists. This demonstration is against the enforced law and steps are taken to arrest the perpetrators and inciter of the move. (no link)

Thus, the Afghan government is declaring the protest described above as illegal and is apparently taking measures against such "inciters" who "abuse the pure sentiments of" Afghans.

Describing yet another protest, AFP reports from the eastern city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan's gateway to Pakistan:

Up to 600 residents blocked the main highway in protest on Wednesday [Aug 18], an AFP reporter on the scene said. They chanted "Death to Americans" and "Death to Karzai," referring to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. (link)

Finally, an August 16 protest against the construction of an Afghan military base turned ugly when US troops fired on the crowd:

In the east, meanwhile, protesters set upon U.S. troops outside of Bagram Air Field, the main U.S. base in the country. A number of people were wounded as the demonstration in Pul-e-Sayad village turned into a riot, NATO said.

The crowd of 250 gathered around the American troops to protest the building of an Afghan army base on land owned by local villagers, said Abdullah Adil, an Interior Ministry official who works with NATO forces in the area.

A few villagers had first gone to the construction site in the morning to demand that work be stopped, and when it was not, they returned with more people, he said.

Protesters threw rocks at the troops as they escorted a contractor to the base, NATO said.

The rocks injured some service members and when they couldn't quell the riot, a soldier fired at the crowd in self-defense, NATO said. ...

One 12-year-old boy was shot, but his wounds were not life-threatening, Adil said.

Construction has now been halted pending more discussion with the villagers, he said. ... (link)

Secret 'kill team' killed civilians for sport

2010-09-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

This past spring, revelations surfaced of war crimes committed by soldiers based out of Fort Hood in Washington State. Details have been somewhat sketchy until now. The Guardian's Chris McGreal reports from Washington on the latest revelations:

US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

SEPTEMBER 9 - Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.

According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".

One soldier said he believed Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon".
Investigators said Gibbs, 25, hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a "kill team". While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians. ...

The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies. ...

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

Two days [after the soldier reported the drug use,] members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of "snitching", gave him a beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. The soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the "kill team". ...

The charges will be considered by a military grand jury later this month which will decide if there is enough evidence for a court martial. Army investigators say Morlock has admitted his involvement in the killings and given details about the role of others including Gibbs. ... (link)

The Afghan anti-war movement grows

2010-08-07T02:06:00.000-07:00

Coverage of Afghanistan's burgeoning anti-war movement is sadly quite scarce, though we have seen in this space some of the more interesting reporting (see here for example). Lately, however, there have been developments which shed some interesting light on the (mostly) non-violent Afghan anti-war movement.

The Afghanistan Solidarity Party (ASP) has a platform dedicated to "women’s rights, democracy, and secular society, a disarming of the country, and freedom of the press," according to a spokesperson interviewed by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls. Formed in 2004, the ASP has its roots in Maoist parties of the past, though it may be mentioned that Maoism in Afghanistan was often simply a label for anti-Soviet Marxists and socialists. In a manner typical of Afghan political parties, the ASP operates as a coalition of six parties and forms a part of a larger association of like-minded secular parties oriented toward democracy. It reports being active in most of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

The party's pursuit of a human rights-centered value system has earned it many members. The internationally respected former Afghan foreign minister Dadfar Spanta, once a member of Germany's Green Party, joined the ASP a while after its founding.

As well, the ASP has won the admiration of widely-known Afghan activist Malalai Joya. When asked by an Italian audience last year about what groups they could financially support, Joya recommended RAWA, the Afghan Women's Mission and the ASP.

Indeed the ASP has gained a wide variety of supporters. Canada's own liberal war-boosters the Canada-Afghan Solidarity Committee have helped raise money for them. CASC's Terry Glavin, a pro-war fanatic if there ever was one, wrote in 2008:

It's heartening to see the Afghanistan Solidarity Party making a comeback after key party leader and co-founder Lal Mohammad was beheaded by the Taliban three years ago. ...

These are precisely the kind of Afghans the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee wants Canadians to know more about, and to support, politically, morally and materially. (link)

At the time the ASP was involved in the kind of mobilizing that Western war advocates can easily get behind. The party headed up a large demo in Kabul that year in support of Pervez Kambakhsh, the student journalist who has since been freed from death row. The CASC, however, will no doubt be disappointed to hear that the ASP is now mobilizing against the US-led occupation of their country.

Here you can see a Youtube video of an ASP protest in Herat this past May condemning Iran's hanging of several Afghan nationals living in Iran. The video shows a woman lifting her burka to speak into a megaphone, some minor property damage inflicted upon the Iranian embassy as well as what appears to be tussling with police. Participants are evidently a fairly broad mixture of people from secular and religious walks of life.

The Herat protest was part of several which the ASP organized in various cities. You can see photos of those demos here. All of them featured rhetoric aimed at the United States as well as Iran, and ASP banners denouncing the American-led occupation were prominent.

On July 30, a significant event occurred on the streets of Kabul, near the American embassy. A DynCorp SUV was involved in a collision with a civilian vehicle, killing one and seriously injuring two more. Accounts differ as to what followed, as US officials deny that the security contractors opened fire on the gathering crowd. In any case, a spontaneous protest broke out among those present, resulting in rioting as two DynCorp vehicles, the first having been joined by another, were set on fire. While most reports say that demonstrators set them on fire, AFP has an interesting account:

It was unclear how the vehicles were set alight, as some security firms torch cars they are forced to abandon as a matter of policy, a security contractor in Kabul said, speaking on condition of anonymity. (link)

The DynCorp employees reported injuries from the rioting. Press photos show young Afghans joyously stomping on a burning American SUV as others wield clubs and throw rocks at the wreck.

The ASP soon organized a protest to harness the anti-occupation sentiment. On August 1, hundreds of Kabulis hit the streets behind ASP banners and placards of various anti-occupation themes, one of which featured the iconic media image of young protesters smashing a DynCorp truck. The photos from the demo appear to show young men using face coverings to hide their identities (see here and here in particular).

Here's the story in the Afghan press:

Kabul residents protest against foreign troops
By Abdul Qadir Siddiqui

KABUL, Aug 1 (Pajhwok) Hundreds of men and women protested against foreign troops on Sunday in Kabul and demanded their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The demonstration started at around 10am from Shah Do Shamshera area of Kabul toward Deh Aghanan square, where the protesters chanted "death to the invaders", "death to the countries which interfere in the affairs of Afghanistan" and "killers of Afghans should leave Afghanistan."

The demonstration follows the deaths on Friday of four civilians [later said to be one killed, several injured - DM] whose car apparently pulled out in front of an armoured vehicle belonging to an American Embassy contractor and was crushed. The accident drew large crowds who threw stones and set the contractors vehicles on fire.

The protesters also chanted slogans against Pakistan and Iran, two other countries they accuse of interfering in Afghanistans affairs.

They condemned the acts of US and its alliance in Afghanistan, said chairman of Afghanistan Solidarity Party, Daud Razmak, who led the demonstration. ... (link)

And the Washington Post has more on the August 1 protest:

"Many times NATO troops and these cars have killed our innocent people. They never care whether we are Afghans or animals," said Samia, 26, an activist from Kabul who took part in the demonstration.

Samia, who like many Afghans goes by only one name, said that she did not want the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan but that NATO has only aggravated the situation over the past decade and fed a parasitic and dependent Afghan government.

"We want NATO troops and American troops to leave Afghanistan. Even with their huge army, they couldn't do anything in the past 10 years. And in the future, they won't be able to do anything." (link)

Petraeus' first move: proxy forces

2010-07-26T22:59:00.001-07:00

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that a couple of years ago, I was regularly running long compilations of civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces (see, for example, here and here). Deadly incidents occurred every few days for months on end. More than once did the tally of civilians killed by western troops exceed that of civilians killed by the Taliban.

Evidence of such carnage has been thinner for over a year now, suggesting two possibilities: Either there were fewer civilians killed by occupation forces, or the incidents continued at the same rate while there was less reporting of them. Few doubt that General McChrystal's new stricter rules of engagement, aimed at winning Afghan hearts and minds, had resulted in less danger to the Afghan public. Soldiers were often quoted lamenting that their hands were tied by the new rules.

It is now widely known that General McChrystal's replacement, General Petraeus, has decided to reverse the earlier order, returning the rules of engagement to their former character.

In contrast, another of McChrystal's policy innovations has been treated with more interest. His efforts to introduce militias are being intensified by his successor:

Petraeus's first act is to establish militias to fight the Taliban
General persuades a reluctant President Karzai to sign up to tactics imported from Iraq

Kim Sengupta - The Independent

HELMAND, July 16 - Armed militias of the type used to fight the insurgency in Iraq are to be introduced to Afghanistan in what is seen as a controversial part of the new strategy of General David Petraeus to counter the tide of Taliban attacks.

The setting up of the groups – who will provide up to 10,000 fighters – is the first major initiative by General Petraeus after taking over command of Western forces in the Afghan campaign following the sacking of his fellow American, General Stanley McChrystal.

The move, has, however, faced resistance from Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, who fears that the groups would become power bases for regional strongmen. ...

The militias are to be deployed in less inhabited areas, which have seen a drawdown of Western forces in accordance with General McChrystal's decision to concentrate on more populated centres. ... (link)

Militias, of course, are seen as a potential problem in and of themselves.

Your guide to WikiLeaks' Afghan war logs

2010-07-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

On Monday, as most readers are probably aware, WikiLeaks released an enormous trove of US military reports from Afghanistan.

First, the local angle: There is some Canadian content, though very little. One incident report claims that an air attack by friendly forces killed four Canadian troops on September 3, 2006 during Operation Medusa. At the time, those deaths were officially reported to be caused by Taliban fire, and indeed there is a small amount of literature describing those soldiers' last moments. The Canadian military denies the report.

Next, a little bubble bursting: The purported Pakistani intelligence-Taliban link is not as strong as some of the hyped articles have it. The New York Times' coverage has opted to focus on the Pakistan angle, citing intelligence reports from the WikiLeaks cache which report that Pakistan's ISI is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban:

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders. (link)

The key word in that run-on sentence is "suggest," as in the evidence does not prove that the ISI supports the Taliban. Indeed, the evidence for the connection is rather poor, according to Declan Walsh, a Guardian reporter with plenty of experience in Afghanistan and who was part of the Guardian team for the WikiLeaks report. The reports:

fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. (link)

American diplomat Peter Galbraith, formerly stationed in Afghanistan, is more credulous. While he admits that some evidence is poor (noting "surely the ISI did not plot to poison Kabul-bound beer, an enormously complex operation with limited pay off since US troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Afghanistan") he observes that the documents "show a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban."

What follows is a summary of the highlights of the revelations of the Afghan war diary, mostly taken from the Guardian team's analysis.

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

Nick Davies and David Leigh
The Guardian - Sunday 25 July 2010

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. ...

The war logs also detail:

- How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

- How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

- How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

- How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date. ...

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots ...

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties." ... (link)

Declan Walsh on the Pakistani ISI:

At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply. ...

But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. ...

[A] retired US officer said some [Afghan] NDS officials "wanted to create the impression that Pakistani complicity was a threat to the US". And more broadly speaking, "there's an Afghan prejudice that wants to see an ISI agent under every rock". ... (link)

Walsh also writes on what the leaked files show about the Afghan insurgency's weaponry for attacks against US/NATO aircraft:

The US military covered up a reported surface-to-air missile strike by the Taliban that shot down a Chinook helicopter over Helmand in 2007 and killed seven soldiers, including a British military photographer, the war logs show.

The strike on the twin-rotor helicopter shows the Taliban enjoyed sophisticated anti-aircraft capabilities earlier than previously thought, casting new light on the battle for the skies over Afghanistan.

Hundreds of files detail the efforts of insurgents, who have no aircraft, to shoot down western warplanes. The war logs detail at least 10 near-misses by missiles in four years against coalition aircraft, one while refuelling at 11,000ft and another involving a suspected Stinger missile of the kind supplied by the CIA to Afghan rebels in the 1980s.

But if American and British commanders were worried about the missile threat, they downplayed it in public – to the extent of ignoring their own pilots' testimony. The CH-47 Chinook was shot down on 30 May 2007 after dropping troops at the strategic Kajaki dam in Helmand...

Later that day Nato and US officials suggested the helicopter, codenamed Flipper, had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade – effectively, a lucky hit. ...

But US pilot logs show they were certain the missile was not an RPG and was most likely a Manpad – the military term for a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. ... (link)

The Guardian's Nick Davies looks at a heretofore obscure American unit called Task Force 373, used for targeted assassinations and captures. Interestingly, he also summarizes an incident where official statements contained lies about the deaths of civilians, again showing US-led deception efforts:

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. ...

[O]n 4 October [2007], [TF 373] confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday [in Paktika province]. The Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had been firing.

The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.

The coalition put out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without giving any numbers or details...

In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back, suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home, senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities … [and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting". Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no protest" over the incident. ...

The logs include references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list, which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been involved in kill/capture missions...

Some of these "non 373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to kill the target...

Other Jpel targets were traced and then bombed from the air. ... (link)

Readers will notice in the above that nothing is said about the involvement of Canadian special forces.

Declan Walsh on Afghan-Pakistani tensions on the border:

Afghanistan war logs: Secret war along the Pakistan border
Americans caught in middle of flare-ups over disputed colonial boundary and attacks by Taliban from within tribal zone

Declan Walsh - The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010

The Taliban are not the only enemy along the fraught borderlands of the Afghan war. Secret intelligence files reveal severe tensions between putative allies who can be drinking tea one day and fighting each other the next.

The war logs detail hundreds of cross-border clashes along the lawless frontier with Pakistan, far more than previously reported. The most violent salvos came from US troops disregarding Pakistani sovereignty to fire on Taliban fighters sheltering in its tribal belt. ... (link)

Finally, the Guardian's David Leigh on the little-discussed role of the CIA:

Afghanistan war logs: Secret CIA paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths
Innocent Afghan men, women and children have paid the price of the Americans' rules of engagement

David Leigh - The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010

Shum Khan was a deaf and dumb man who lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he "ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion".

The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for "other government agency") shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded "escalation of force" provisions of the US rules of engagement. ...

But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false. ...

In another case the logs show that on the night of 30 August 2008, a US special forces squad called Scorpion 26 blasted Helmand positions with multiple rockets, and called in an airstrike to drop a 500lb bomb. All that was officially logged was that 24 Taliban had been killed.

But writer Patrick Bishop was embedded in the valley nearby with British paratroops at their Sangin bases. He recorded independently: "Overnight, the question of civilian casualties took on an extra urgency. An American team had been inserted on to Black Mountain … From there, they launched a series of offensive operations. On 30 August, wounded civilians, some of them badly injured, turned up at Sangin and FOB Inkerman saying they had been attacked by foreign troops. Such incidents gave a hollow ring to ISAF claims that their presence would bring security to the local population." ...

The US also realised very quickly that a Polish squad had committed what appeared to have been a possible war crime. On 16 August 2007 the Poles mortared a wedding party in the village of Nangar Khel in an apparent revenge attack shortly after experiencing an IED explosion. ... (link)

The Taliban's counter-surge

2010-06-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

With Obama's troop surge now half a year old, we can begin to see its effects on the Afghan Taliban. A couple of items in this week's news reveal a bolstered, rather than cowed, insurgency.

From the CBC:

A dramatic increase in the number of homemade bomb attacks is part of an "alarming trend" in Afghanistan, a UN report released Saturday said.

The report to the UN Security Council said bombings and assassinations have soared in the past four months amid ramped-up military operations in the Taliban-dominated south.

The number of attacks involving improvised explosive devices increased by 94 per cent over the same period in 2009, while assassinations of Afghan officials rose by 45 per cent. ... (link)

In other signs that the insurgency is not diminishing in force, officials admit that the northern province of Baghlan is thick with Taliban:

'All districts in Baghlan may fall into Taliban hands'
By Habib Rahman Sherzai

PUL-I-KHUMRI, June 16 (Pajhwok) - Baghlan provincial council members have warned of falling all the districts into the hands of Taliban, who are already in control of almost 11 districts in the northern province.

A fragile government's writ was prevailing in Barka, Tala Barfak, Farang, Khost and Dahna-i-Ghori districts, the council members told Pajhwok Afghan News. They added the remaining 11 districts were under complete control of the Taliban insurgents. ...

Residents have also confirmed the presence of Taliban in some of the districts. The Taliban have been in control of most parts of Barka district, they say.

A resident of the district, Abdul Ghayor, 50, said Taliban resolved their problems and imposed their own laws. The Afghan government could only control the district, he added. (link)

June 12 - StopWar Vancouver AGM and anti-war conference

2010-06-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, you're invited to join members of Vancouver's StopWar.ca Coalition for a day of workshops, presentations and discussion.

StopWar.ca AGM and Anti-War Conference

Saturday, June 12, 2010, 11 am – 4:30 pm
At the Maritime Labour Centre (111 Victoria Drive)

Join us for a conference on June 12th to discuss the escalated war in
Afghanistan and the Harper government’s role in warmaking, occupation
from Haiti to Palestine.

StopWar advocates for an end to the war on Iraq, for Canadian troops to
be brought home from Afghanistan, and for a Just Peace in the Middle
East. StopWar opposes any attack against Iran by the United States or
Israel.

Formed in 2002, StopWar.ca is a broad-based peace coalition based in the
Lower Mainland of British Columbia, endorsed by over 160 organizations
and prominent individuals. StopWar is a member of the Canadian Peace
Alliance. We carry out our activities in a cooperative way, and we are
always looking for new activists and volunteers. General meetings are on
the first Wednesday of every month, 5:30 pm at the Maritime Labour
Centre, 111 Victoria Drive, Vancouver (entrance by parking lot).

AGM Schedule

11 am-12:30 pm - Annual General Meeting of StopWar.ca Coalition

12:30-1:30 pm - Lunch break

1:30-2:30 pm - Plenary session on the war in Afghanistan

2:30-4:00 pm - Concurrent workshops on Latin America & Palestine

4:00 pm - Report Back Plenary

For more information email stopwar@resist.ca

US troops kill Afghan civilians 'chosen randomly'

2010-06-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

One American soldier based out of Fort Lewis in Washington state has been arrested while others are under investigation for the alleged murder of civilians in Kandahar province earlier this year. All the soldiers are with the US Army's 5th Stryker Brigade, which deployed to Kandahar in July of 2009. The unit suffered a large number of casualties, which observers have seen as a catalyst for anger which resulted in the alleged outrage.

Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reports on some of the details for NPR's All Things Considered:

We're told at least several soldiers from the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Washington, were involved. And here's what we know so far. I'm told that civilian deaths occurred during a patrol or it may have been on more than a single patrol. One source tells me the victims were chosen randomly, and there's no indication there was any type of enemy action - any firefight here - before the civilian deaths. ...

[T]his all came to light when a soldier approached his chain of command and told them about the civilian deaths.

Now, this soldier went back to his unit and he was beaten up by his fellow soldiers, so this suggests there may be some sort of cover-up here. Now, the soldier again went back to his chain of command, to his officers, to tell them what happened to him, and that's when other soldiers started coming forward. ... (link)

Agence France-Presse adds some details:

The soldier was beaten after telling authorities about illicit drugs and then, while recovering in hospital, recounted his comrades' alleged role in the deaths of three Afghan civilians, said two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The soldier was "beaten within an inch of his life," one of the officials told AFP. ... (link)

This is not the first time that occupation troops in Afghanistan have been accused of the deliberate killing of civilians. Back in 2007, Polish NATO soldiers were arrested for the Nangar Khel massacre, in which eight civilians were killed. The case was still before the military court this past winter. According to the most recent publicized testimony, it appears that the unit's mid-level commanders ordered the village targeted in retaliation for perceived local support for an earlier deadly Taliban attack on a NATO patrol. Afterward, those commanders first falsely claimed that Taliban fighters were present in the village. When their underlings were not willing to go along with the fiction, those mid-level commanders blamed their commander.

Kandahar hostile to foreign troops

2010-06-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the frequently recurring themes of this blog has been the unreported current of Afghan public opinion which sees the NATO/US mission in their country as an unwanted occupation. This current is undoubtedly substantial and may, as we've seen, constitute the majority view, at least in some regions of the country (see here, for example).

It's not that major media outlets have not reported these developments, but their coverage is typically shallow and generates little echo or commentary. Thus, the story dies soon after it is reported. Below, I excerpt reports from the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times which all acknowledge the reality of public opposition to the foreign occupation. True to tradition, there was no reflection in those papers about what it means to be carrying out a war against the wishes of local people.

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung warns of the risks of the Kandahar operation which is taking shape at this moment:

Results of Kandahar offensive may affect future U.S. moves

MAY 23 - The Obama administration's campaign to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan's second-largest city is a go-for-broke move that even its authors are unsure will succeed.

The bet is that the Kandahar operation, backed by thousands of U.S. troops and billions of dollars, will break the mystique and morale of the insurgents, turn the tide of the war and validate the administration's Afghanistan strategy.

There is no Plan B. ...

U.S. civilian officials are simultaneously trying to wrest control from local power brokers and to correct imbalances that favor one tribal group. They plan to set up 10 administrative districts, each with a representative council and money to spend.

Success has been only vaguely defined, and progress will be monitored through what the military calls "atmospherics reporting," including public opinion polls and levels of commerce in the streets. A senior military official said the central question, which the administration will pose and answer for itself, is: "Are we moving toward a solution in Kandahar that the people support?"

Public descriptions of the balance between the offensive's military and civilian aspects have fluctuated in response to Afghan sensibilities in a region that is arguably more hostile to foreign intervention and the government in Kabul than to the Taliban. ... (link)

The Guardian's John Boone writes from Kandahar, also about the upcoming NATO offensive in that city:

A recent public opinion survey in Kandahar conducted for the US army found that despite their efforts to remain above the fray, most of the 1,994 people questioned sympathised with the insurgents' reasons for taking up arms against the government. Some 94% of respondents did not want foreign forces to start a new operation. ...

Despite the dire state of security in the city and its surrounding areas, there is widespread opposition among locals to a major military offensive, which, like the February operation in Marjah, has been well publicised in advance. ... (link)

And Richard Oppel, Jr. writes for the NYT on the "threat" that foreign forces pose:

NATO Apologizes for Killing Unarmed Afghans in Car

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 21 (NYT) - NATO apologized Wednesday for shooting to death four unarmed Afghan civilians this week in Khost Province and acknowledged that it had wrongly described two of the victims as “known insurgents.” ...

But in some parts of the country, American and NATO convoys are already considered by Afghans to be as dangerous a threat as Taliban checkpoints and roadside bombs, raising questions about whether the damage can be reversed to any real degree.

“People hate the international forces,” said Bakhtialy, a tribal elder in Kandahar who, like many Afghans, goes by one name.

“Their presence at the moment is too risky for ordinary people. They are killing people, and they don’t let people travel on the road.” ... (link)

Finally, the National Post has some revealing news about the state of Kandahar City:

"The Taliban are in control in Kandahar and the areas geographically adjacent to Kandahar city. They control it completely," said Hy Rothstein, a retired U.S. Special Forces Colonel who teaches at the U.S. Navy's Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"Those areas are fortified. There are IED belts (improvised explosive devices) and a population that is not going to provide the type of information the coalition needs in any serious way because the Taliban remain and their shadow government remains strong. ...

Recent visitors to Kandahar say the city is overwhelmed with anxiety. Residents fear being caught up in the NATO offensive and are worried by rumours Taliban leaders in Pakistan have drawn up "kill lists" of people marked for death.

The United Nations recently shut its Kandahar office and removed foreign staff from the city because of the surge in violence. ... (link)

Militias: NATO's proxy forces

2010-06-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

As the nearly nine-year war in Afghanistan has progressed, it has undergone a sometimes shifting development. In previous years, we saw a steady rise in US (and British and French) air attacks (called 'Close Air Support') on insurgents clustered in rural compounds. More recently, while the air attacks have basically continued at the same rate as before, the US military has shifted its rhetoric (and, somewhat, its practice) toward "engaging the civilian population," to use the terminology preferred by counterinsurgency fantasists. For many Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's south, this has translated into heightened danger, as more contact with civilians has meant more night raids, which outrage the population.

Below, the Guardian's Stephen Grey reports on another emerging trend of the war: US-backed militias. Recent months have seen a variety of security armed groups attain some form of recognition from US military authorities, including militias which are more or less tribal and others which may be warlord-led. (In a future post, we will take a look at these various militias as well as new police and military forces.)

Afghan prosecutor issues arrest warrant for US army officer over police killing
Stephen Grey - The Guardian

KANDAHAR, May 16 - An Afghan prosecutor has issued an arrest warrant for an American special forces commander over allegations that a police chief was murdered by a US-trained militia.

Brigadier General Ghulam Ranjbar, the chief military prosecutor in Kabul, has accused the US of creating an outlaw militia which allegedly shot dead Matiullah Qateh, the chief of police in the city of Kandahar.

The militia, which Ranjbar claimed is armed and trained by US special forces, also allegedly killed Kandahar's head of criminal investigations and two other officers, when they attempted to free one of their members from a courthouse. ...

[Ranjbar] accused American officials of refusing to hand over evidence or to permit his investigators to interview the special forces commander, known to Afghans only as "John or Johnny", who he alleges sanctioned the raid. ...

Ranjbar said an investigation found that the force that killed Qateh operated from Camp Gecko, in the hills outside Kandahar, a base for both US special forces and the CIA. ...

He claimed that suspects arrested for the courthouse raid had confessed to being part of a 300-strong militia unit run by "Johnny". ...

[A]ccording to the Afghan account, the militia known locally as the "Kandahar Strike Force", or the "Kandahar Special Group", arrived at the courthouse last June with US-supplied uniforms, vehicles and weapons. They demanded the release of a comrade held for a traffic offence. When police were called to the scene by terrified court officials, the militia opened fire, killing Qateh, and three other policemen. ...

The involvement of the Camp Gecko militia is politically sensitive because of its alleged close ties to Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. ... (link)

Writing from Kandahar, journalist Dion Nissenbaum reports on an Afghan government plan to consolidate private security firms (which often closely resemble warlord-led militias) in southern Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Ahmed Wali Karzai appears to have his fingers in this one, too:

The pending proposal from the Afghan Interior Ministry calls for consolidation of about two-dozen small, lightly regulated security companies under the command of a Kandahar-based security mogul known simply as Ruhullah.

Ruhullah told McClatchy the deal would allow him to create a 2,500-person security firm to provide protection for NATO supply convoys in southern Afghanistan. This would make his firm by far the biggest of its kind in Afghanistan. ...

Some analysts worry that Ahmed Wali Karzai could use the new force to thwart any attempt during the U.S.-backed drive in Kandahar to supplant him ...

In an interview last week at his Kandahar compound, Ruhullah said he got his start in security after the U.S. invasion in 2001, when he started providing protection for CNN and CBS crews covering the conflict.

"I am the one who laid the foundation for security firms in southern Afghanistan," Ruhullah said.

Since then, security specialists say Ruhullah established a powerful security network that now controls long stretches of the convoy supply routes in southern Afghanistan.

Afghan and American government officials said that Ahmed Wali Karzai personally lobbied U.S. policymakers and top Afghan officials to approve the deal. ...

Abdul Manan Farahi, head of the Interior Ministry's counterterrorism department that regulates private security companies, challenged the perception that the new company would become part of Ahmed Wali Karzai's political empire. He said the plan calls for a new leader to take control every six months and includes a diverse collection of security contractors from different tribes that consider Karzai a rival. ...

"The main profits will go to a few people," said one Kandahar security contractor who asked that his identity be kept secret out of fear of retaliation from Ahmed Wali Karzai. "Anyone who has good relations with Ahmed Wali will get the good contracts." ... (link)

Allegations of Wali Karzai's wickedness are thick on the ground, including accusations that he is drug kingpin and CIA asset. What is undisputed is his vast influence in Kandahar, where he is head of the provincial council and often referred to as the effective governor. In March, Time Magazine's Tim McGirk wrote that his "sources insist that Wali Karzai in the past has threatened to call down NATO air strikes or arrange night raids by U.S. special forces on tribal elders who defied him."

Remote control civilian killers

2010-05-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times' Dexter Filkins relates a glimpse of the sanitized butchery in the State-side control rooms for the drone war. It seems that drone operators watching computer screens a half a world away from Afghanistan ignored evidence that civilians were about to be killed in their attack:

Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths

KABUL, May 29 (NYT) - The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike in February on a group of innocent men, women and children. ...

The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan Province ...

In this case, the military Predator operators in Nevada tracked the convoy for three and a half hours, but failed to notice any of the women who were riding along, the report said.

According to military officials in Washington and Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters on the case, intelligence analysts who were monitoring the drone’s video feed sent computer messages twice, warning the drone operators and ground command posts that children were visible.

The report said that drone operators reported that the convoy contained only military-age men. “Information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed by the Predator crew,” General McHale wrote.

Immediately after the initial attack, the Kiowa helicopter’s crew spotted brightly colored clothing at the scene, and, suspecting that civilians might have been in the trucks, stopped firing.

After the attack, the Special Operations team turned over the bodies to local Afghans. Even so, General McHale said, officers on the ground failed to report the possibility of civilian casualties in a timely way. ... (link)

Note that military officers evidently attempted to avoid publicizing the civilian casualties.

Taliban flex muscle amid US troop surge

2010-05-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

The recent Taliban-claimed attack in Kabul that claimed the life of a Canadian Forces colonel, and which the National Post says marks a "new turn" in the war, was quickly followed by a Taliban attack on nearby Bagram airbase, a major American installment. The pair of attacks has prompted some observers to declare that the Taliban's Spring offensive has begun.

Mustafa Qadri writes for the Guardian's site that the Taliban are seen as freedom fighters by many Afghan Pashtuns:

Taliban: the indistinguishable enemy

MAY 16 - They may be repressive fanatics who enslave women and give sanctuary to al-Qaida, but the US-led occupation of Afghanistan has transformed the Taliban into Pashtun freedom fighters. There are two principal reasons for this.

First, despite our best attempts, the foreign troops and the state they prop up are viewed as outsiders who have come not to liberate the country but subjugate it.

Second, so long as our presence in Afghanistan is primarily military, our relationship to ordinary Afghans will be based primarily on violence. Armies, by their very nature, must intimidate and coerce the population into accepting their authority. Despite the talk of winning hearts and minds and civilian surges, much of what we do in Afghanistan creates fear and hostility. ...

The problem for foreign powers in a foreign land is their limited interest in the welfare of the people whose lands they occupy. There can be no sustainable resolution of the current violence, however, unless and until the locals take the lead in looking for political solutions. (link)

Julian E. Barnes reporting for the Los Angeles Times discusses recent indications that the Taliban-led insurgency is not disappearing in the face of President Obama's military surge. The surge, which is expected to peak in September, is in fact the fourth troops increase which the Afghanistan war has seen. All of the previous ones have resulted in heightened violence.

Afghan Taliban getting stronger, Pentagon says
A Pentagon assessment, while expressing confidence in U.S. strategy, says the movement has flourished despite repeated assaults.

WASHINGTON, April 29 (L.A. Times) - A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants' heartland.

The report, requested by Congress ... concludes that Afghan people support or are sympathetic to the insurgency in 92 of 121 districts identified by the U.S. military as key terrain for stabilizing the country. Popular support for Karzai's government is strong in only 29 of those districts, it concludes. ...

A senior Defense official who briefed reporters on the report said violence increased last year in part because of the additional U.S. troops. ...

The report also notes that insurgents' tactics are increasing in sophistication and the militants have also become more able to achieve broader strategic effects with successful attacks. ... (link)

And an Associated Press report cites the Red Cross in shedding some light on the extent of insecurity in southern Afghanistan. Note that insurgents are not the only source of insecurity, as personal and tribal rivalries also commonly break out into armed clashes. These rivalries are often fueled by the accoutrements of the US-led war and occupation of Afghanistan.

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

GENEVA, May 5 (AP) - Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated in recent months to the extent that foreign staff of the U.N.'s refugee agency are unable to travel to half of the country, its top official said Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

Is peace in Afghanistan at hand?

2010-05-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's Jon Boone writes from Kabul:

Taliban leaders to be offered exile under Afghanistan peace plan

KABUL, May 5 - Top Taliban leaders could be offered exile outside Afghanistan if they agree to stop fighting the government of Hamid Karzai, a long-expected peace plan by the Afghan government will propose later this month.

The far-reaching proposals, seen by the Guardian, also call for "deradicalisation" classes for insurgents and thousands of new manual jobs created for foot soldiers who renounce violence.

The long-delayed Afghan Peace and Reintegration Programme has emerged just as Karzai prepares to go to Washington for talks with Barack Obama...

Western powers are likely to be pleased by the level of detail about the new High Level Peace Council, which will take over from a notoriously chaotic predecessor body accused of reintegrating fighters who subsequently took up arms again.

However, diplomats are worried that the government lacks the capacity to implement a programme that calls for complex activities in around 4,000 villages ...

If they agree to lay down their arms and cut ties with al-Qaida they will be entitled to an amnesty against prosecution for any crimes they may have committed. They will also be issued with a biometric "reintegration card". They will then be offered a "menu" of options designed to keep them peacefully occupied, including vocational training in such trades as carpet-weaving and tailoring. ...

By far the most controversial option is the option for former insurgents to join the Afghan army or police force. ... (link)

There is of course one thing missing from the peace plan, at least as outlined by in the Guardian. No mention is made of the Taliban's central demand, which is the removal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. However, the plan does not appear to preclude any outcome on that question, but simply side-steps it. While it does appear to block certain outcomes (e.g. power sharing by Taliban leaders), it seems to leave the status of foreign troops open. Perhaps, then, this plan is considered a starting point for negotiations which would address that more central question.

Also in the Guardian, veteran correspondent Jonathan Steele has a fascinating report focusing on women's attitudes toward negotiations with the Taliban. The article uncovers some rarely-discussed aspects of the Taliban, such as the fact that the Taliban leadership authorized women to study medicine during their reign inthe 1990's.

Afghanistan: is it time to talk to the Taliban?
Jonathan Steele - Guardian - May 4

... Perhaps most surprisingly, even among Afghanistan's small but determined group of woman professionals, the notion of making a deal with the ultra-conservative men who forced them into burkas and denied them the right to work outside the home is no longer anathema. A desperate desire for peace is trumping concern over human rights. ...

I was one of the few journalists in Kabul as the Taliban swept up from Kandahar to take control of the Afghan capital in 1996, prompting the mujahideen warlords to abandon resistance and flee. The sudden shift left everyone stunned, but the crowds that came out to watch the Taliban's pick-up trucks roaring around the streets were mainly supportive. ...

[E]ven as repression grew women could still be heard saying that their family's new-found safety from the civil war's shells and rocket-fire made it worth it.

A similar calculus of security-versus-rights is re-emerging now. Three years ago, when I was last in Kabul and the Taliban were only just starting their comeback on the battlefield, defeating them was the watchword of the day. There has been a tectonic shift in Afghanistan's public mood since then. It is prompted by a host of factors: growing disappointment with western governments and the ineffectiveness of billions of dollars in aid that seems to go nowhere except into the bank accounts of foreign consultants or local politicians; a sense that there can be no military solution to the new civil war and that outsiders are deliberately prolonging it; grief and despair over the mounting toll of civilian casualties, many caused by US airstrikes; rising nationalist anger and a feeling of humiliation; and a desire to return to an Afghan consensus in which Afghans create their own space and find their own solutions. Karzai's recent outbursts against the Americans and other foreigners are no aberration. They reflect a widely held mood.

Over two afternoons, I sit down over tea with a group of six women professionals. If anyone should be suspicious of the Taliban, it would be educated women like these. In varying degrees they all favour negotiations. Though they do not want their names used, so I will identify them by the letters A to F.

A is a Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and the one from which almost all Taliban come. She was already a refugee in Pakistan when the Taliban took over, having fled in 1993 at the height of the civil war. She only returned to Kabul after the Taliban were overthrown.

B, also a Pashtun, lived under Taliban rule. She feels the US, Pakistan and other foreigners are manipulating the war and even have the elusive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, under their influence. I encounter this sense of the Taliban as puppets, even victims, in numerous conversations with Afghan men as well as women.

"It's an excuse for foreigners to occupy Afghanistan and stay here," says A. "That's why the war continues. It's not a war against the Taliban. It's a war for their own objectives."

B says Taliban rule had positive as well as negative sides. As a woman, you couldn't work, "but if you were walking in the street no one could kidnap you. We felt safer than now, when there are all these security guards and other people with guns who can abduct a woman at any time." ...

F, a Tajik, says she has noticed Taliban members presenting themselves as nationalists more than Islamists these days. ...

Anders Fänge, the country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, a large aid agency, has spent around 20 years in the country, also working as a journalist and a UN official. The Taliban should never have been portrayed in the black-and-white terms that Bush and Blair used, he says. During their period in power they often turned a blind eye to the discreet "home schools" where teachers taught girls in people's flats or family compounds. "In 1998 the Taliban governor of [the central Afghan city] Ghazni told me, 'We know you have these girls' schools, but just don't tell me about them.' A Taliban minister even approached me and said, 'I have two daughters. Can you get them in?'" he recalls.

Similar attitudes exist today, he says. In Wardak, a province close to Kabul that is heavily contested by Taliban and Nato forces, "we don't have much problem with the Taliban," says Fänge. "They accept girls' schools and women doctors. They just ask for two hours of Islamic education in schools, that teachers grow beards and not spread propaganda against the Taliban."

The difficulty comes from foreign Taliban, the Pakistanis and Arabs, or Taliban from other provinces. "At the local level, it's a patchwork, a mosaic of local commanders, who may recognise Mullah Omar as their spiritual leader but are not under his control," he adds.

Fänge's points support the case, rarely mentioned by western politicians, that Taliban conservatism differs from the rest of the country in degree, not in kind. Afghanistan is a largely rural society where the oppression of women runs deep. Even in villages populated by Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, Afghan women are routinely banned by husbands or fathers from leaving the family compounds, and girls are kept out of school, according to Afghan women reporters.

... Arsalan Rahmani was deputy minister of higher education and later minister of Islamic affairs in the Taliban government. Four years ago Karzai invited him back to Kabul and made him a senator. He accepts the Taliban made a string of mistakes. "They didn't have good management, they were young, they had no experts, doctors, and couldn't run ministries. My boss was a boy of 25, who couldn't even sign an official letter."

He describes reports of restrictions on girls' education and women being denied the chance to work as false. "That wasn't their idea, then or now. We didn't let girls go to school because of lack of security. There was a war on. But now in Pakistan, Taliban girls go to school and university. My son is a doctor and I want him to marry a lady doctor. I've got three daughters. During the Taliban time they were in Pakistan and all studied there."

He goes on to tell an incredible story. "When I was deputy minister of higher education, people came to me and said they had girls who had finished school and wanted to study medicine. I consulted Mullah Omar and he authorised us to set up rooms in a central Kabul hospital, now called Daoud Khan hospital, where women could study to become doctors. Around 1,200 graduated, and if you track them down you'll see my signature on their degree certificates," he says.

I have no time to follow his advice but I do locate Shukria Barakzai, an independent woman MP who stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet occupation, the four-year rule by mujahideen warlords, and the Taliban period. She confirms the senator's story.

Like many educated Kabulis, she criticises the warlords as strongly as the Taliban (during the warlords' clashes she lost a son and daughter). She too favours talks with the Taliban. "I changed my view three years ago when I realised Afghanistan is on its own. It's not that the international community doesn't support us. They just don't understand us. Everybody has been trying to kill the Taliban but they're still there, stronger than ever. They are part of our population. They have different ideas but as democrats we have to accept that. Every war has to end with talks and negotiations. Afghans need peace like oxygen. People want to keep their villages free of violence and suicide bombers."

Her relaxed attitude to the Taliban stems, in part, from confidence that they cannot win again. "They no longer have the support and reputation they had back then. Taliban is an ideology. It's no longer a united force," she says. ... (link)

May 29 set for Vancouver action against war

2010-05-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

With NATO planning to launch a new offensive in Afghanistan's Kandahar Province in June, Vancouver's StopWar.ca Coalition is organizing a day of protest to respond. Here is the notice for the May 29 action.

***

Stop Harper's War Now!

Join a rally and roving protest

Saturday, May 29, 1pm
Vancouver Art Gallery (North lawn, Howe & Georgia)

Organized by StopWar.ca.

Why it's important to demonstrate now

Please join us for a mass demonstration against Canada's continued involvement in the war in Afghanistan. With pressure being ramped up for an extension of Canada's military role in the NATO occupation beyond 2011, and with a massive new military offensive planned for June in Kandahar, it's more important than ever to show our opposition to this war. Organize your family, friends and community to participate in this rally now.

Real aid, not bombs

The war in Afghanistan has killed many thousands of Afghan civilians, and over 140 Canadians. The total cost to Canadian taxpayers is projected to reach $22 billion. Canada's annual military budget is over $18 billion, and the Harper government plans to pour $500 billion into the military over the next 20 years. At the same time, governments across Canada are cutting funds for education, health care, and low-income housing. It's time to bring the troops home. Military spending must be redirected towards genuine humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan, and urgent social priorities in Canada!

To get involved, or for more information, email stopwar@resist.ca.

American soldiers lose confidence, says poll

2010-04-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

Writing for Politics Daily, columnist David Wood, well-known as a specialist on war and the military, reveals American soldiers' declining confidence in victory in the war in Afghanistan:

U.S. Military Confidence Sinks on Winning Afghan War, Poll Finds
David Wood - Politics Daily

April 13 - The military's confidence that it will win the Afghan war is declining, according to a new tracking poll showing only 60 percent of active-duty military personnel believe the U.S. can triumph.

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

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

Canada subcontracts torture

2010-04-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Revelations don't get much more explosive than this. On Parliament Hill Wednesday, the Afghanistan committee heard from Malgarai Ahmadshah, an Afghan Canadian who worked for the Canadian Forces as an interpreter. Here's the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Malgarai, whose Canadian Forces’ codename was “Pasha,” was an interpreter for the military in Afghanistan for one year ending in June, 2008...

“I saw Canadian military intelligence sending detainees to the NDS when the detainees did not tell them what they expected to hear,” Mr. Malgarai told the special Commons committee on Afghanistan.

“If the [Canadian] interrogator thought a detainee was lying, the military sent him to NDS for more questions, Afghan style. Translation: abuse and torture.”

Effectively, he said, “the military used the NDS as subcontractors for abuse and torture.” ...

There is friction between Mr. Malgarai and the Canadian government. He alleges that someone in the Canadian Forces leaked his real name and identity to the Taliban, calling it punishment for complaining to them about detainee transfers. The ex-interpreter says this led to death threats from the Taliban and forced his family to flee Afghanistan as refugees.

Mr. Malgarai, who now lives in Ottawa, said Defence Minister Peter MacKay and former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier refused his requests for help in relocating his family...

In one July, 2007, example, he said the NDS refused to take a detainee suffering battlefield injuries. The NDS colonel, in front of two Foreign Affairs advisers, placed his pistol on the table and said, “Here is my gun. Go shoot him. Give me the body and I will justify it for you.”

Mr. Malgarai said one Foreign Affairs official, Ed Jager, immediately told the colonel: “I will pretend you did not say [that] and I did not hear it.”

The detainee was ultimately handed over. “Canada’s government says detainees are never transferred to NDS if there is a risk of abuse. But this is a lie,” the ex-interpreter said... (link)

Agence France-Presse has more:

Malgarai Ahmadshah alleged that in summer 2007, Canadian soldiers shot an unarmed man whom they believed had been carrying a gun.

"After the Canadian Forces wrongly killed a man, they panicked, they swept through the neighborhood, arresting people for no reason. They arrested over 10 men from about 10 to 90 years old," said the Afghan-Canadian who was codenamed Pacha during his tenure as translator.

Ahmadshah said he had personally interrogated the detained Afghans at the insistence of Canadian troops to determine whether they had any links to the Taliban.

"None did anything wrong except to be at home when the Canadian Forces murdered their neighbor," he said, adding that Canada had transferred "these innocent men" to the Afghan security forces. ... (link)

Under questioning from Liberal Bob Rae, Ahmadshah clarified that he had not seen the alleged killing. CanWest has this bit from Malgarai's appearance:

Malgarai said he translated 40-50 detainee transfer documents from English to Pashto, Afghanistan's official language. He would ask the Canadians: "Should I translate this as transfer for questioning or transfer for torture?"

"They would just laugh," he said. "They were subcontracting torture." (link)

The CBC's Kady O'Malley liveblogged Malgarai's testimony and includes this:

Oh, and the explosive test - that, [Malgarai] says, is "ridiculous". The soil in Afghanistan is tainted -- he, himself, put his hands on it once, asked for a test - and came back positive. (link)

Although the media seem not to have picked up on this revelation, if true it is arguably more serious than his other disclosures. It is doubtless the case that Canadian forces have detained and passed on to the NDS a large number of Afghans on evidence from explosives tests and little else. If the tests are as prone to false negatives as Malgarai contends, then it follows that we have likely jailed (and worse) many innocent people.

Military poll shows Taliban support in Kandahar

2010-04-12T16:55:00.001-07:00

Murray Brewster, a reporter with plenty of experience in Afghanistan, has this:

Public support for Taliban in Kandahar hit 'all time high' last spring: poll
By Murray Brewster

KANDAHAR, April 6 (CP) - Public support for the Taliban hit an all-time high in Afghanistan's Kandahar province last spring just as the United States was preparing to deploy the first wave of military reinforcements, polling data compiled by the Canadian military suggests.

The data, obtained by The Canadian Press under access to information laws, provide a look at the disenchantment of ordinary Afghans, and perhaps illustrate the method behind the madness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent anti-West rants.

The survey, conducted as part of the military's spring 2009 campaign assessment, illustrates just how much resistance there was even a year ago to the growing U.S. troop buildup in Kandahar.

"International economic assistance is heavily preferred over military assistance," the report said of Afghan public opinion.

A startling 25 per cent of those asked said they had a favourable view of the Taliban, including six per cent with a "very favourable" opinion.

The poll was conducted in most major provincial districts, but the military did not release details about the sample size or methodology. The army has been conducting regular surveys of the Afghan population since 2007.

A human rights group said the sentiments captured in the poll are still present today...

"Fewer Kandaharis report feeling safe than in previous polls; more believe that security is worsening than improving," said the study, carried out in February 2009... (link)

This is not the first time that we have seen mention of these military-run polls. Brewster first mentioned them last year when he reported that "the Taliban pulls down between 15 and 20 per cent support" in the polls. Britain-based academic Antonio Giustozzi recently alluded to them, saying they find higher support for the Taliban and lower support for the Afghan government than do polls conducted for news agencies.

The NATO polling figures are actually not too far from what some professional polling firms have found. In late 2007, a poll conducted for the BBC and others found 23% of respondents in the Afghan southwest reported that the Taliban had local support.

Other experts feel that even these surprising figures understate Taliban support. This is not outlandish given that, for Afghan civilians, there is quite a risk associated with declaring to NATO-backed pollsters one's support for the Taliban. In a briefing prepared for the Pakistan Security Research Unit, veteran Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad writes of a January 2007 conversation he had with the then head of the British PRT in Helmand, and current British ambassador to Congo (DRC), Nicholas Kay. Kay told him that the majority of the population of southwest Afghanistan support the Taliban.

UK troops assist in framing respected NGO

2010-04-11T13:29:00.001-07:00

It appears as though NATO has taken its revenge on the Italian NGO Emergency, headed by Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gino Strada. During the recent showcase attack in Helmand, Operation Moshtarak, the NGO was unsparing in its criticism of the foreign forces:

Emergency Press Release

FEBRUARY 14, 2010 - Since yesterday, the Surgical Centre run by the Italian Ngo EMERGENCY in Lashkar-gah, in southern Afghanistan, has been anticipating the arrival of victims of the bombings carried out by Anglo-American forces, that for two days now have been targeting the village of Marjah, located about 50 km southwest of the capital of Helmand province.

Our staff has been notified that dozens of seriously injured civilian victims are unable to be transferred to hospitals due to military blockades which are impeding vehicles transporting injured victims. As of this morning, six victims died because their evacuation was hindered...

EMERGENCY denounces these severe war crimes perpetrated by the international coalition of forces led by the United States, and calls for a humanitarian route be opened in order to guarantee immediate assistance to the wounded. (link)

Fortunately for NATO, the NGO's condemnation was completely ignored by elite media. I can find no mainstream coverage of this item, which was however publicized by Democracy Now!

NATO officials no doubt hope to demonstrate that you can't call them war criminals and get away with it:

Italians held over alleged plot to kill Afghan governor

APRIL 11 (AP) - Three Italian medical workers are among nine people who were detained over an alleged plot to kill an Afghan provincial governor, officials said.

The nine were held after suicide bomb vests, hand grenades, pistols and explosives were discovered in a hospital storeroom in Lashkar Gah, capital of the southern province of Helmand, a spokesman for the provincial government said. Police had been tipped off about a plot to kill Helmand's governor during a future visit to the hospital, the spokesman said.

A video of the raid shows British troops accompanying Afghan police, soldiers and government officials to the hospital, which is run by the private Italian group Emergency. In a storeroom, boxes are opened containing what appear to be bullets, pistols, hand grenades, and bags of explosives... (link)

Reuters has more:

"They want to get rid of a troublesome witness. Someone has organised this set-up because they want Emergency to leave Afghanistan," the head of Emergency, Gino Strada, told reporters.

He accused the government of President Hamid Karzai of effectively "kidnapping" the charity's employees -- a doctor, a nurse and a logistics worker -- with the backing of NATO forces fighting the Taliban in the province...

A spokesman for the NATO-led international force said on Saturday no NATO troops were involved in the arrest, but Strada said video footage of the arrest showed NATO soldiers were at the hospital.

"Emergency shows the results of the so-called war on terrorism ... 40 percent of the wounded are children under the age of 14. We had asked for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate the wounded, but they put up a security cordon that does not let them reach hospitals," Strada said.

"Until recently we managed to treat the wounded because international conventions were respected ... Today this is no longer possible," he said... (link)

And in typical police state style, the cops say they already have confessions:

Italians 'confess' to murder plot in Afghanistan
Times Online

APRIL 11 - Three Italian aid workers seized by Afghan police in Helmand have confessed to their part in a plot to assassinate the provincial governor, Afghan officials claimed today...

“We still have not been able to reach them by phone,” [an Emergency] statement said. “The only contact we have been able to make has been through one of the employee’s cell phones answered by someone who identified himself as a British military official. This person notified us that the Italians were well, but unavailable to speak at the time.”

The Italian ambassador has flown to Lashkar Gar in an attempt to see the accused Italians...

Military officials insisted that Nato forces were not involved in the raid. Britain’s Special Forces and the Secret Intelligence Service based in Helmand are not part of the Nato mission but they work alongside Afghan forces in Helmand... (link)

You can see the video of the raid here. It shows British troops and Afghan officials entering the Emergency clinic and shows the armaments allegedly found in the clinic. Notice that the Afghan police and others who are collecting the evidence make no attempt to keep their fingerprints off the weapons. It appears as though British forces were watching this, yet they obviously did not intervene to stop this egregious mishandling of evidence.

CNN has this odd assertion:

Authorities said the suspects had taken $500,000 from the Pakistan Taliban to launch their attack in a crowded location when Gov. Gulab Mangal was present. ... (link)

However, the New York Times says the Afghan authorities accuse the Emergency staff of being in league with the Taliban's Quetta shura, which is separate from the Pakistani Taliban.

Tom Coghlan of the Times adds some interesting background:

[I]n 2007 darker accusations were made by the Government, which accused employees of the Emergency hospital of a role in the kidnap of an Italian journalist, Daniel Mastrogiacomo, and two Afghan colleagues by the Taleban.

The Italian was freed after the release of a number of Taleban prisoners. The Afghans were beheaded.

Afghan officials say that Italian government pressure stopped further investigation of the hospital’s alleged role in the kidnap. As one senior government official said in Kabul yesterday: “There has been suspicion for some time of Emergency.” ... (link)

German special forces killed 83 Afghan civilians

2010-04-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

We saw recently that the German army is, despite its government's claims to the contrary, knee-deep in an unpopular war. Today we will explore the event which for many Germans has proven to be the straw that broke the camel's back, an incident known to many as the Kunduz massacre.

Readers may recall Labour Day weekend this past year, when a German-ordered airstrike by US jets blew up two fuel tankers stranded on a riverbed which had reportedly been stolen from foreign forces. Almost immediately, it was widely reported that the number of insurgents and civilians killed in the inferno was at least fifty and was perhaps 90 or more. Also, despite vague details, the Afghan health ministry reported that "a big number of civilians were killed and wounded" in the September 4 bombing. (You can see the rather disturbing drone's-eye-view video of the strike here.)

Despite such early developments, Canada's major newspapers, in concert with the mainstream English language media worldwide, tended to favor the lowest available estimates of the strike's human toll. Even as firmer and more authoritative tallies emerged which supported higher estimates of casualties, the Canadian media generally lowered its reported tallies. The facts of the matter are still unreported in the Canadian press, and the same is true of the United States.

Early Canadian coverage following Sept 4, generally drawn from wire services, cited figures as high as more than 45 civilians dead out of 90 killed in total. By September 14, however, most major Canadian dailies had settled on the figure of 30 (sometimes 30-40) dead civilians.

Only one Canadian newspaper (The Province, Sept 8) carried an AFP report which cited Afghanistan Rights Monitor's tally of 60-70 civilians deaths based on the organization's interviews with 15 residents of Omar Khel village, where the attack occurred. **

The same day as the article the Province, the National Post ignored the ARM tally and instead poured scorn on the United Nations for something that body had not even done yet. According to the Post's editorial board UN condemnation of the Kunduz bombing was "inevitable" following the Taliban's "call for a UN investigation." By this depraved act the Taliban resemble "the Islamists who attack Israel" in their cynical use of the UN, which "never seems able to see through the schemes and plots of extremists and dictators," the editorial warns.

Characteristically, the National Post's sermon is deeply flawed owing to its peripheral relation to the facts. In reality, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) had already been investigating for several days, prompted not by insurgents but by the seriousness of the incident. Contrary to the Post's claims, the Taliban had called not for an investigation but for the bombing to be condemned and steps taken to prevent a recurrence.

On September 14, most of Canada's major dailies (National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun) ran notices relating the results of an Afghan government appointed commission which found that 30 civilians had been killed in Kunduz. However, almost all Canadian media completely ignored a crucial part of the commission's findings. Only the Edmonton Journal (Sept 18) found reason to include the commission's condemnation of the attack. Of course, Afghanistan being something of a vassal state, the condemnation is very mildly worded, saying simply that NATO's decision to launch the airstrike was "the wrong decision".

Quite oddly, Canada's leading daily, the Globe and Mail, did not even mention the Sept 4 air strike until September 9 when a Canadian general serving with NATO command was appointed to investigate the incident. Regarding civilian deaths, the article notes that estimates of civilians killed ranged from "less than 10 to more than 80." They appear not to have followed up on the story.

That the leading media outlets were not more vigorous in their questioning might strike some as odd, given NATO's initially clumsy public relations. " NATO initially said it believed the casualties were all Taliban fighters," wrote one Reuters correspondent, "but later acknowledged that large numbers of wounded civilians were being treated in hospitals."

It seems that the Afghan government appointed commission was not the last word on the matter. Amnesty International, after visiting the site of the bombing and speaking with locals, came out with a report in late October:

Amnesty international’s investigation into the Kunduz incident suggests that the laws of war may have been violated during the airstrike...

According to the German military, NATO’s investigation could not verify the exact number of casualties. Village elders from the area told Amnesty International in Kunduz that 142 people had been killed in the attack, of which at least 83 were civilians...

Amnesty International gathered eyewitness testimonies from survivors of the attack, as well as interviews with Mohammed Razaq Yaqoobi, the local chief of police, UN officials, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission...

The organisation’s research shows that NATO did not provide civilians in the area with effective warning that they were going to launch an attack, endangering the lives of people in the area.

In some circumstances, NATO aircraft in Afghanistan fly close to targets or shoot warning rounds to get civilians away from a potential target. Eyewitnesses to the attack told Amnesty International that they did not see NATO aircraft engage in any warning action prior to the Kunduz airstrike... (link)

But even Amnesty's figure of 83 dead civilians was not the end of the story. In November a report in Der Spiegel (not translated into English) related the story of an independent investigation which concluded that only a handful of Taliban insurgents were killed

German lawyer Karim Popal, himself born in Afghanistan, claimed to represent 78 relatives of victims of the strike in a compensation suit against the German government. Popal had traveled to Kunduz in the weeks after the bombing and met with family members of victims of the bombing.

According to Popal's investigations, the attack killed just five Taliban while claiming the lives of 139 civilians, including 36 children and 20 women. Some 163 children were orphaned. There were 20 wounded civilians as well as 20 missing civilians. Assuming that those 'missing' were most likely dead, Popal's figures imply that 159 civilians were killed.

However, a month or so after this turn of events, Popal's claims were seriously questioned. At least one Afghan whose relatives were killed in the Kunduz bombing distanced themselves from Popal, while a lawyer colleague claimed that Popal had not personally met with all victims' family members as he had claimed. German news magazine Report Mainz cites Amnesty International Germany's Monika Lüke dismissing Popal's figure and calling his allegedly inflated tally an attempt at "haggling" with the German government over compensation.

Interestingly, however, Report Mainz also refers to an unpublished report from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission which found that 112 civilians were killed. (Those who sprechen kein Deutsch can drop the text into Google translate, though expect difficult reading of grammar strange in.) Of course it is difficult to know what to make of this assertion. The AIHRC's staff have shown themselves to be quite competent in the past, but it is unclear why the report wasn't published. However, it is worth noting that Amnesty found that "at least 83" of 142 victims were civilians.

It is worthwhile to note here some details of other things about the Kunduz bombing which have come to light. Much of the controversy centers upon two actions of Colonel Georg Klein, the commanding officer who ordered the September 4 airstrike. First, Klein told the American pilots who were dispatched to the scene that his forces had an informer on the ground at the riverbank relaying real time intelligence on the situation. Then Klein rejected the suggestion that the pilot first fly in close on the scene in order to scare off civilians.

The Kunduz incident recently made headlines in Germany once again after it emerged that Chancellor Angela Merkel may have lied about when she learned of civilian casualties in the September bombing. The Irish Times has some excellent coverage of this development:

An e-mail from Germany’s secret service, leaked to Der Spiegel magazine, suggests the chancellery was informed nine hours after the German-ordered strike on September 4th that 50-100 civilians had been killed.

By contrast, for days after the strike – three weeks before the general election – former defence minister Franz Josef Jung claimed that “only Taliban terrorists” had been killed...

Mr Jung was forced to resign from Dr Merkel’s new cabinet after it emerged that he knew about civilian casualties far earlier than he admitted in public...

“Merkel allowed the defence minister to lie about civilian casualties, contrary to the facts,” said Jürgen Trittin, co-leader of the opposition Greens...

The current defence minister, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, first called the bombing military justified, then changed his mind. He blamed his top two military advisers for the U-turn and dismissed them, claiming they had withheld crucial information from him. He then later changed his mind on being misinformed.

It later emerged that German special forces were closely involved in the strike, suggesting it was a targeted strike against Taliban leaders near the tankers and not, as claimed in public, a preventative measure to stop the tankers being turned into rolling bombs... (link)

That last bit is quite important in light of the NATO version of events, which told of Taliban insurgents attempting to attack foreign occupation forces with two stolen tanker trucks. It makes a difference legally, since if the Taliban are about to attack, they can be counter-attacked. But if they were simply transporting fuel they would arguably be hors de combat, thus a legally dubious target. Of course, the suspects in this case were in possession of stolen fuel, but that would arguably be a police matter, and not an act which justifies an armed attack in response.

Of particular interest also is the apparent involvement German special forces, mostly likely the KSK who are known to be operating in Afghanistan.

** Interestingly, the Reuters dispatch in the Province notes the Taliban's own efforts to assess the attack: "The Taliban said they had set up their own commission to investigate the incident and released a list of 79 civilians killed in the air raid. The list includes 24 children under age 18." If we assume that Amnesty's tally of 83 dead is authoritative, it is noteworthy that the Taliban's initial report was the most accurate, erring on the conservative side.

New York Times sees 'occupation' in Afghanistan

2010-04-06T19:35:00.001-07:00

Back in February, the Open Society Institute released a report on the war in Afghanistan entitled 'Strangers at the Door' which noted improvements in some areas of forces conduct following the introduction of General McChrystal's new guidelines. In particular, there has been progress in "reducing civilian deaths due to airstrikes," according to the report. It continues:

One practice, however, that has changed little is the search and seizure operations known as night raids. (link)

We saw back in January that there is reason to believe that ground force attacks, often at night, are replacing the airstrike as the most common terror tactic in use by American-led forces in Afghanistan. Now reporter Richard Oppel of the New York Times has news of a similar kind:

Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints
Richard Oppel, Jr.

KABUL, March 26 (NYT) - American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul.

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.

Though fewer in number than deaths from airstrikes and Special Forces operations, such shootings have not dropped off, despite new rules from General McChrystal seeking to reduce the killing of innocents. The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate — a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation. ...

Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall.

“There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents,” Sergeant Major Hall told troops during the videoconference. ... (link)

Oppel should be commended for his use of the word "occupation" to describe the task of foreign troops in Afghanistan. It may be a first for the New York Times.

In another New York Times milestone, a former member of the Reagan administration became the first commentator I've seen to advocate in its pages for an old solution to a new problem. Bing West, former Marine and former assistant secretary of defence, wants to see the US get tight with an expanded and empowered military and pull out:

The Philippines — and South Korea as well — evolved into thriving democracies at their own pace, well after American aid helped to beat back the military threats facing them. It was enough to prevent the Communist takeovers and leave behind governments controlled in the background by a strong military. We didn’t spend tens of billions of dollars on material projects to inculcate democratic principles.

Similarly, a diminished Hamid Karzai can be left to run a sloppy government, with a powerful, American-financed Afghan military insuring that the Taliban do not take over. ... (link)

And lest we forget that even a supposedly improved situation is still a horrific one for those on the population of the country:

KABUL, April 6 (Reuters) - NATO launched an investigation on Tuesday into whether its forces had killed four civilians -- two women, a child and an elderly man -- in an air strike overnight on a compound in southern Afghanistan.

In a separate incident, the NATO-led force said it was also investigating how one child had been killed and three wounded during a clash with fighters in the east of the country... (link)

Canadian forces working closely with criminals

2010-04-06T19:04:00.001-07:00

The latest revelation in the revelation-a-week detainee/torture scandal is that the government was warned just last year about the Canadian military's possibly illegal relationship with the Afghan version of the FBI, known as the NDS.

The CBC has the story:

Tories alerted to Afghan secret police legal 'risk'

APRIL 6 - The Conservative government was warned last summer that working with the Afghan secret police would lead to allegations Canada condoned abuse and that Canadians could face legal liability for complicity in torture.

The information, contained in a candid top-level government memo shared with CBC News, shows that officials were worried that Canada's relationship with the Afghan National Directorate of Security was risky — and possibly illegal — even while the government was defending it...

The NDS has wider powers of arrest and detention than most intelligence agencies, the memo says, and as a result, "there is considerable scope for the use of improper methods." Engaging with the NDS "entails a degree of risk to Canadian interests," it adds...

"Canadian partnership in NDS projects without prior insight into its methods runs the risk of appearing to condone human rights abuses and acts which would be illegal under Canadian law," the document states.

Government officials admit that Canada has used the fruits of NDS intelligence-gathering. Brig-Gen. Denis Thompson, former commander of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, told a parliamentary committee last week that his assessment of the NDS in fighting the insurgency "is that they were a very valuable partner, and I mean, we acted on the intelligence we received from the NDS." ... (link)

These rather stark views of the NDS are quite similar to those of the former political director of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, Cory Anderson. Last week, he testified before the ongoing special parliamentary committee on Afghanistan which has played host to the revelations of Richard Colvin and memorable testimonies from a variety of witnesses. His explanation of one of the main tasks of Canadian diplomats is quite startling:

“I don’t think it helps our cause to be so closely associated with the NDS in a very overt fashion because of the specific reputation that it has among the population,” [Anderson] said.

Afghans most often reach out to Canadian diplomats not for development funds but to enquire about missing siblings, he said.

“What they were concerned about was, what happened to their cousin a year-and-a-half ago who has gone missing or why has someone been in NDS custody for months at a time without having any charges laid against them, and were they (transferred by Canadian Forces)?” Anderson said...

The NDS provides good generic intelligence, but there are concerns that intelligence is obtained through ways that breach “obligations under international standards,” he said...

Anderson said he repeatedly voiced concerns about “mission killers” — such as Canada’s partnership with the NDS — with members of the Canadian Forces and politicians, including Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

The diplomat also slammed the military for absolving itself from any monitoring responsibility leaving a handful of diplomats ill-equipped to penetrate the NDS and judge whether torture was taking place... (link)

And the Toronto Star elaborates on Anderson's views on the role of the Canadian Forces:

Anderson spelled out a scenario Wednesday in which the Canadian Forces wiped their hands of responsibility for the well-being of the detainees they had captured as soon as they left their temporary prisons at Kandahar Airfield.

The military did as little as possible to help their civilian partners – primarily diplomats – monitor those prisoners to ensure they were not being tortured, he told the House of Commons special committee ...

[Anderson said the NDS] was an agency built on “endemic and systemic duplicity” and its officials appeared to resent the interference of Canadian diplomats in their operations and resisted all but the most basic cooperation ... (link)

Anderson is of course not the first person to sound warnings about the NDS. Here's what whistle blowing diplomat Richard Colvin wrote about his attempts to tell civilian and military officials about the risk of torture:

[I]n early March 2007, I informed an interagency meeting of some 12 to 15 officials in Ottawa that, "The NDS tortures people, that's what they do, and if we don't want our detainees tortured, we shouldn't give them to the NDS." (The NDS, or National Directorate of Security, is Afghanistan's intelligence service.) The response from the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM) note-taker was to stop writing and put down her pen... (link)

Massacre cover-up exposed

2010-04-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

We saw last week that NATO was busy smearing British journalist Richard Starkey for reporting on the victims' version of events in Gardez during a murderous special forces house raid in February. Now Afghan investigators are finding corroboration for the villagers' version.

The New York Times has the story:

Afghan Investigators Say U.S. Troops Tried to Cover Up Evidence in Botched Raid
Richard A. Oppel, Jr. - NYT

KABUL, April 5 - Afghan officials investigating the deaths of five Afghan civilians gunned down in February during a bungled raid by American Special Operations forces believe that troops tampered with evidence at the scene, the lead investigator said Monday...

The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans — all family members — from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said...

In an interview, [lead investigator Merza Mohammed] Yarmand said the raiding party had killed all five Afghans — and then meddled with the scene.

“We came to the conclusion that the NATO patrol was responsible for the killing of the two men and the three women, and that there was evidence of tampering in the corridor inside the compound by the members” of the assault team, Mr. Yarmand said...

Yet to be determined is whether Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the victims’ bodies in an effort to hide what had happened, as described by family members who survived the raid.

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

Reading the above, a keen eye might note a certain discrepancy in Oppel's reporting. He cites terms like US Special Operations and NATO patrol interchangeably, though it is not clear. It would be unusual, from what we know of past trends, if this was a NATO night raid undertaken by US special forces with Afghans training or assisting alongside. Until now, the bulk of evidence indicates that such operations are done outside NATO command, and instead under the USA's Operation Enduring Freedom. It seems likely the reasons have to do with preventing the involvement of NATO allies in either planning or responsibility or both. Night raids have a highly dubious legal status and some of NATO's more sensitive members might not stay quiet if their forces were involved in such operations.

Over at the Rethink Afghanistan blog, which has been following this story closely, the revelations brought this well-expressed rebuke:

Remember that survivors of the raid said that the special operations forces denied the wounded medical treatment and prevented survivors from going to get medical help for an extended period of time, during which one of the women and one of the men who were mortally wounded died.

That means special operations forces were busy digging bullets out of walls and/or people to cover their asses while the innocent people they shot were bleeding to death... (link)

Finally, another dispatch from Richard Oppel sheds some light on what is happening in Marja:

Violence Helps Taliban Undo Afghan Gains
Richard A. Oppel, Jr. - NYT

MARJA, Afghanistan, April 3 - Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week...

One tribal elder from northern Marja, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being killed, said in an interview on Saturday that the killing and intimidation continued to worsen. “Every day we are hearing that [the Taliban] kill people, and we are finding their dead bodies,” he said. “The Taliban are everywhere.”

The local problem points to the larger challenges ahead as American forces expand operations in the predominantly Pashtun south, where the Taliban draw most of their support and the government is deeply unpopular...

“We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”

“We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We have to deal with these people.” ...

After the February offensive, the Marines used cash payments to prod more than 20 store owners at one bazaar in northern Marja to open their doors, a key to stabilizing the area and reassuring residents.

By late March, all but five shops had closed, Major Coffman said. A prominent anti-Taliban senior elder was also gunned down in northern Marja, prompting most of the 200 people in his district to flee... (link)

Note the American general's tacit acknowledgment that Taliban fighters in Marja were largely local men who thus enjoyed substantial support from the population.

Germany is at war

2010-04-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

Thousands of Germans took to the streets in this year's Easter Marches, following a yearly tradition going back half a century to early anti-nuclear protests. Gathering in 30 different cities, the demonstrators called for nuclear disarmament and an end to the war in Afghanistan.

While their numbers were somewhat small, they represent the overwhelming majority of German public opinion on the war - a fact not lost on the CIA. In a recently leaked report prepared for the agency, authors examined the question of why France and Germany are able to contribute large contingents of soldiers to the war "despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments".

The answer they arrive at is that the war's "low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition". They warn, however, that an increase in European casualties could usher in a feared "backlash," which has now taken a concrete form in the recent Dutch commitment to following through on removing all troops from Afghanistan as scheduled. The CIA authors refer to this as a "precedent for 'listening to the voters,'" revealing the traditional fear of democracy necessary for functioning in elite institutions.

The dreaded backlash is getting some fuel lately:

Germany shocked by Taliban ambush

BERLIN, April 5 (UPI) - The German government for the first time spoke of being at war in Afghanistan after a heavy firefight with 80 Taliban insurgents left three German troops dead.

It was a terrible Good Friday for the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan: First a German patrol was ambushed near Kunduz by two groups of 40 Taliban insurgents. The heavy firefight, which lasted for several hours, left three Germans dead, severely wounding eight more.

Shortly after the clashes began, another German unit was sent to help their comrades. Yet en route to the ambush, the Germans opened fire on two vehicles that officials in Berlin said would not stop approaching them despite warnings. Six Afghan troops in the vehicles were killed. While Germany says the troops approached in civilian cars, Kabul says they were military vehicles...

In Germany, observers are now calling for soldiers to better prepared for these attacks.

Ulrich Weisser, a retired German Navy admiral... urged Berlin to equip troops in Afghanistan with reconnaissance drones to Afghanistan so that ambushes like Friday's can be prevented. And to counter them, they need combat and transport helicopters as well as heavy artillery, he said. Weisser added it was "completely unacceptable" that not a single German combat helicopter has been sent to Afghanistan... (link)

Calls for German troops to get more powerful weaponry are an ominous development, though it appears there are already other efforts to "enhance" Germany's involvement in the war:

The Sunday Times (London)
RAF and Luftwaffe unite in flight
Michael Smith

APRIL 4 - A navigator from the Luftwaffe has become the first member of his country's air force to fly into combat with the RAF...

[The navigator and his British pilot] flew about 18 missions together over a six-week period in December and January, providing air support for troops on the ground.

The aircraft was armed with 500lb laser-guided Paveway IV bombs, Brimstone air-to-ground missiles and a 27mm cannon.

The Luftwaffe navigator's role was specifically requested by Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German defence minister, as part of an effort to enhance the country's involvement in the Afghan war.

Its armed forces have been criticised by Nato for restrictions imposed by their government that prevent their ground troops from going out at night, operating in southern Afghanistan-where the fighting is fiercest - or taking part in offensive action.

By flying sorties in the south, the navigator has arguably breached those restrictions and his role may be seen as controversial in Germany... (link)

Karzai's justice: children brutalized in jail

2010-04-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

For anyone who follows events in Afghanistan even casually, it is not news that children there are suffering tremendously. Most obviously, there has been an horrific toll of children killed directly by the war. According to one tally, last year US/NATO airstrikes alone killed more children than the Taliban and other insurgents did in all their attacks (131 vs. 128).

But the challenges for children go beyond the direct horrors of war. "The world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency," according to British charity Save the Children. Afghan children have the world's worst chance of seeing their fifth birthday and yet Canada, along with other belligerent countries, is spending a mere pittance on aid for that country while the military sucks in billions of dollars.

And who can forget the scandalous 2008 accusation by Canadian Forces padre Jean Johns who revealed that Canadian soldiers were ordered by commanding officers to look the other way as allied Afghan soldiers engaged in "bacha bazi" ("boy play"). Her accusations were later echoed by other soldiers. The Canadian Forces NIS is likely still investigating the allegations.

Interpress Service's Gareth Porter has more on the hazards facing Afghan children:

Two-Thirds of Boys in Afghan Jails Are Brutalised, Study Finds

WASHINGTON, Mar 30 (IPS) - Nearly two of every three male juveniles arrested in Afghanistan are physically abused, according to a study based on interviews with 40 percent of all those now incarcerated in the country's juvenile justice system.

The study [was] carried out by U.S. defence attorney Kimberly Motley for the international children's rights organisation Terre des Hommes...

Those statistics parallel the findings of a study published by the U.N. Children's Fund and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in 2008, which found that 55 percent of boys and 11 percent of girls reported having been beaten upon their arrest.

Virtually all the male juveniles said the police beatings were aimed at forcing them to sign a confession. They said they had signed either while being beaten or threatened with being beaten, and that the confessions were then used to convict them.

The testimony of the juveniles themselves on brutalisation by police was consistent with Motley's interviews with juvenile court judges. Forty-four percent of the judges interviewed indicated that juveniles complained routinely about torture and physical abuse by police officers. Another 33 percent refused to answer when asked whether they had heard such complaints...

Almost half the children brought before a court in Afghanistan are also denied the right to speak in their defence, according to Motley's study...

One of the male juveniles denied the right to testify in court was a boy charged with pederasty, or sexual relations between an adult male and a child. As is often the case, he was the victim of rape, after having been kidnapped by three adults, all of whom were released and never charged... (link)

It is worth noting that officers from the Correctional Service of Canada have been in Afghanistan for several years instructing their Afghan cohorts as well as inspecting correctional facilities there. Of course, we don't know if CSC ever found evidence of the crimes which both Motley and Porter rather easily discovered. While it might at first seem difficult to believe that Canadian officials would be hypocritical on issues of sexual morality, cynical readers might simply interject that recent Ministers of Public Safety (responsible for CSC) have included the morally challenged Stockwell Day and Vic Toews.

Related blog posts:
(September 2007) Al Jazeera: "Even Afghanistan's formal justice system does not clearly define rape as a separate crime, including it under the offence of "zina" or adultery, pederasty and violation of honour."

(August 2008) Afghan government representatives commit child rape, says Afghan human rights organization.

Negotiations in Afghanistan

2010-03-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

Readers are undoubtedly aware that there has recently arisen a flood of news and commentary about talks and negotiations in Afghanistan. This torrent was released by President Karzai at the international conference on Afghanistan held in London this past January. There, Karzai promoted the idea of negotiations between insurgent leaders and the Government of Afghanistan. The idea got a cool reception from Washington, which prefers to peel off low-level insurgents and rehabilitate them rather than cutting any power-sharing deal with insurgent leaders. Other countries, notably the UK, are more enthusiastic.

Of course, there have been reports since at least 2008 of talks between Afghan government officials and insurgent representatives, most memorably in Saudi Arabia in September, 2008.

One should note at this point that such a plan is not the only type of negotiations which have been talked about in the context of ending the war. Other political leaders, notably the National Peace Jirga of Afghanistan, advocate instead for a jirga which would bring representatives of all Afghans together, rather than simply insurgents and the government.

An interesting side note on the negotiations issue is the recent capture of senior Taliban official Mullah Baradar. While Pakistan's motives for capturing Baradar were at first obscure, it is now widely held that Pakistan is leveraging their habeus corpus of Baradar in order so as not to be left out of unfolding negotiations, for which Baradar has apparently been a key player. In Islamabad's view, the Karzai-inspired talks were destined to cut out Pakistan, perhaps even presaging a tilt toward India, Pakistan's rival. Any negotiations which occur now will have to involve Pakistan.

The Associated Press has the latest on the call for talks, which has attracted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami to Kabul to make some offers:

Militant group in Kabul with draft peace deal
Deb Riechmann in Kabul

... Harun Zarghun, chief spokesman for Hizb-i-Islami, said a five-member delegation was in Kabul to meet with government officials and also plans to meet with Taliban leaders somewhere in Afghanistan. The group, which has longtime ties to al-Qaida, was founded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and rebel commander in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s...

Zarghun, the group's spokesman in Pakistan, said the delegation is carrying a 15-point plan that calls for foreign forces to start pulling out in July - a full year ahead of President Barack Obama's desire to start withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011.

The plan also calls for the current Afghan parliament to serve through December. After that, the parliament would be replaced by an interim government, or shura, which would hold local and national elections within a year, according to the plan. Zarghun said a new Afghan constitution would be written, merging the current version with ones used earlier... (link)

Other reports have quoted Hizb-i officials as saying their proposal is a starting point for negotiations, not necessarily a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

Interestingly, the Hizb-i Islami delegation has some unusual supporters - the National Front of Afghanistan. This party is widely considered to be the Northern Alliance in political clothing. (The Northern Alliance being of course the mostly non-Pashtun, Tajik-dominated, coalition which opposed the Taliban regime until 9/11 when the USA provided its air force.)

HIA-govt talks gain traction
By Abdul Qadeer Siddiqui

KABUL, Mar 24 (Pajhwok) - The National Front of Afghanistan (NFA), a political party opposed to President Hamid Karzai, has welcomed covert peace talks between the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) and the government as beneficial for the country.

NFA spokesman Syed Aqa Faazel Sancharaki, in an exclusive interview with Pajhwok Afghan News, said on Wednesday they supported all the steps taken towards bringing peace and stability, including talks with the HIA...

Also on Wednesday, another political party -- Afghanistan Nationwide Jirga (ANJ) -- lent its weight to the peace parleys with HIA and backed its conditions for fresh presidential, parliamentary and provincial council elections.

A member of the party, Naseem Gul Totakhel, said: "It will be even better if disgruntled elements are also invited to the upcoming traditional peace Jirga slated for April 29." ... (link)

It is difficult to find out anything on the Nationwide Jirga, mentioned above. However, it appears to have some basis in the Pashtun areas of eastern Afghanistan. If so, then the endorsment of the HIA (also abbreviated HIG for Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin) talks is coming from both Tajik and Pashtun quarters. An intriguing development to be sure.

NATO's M.O.: Killing pregnant women, smearing journalists

2010-03-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

In recent months, Times reporter Jerome Starkey has exposed two incidents of Afghan civilians killed by foreign forces and their Afghan protegees. In December a night raid in eastern Kunar province killed eight boys. This was followed in February by another house raid which killed an attorney and his police officer brother and which involved the strange assertion that the raiding forces had found the bodies of two women who had apparently been murdered.

Here's Newshoggers with more:

In the first case, NATO officials told [Starkey] they no longer believed that the raid would have been justified if they'd known what they now know, but no official would consent to direct attribution for this admission.

In the second case, NATO initially made sensational claims that they'd discovered during the raid the bodies of pregnant women that had been bound, gagged and executed. Starkey's reporting forcefully rebutted this claim. Instead of simply retracting their story, NATO went so far as to attempt to damage Starkey's credibility by telling other Kabul-based journalists that they had proof he'd misquoted ISAF spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith. When Starkey demanded a copy of the recording, NATO initially ignored him and eventually admitted that no recording existed. NATO only admitted their story was false in a retraction buried several paragraphs deep in a press release that led with an attack on Starkey's credibility.
(link)

While the title of this blog post asserts that these are NATO's actions in question, I am playing a little fast and loose with the facts, mostly to have a snappy title to draw in readers. However, I am following both Newshoggers and, surprisingly, journalist Jerome Starkey in this regard. In his original articles Starkey rather ambiguously relates statements of NATO officials. So while it is NATO which is communicating with Starkey in his original dispatches, in all likelihood neither of the deadly raids in question were NATO-run operations. In general, night raids like the ones described tend to be performed by American-led special forces teams which have Afghans along for translating and training and which are outside NATO command. This according to the admittedly thin evidence on the matter. So, a more accurate, and more clunky title for this posting would be: 'USA's M.O.: Killing pregnant women; NATO's M.O.: smearing journalists'.

Canadian forces hand over to execution, says soldier

2010-03-26T00:23:00.000-07:00

A heavily censored stack of documents which the Canadian government has released has brought new revelations about torture (and worse):

Afghans routinely executed detainees: soldier

OTTAWA, Mar 25 (CP) - A Canadian soldier has alleged that Afghan authorities routinely executed detainees his unit handed over to them, newly released documents show...

The accusation that detainees were killed by Afghan army or police officers comes from a Canadian soldier with the Royal Canadian Regiment who served in the Panjwai district. Upon returning to Canada, he told a military doctor treating him for stress about his concerns.

"After they handed over the detainee, the local authority would walk the detainee out of range and the detainee would be shot," says a 2008 report on the soldier's claims. "This occurred on more than one occasion." ...

An April 2007 by a Foreign Affairs official who joined a Correctional Service of Canada staffer on an "exhaustive inspection" of the notorious National Directorate of Security facility in Kandahar City also cites claims of abuse.

Amnesty International has complained that military police failed to probe officers who directed the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities despite knowing they might be tortured.

A February 2008 memo prepared at National Defence Headquarters by Capt. S.M. Moore... notes a survey conducted "in theatre revealed that soldiers stated they had witnessed the abuse of detainees" — yet the information was not immediately passed on to military police.

It adds that on Feb. 15, 2008, two unknown individuals approached a female military police member when she exited the shower, grabbed her arms, pushed her against the shower wall and told her: "MPs mind your own business." ... (link)

How do you say 'deja vu' in Russian?

2010-03-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

In the Christian Science Monitor, veteran correspondent Edward Girardet has some fascinating reflections on the Red Army campaign in the Panjshir valley during the summer of 1982. The Russians were of course fighting a losing battle against the US-supported mujahideen warriors, and Girardet points out some uncanny similarities between the that war and the present one.

The Panjshir, just north of Kabul, is a famous bastion of Tajik forces and which in 2001-02 served as a regional headquarters of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance in their US-led war against the Taliban regime.

Afghanistan war: lessons from the Soviet war

... My purpose was to report on the largest Soviet-led offensive against the mujahideen to that date. More than 12,000 Soviet and Afghan troops would attempt to crush 3,000 fighters led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, known as the "Lion of Panjshir" and one of the 20th century's most effective guerrilla commanders.

Last month's NATO-led operation in Marjah in Helmand Province – the largest offensive of the current war – put me in mind of the Panjshir...

The Panjshir push was roughly the same size as the Marjah offensive – called Operation Moshtarak – and involved 10,000 to 12,000 coalition and Afghan troops. In the Soviet war, Western journalists reported primarily from the guerrilla side. But in contrast to most of today's media, embedded with NATO troops, we had constant access to ordinary Afghans. We walked through the countryside sleeping in villages, with long evenings spent drinking tea and talking with the locals. Frank conversation doesn't happen when one party wears body armor or is flanked by heavily armed soldiers: Afghans will only tell you what they think you want to hear. Or, even more crucial, what suits their own interests. Hence the highly questionable veracity of opinion polls in Afghanistan today.

Similar to the Marjah offensive, the Soviets warned the population of the impending attack with propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts. They appealed to the Panjshiris to support the government in return for cash and other incentives, such as subsidized wheat. Their tactic was to force the guerrillas out, but allow the civilians to remain. To make their point, the communists lambasted the guerrillas as criminals supported by foreign interests in the tribal areas across the border in Pakistan, a tactic similar to those used by the Americans against the Taliban today...

Days earlier, Massoud had evacuated the area's 50,000 or more people, somewhat less than the population affected by the Marjah campaign. He did this to minimize civilian casualties and to give his fighters free rein.

Before dawn the morning after we arrived, we could hear the ominous drone of helicopters. As the throbbing grew louder, tiny specks appeared on the horizon, gunships sweeping over the jagged snowcapped peaks like hordes of wasps. Soon the hollow thud of rockets and bombs were pounding guerrilla positions...

Massoud's strategy was to empty the valley, let the Soviets in, and have fighters hit the occupation forces in their own time.

It was reminiscent of a 19th-century painting of picnickers casually watching a distant battle. We counted no fewer than 200 helicopter sorties that morning, while scores of tanks and armored personnel carriers ground their way up the riverbed, the only way to penetrate the valley because guerrillas had mined the road...

The Soviet/Afghan force quickly took the valley, proclaiming victory. The reality was far different. Massoud's experienced guerrillas suffered few casualties and, within days, launched assaults against the entrenched Red Army troops. Afghan government soldiers, too, poorly paid and disheartened, slipped out at night with their weapons to join the resistance.

Massoud eventually made a truce with the Soviets. This enabled the Red Army a "take and hold" policy with several garrisons in the Panjshir. Some civilians returned, while the guerrillas established their own concealed bases in mountains beyond. The truce was much criticized by rival groups of mujahideen, but it was part of a long-term strategy: Massoud had no intention of collaborating with the regime. Occupation troops first had to leave before any unity government could be formed...

For years, Massoud kept the Soviets tied down while focusing on other areas and building a highly proficient regional force denying the communists swaths of countryside. The mujahideen – like the Taliban now – always felt they had time on their side. All they needed to do was wear down the Red Army. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets commanded 120,000 troops in Afghanistan, compared with the 150,000 coalition high expected by next fall with completion of the US troop surge...

Throughout its war, however, the Red Army held little more than the main towns. The countryside remained largely in the hands of the mujahideen. Similarly, today, 70 percent of the country is ranked as "insecure" by the United Nations...

Red Army commanders were very aware that they couldn't trust "their" Afghans. Massoud's mujahideen enjoyed full details of planned operations before launch. Many government, military, and police officials, including senior commanders, secretly collaborated with the resistance, just as pro-Taliban and other insurgent collaborators have infiltrated most ministries of the current administration...

While the coalition may claim the Marjah offensive routed the Taliban, it will probably have little impact on the long-term fighting capability of the opposition, even if NATO holds terrain captured.

To claim success shows a poor understanding of Afghanistan. Only a small proportion of the insurgents are actually fighting. The majority of sympathizers will have buried their weapons or simply blended in among the civilians. Others are in the process of deploying elsewhere...

For most Afghans I've talked to on recent trips to Kabul and eastern, central, and southern Afghanistan, justice, not security, is the principal concern. Even where the military is in control, Afghans slip out to Taliban-controlled areas to seek fair dealing, having more confidence in Taliban sharia courts than in Karzai-regime judges. They see lack of rule of law and international community failure to develop a functioning economy, particularly in the countryside where 80 percent of Afghans live. And they increasingly perceive the coalition as a foreign occupation force, much like the Soviets... (link)

In a similar piece a few months back Robert Fisk related how Russian forces were able to take virtually any piece of territory, but could not hold that territory. Revealing an earlier form of rendition, he also heard from locals that Afghan prisoners were being taken back to Russia for torture and interrogation. Then there was the destroyed school, torched by mujahideen for educating girls - a common crime at the time, conducted by the allies of the USA, thus only rarely mentioned in current accounts of that war, and of course never reflected upon.

And in an outstanding article a couple of years back, former Russian soldier Nicolai Lanine outlined how the Soviet government claimed their invasion was undertaken to uphold international law and prevent future attacks against Russia itself from being organized in Afghanistan.

Now almost 300,000 IDP's

2010-03-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, no media outlets whatsoever have picked up on the recent announcement (below, courtesy of a UN news agency) from the UN Secretary-General. The latest figures on internally displaced persons demonstrate the utter disaster which the war in Afghanistan has brought for a wide swath of the population:

IDP numbers up in Afghanistan - UN

KABUL, March 17 (IRIN) - Armed hostilities have boosted the number of internally displaced persons (IDP's) to over 296,000 but an effective humanitarian response is being hampered by insecurity, the UN Secretary-General says in a new report to the UN Security Council...

"The deterioration of Afghanistan's security situation has continued, with 2009 being the most volatile year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, averaging 960 security incidents per month, as compared with 741 in 2008. The situation worsened in January 2010, with the number of security incidents 40 per cent higher than in January 2009," [the report] said... (link)

Related blog posts:

October 2006: The Senlis Council's Norine MacDonald reports that IDP's are "starving" while Canadian soldiers are stationed some 15 minutes away with no mandate to assist them.

November 2007: UNHCR counts 129,000 IDP's just in southern Afghanistan - a figure which does not include an additional 100,000 people recently displaced by conflict in the south.

May 2008: IDP's are cautious of returning home. One northerner said: "Commanders and warlords in the north are still seizing people’s land and forcing them to abandon their houses; so how can we return?"

February 2009: UNHCR counts 235,000 IDP's.

Freelance killing

2010-03-17T00:02:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought that all the angles for killing were covered, the New York Times exposes a type of killing force we haven't seen or heard from before. We have seen there are CIA teams in Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are Afghan special forces operating outside Afghan military command; there are foreign special forces including German ones, Canadian ones and Australian ones; there are unofficial tribal militias; etc. etc. Now this.

It's a bizarre and intriguing tale:

Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
By Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti

KABUL, Mar 15 (NYT) - Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said...

[S]ome American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he now is the subject of a criminal investigation...

Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said...

Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan... (link)

Robert Young Pelton, mentioned in story, is co-author of alternative travel guide The World's Most Dangerous Places. The website he set up for the contract was an open source project at www.afpax.com, and it is still online.

US Army officer reveals ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan

2010-03-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Last fall, an American special forces commander acquired the fawning nickname "Lawrence of Afghanistan" after he published a study on military tactics in Afghanistan. Based on his own experiences, Major Jim Gant advocated for an alternative to reigning counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy and apparently caught the attention of General McChrystal, who widely redistributed the report.

The report involves a case study in Kunar province where his team of special forces operated in 2003. At first this involved Armed Reconnaissance Patrols through the countryside, "basically announcing our presence and inviting contact, friendly or hostile." At one village, they were told there was a "problem" in a different village called Mangwel, to where his eight-man team then went and subsequently met a local leader, Malik Noorafzhal.

Here's how Gant recounts the forming of a significant relationship with Noorafzhal, a tribal leader in Kunar province:

... there was a “highland” people and a “lowland” people... The highland people had taken and were using some land that belonged to the lowland people. The Malik told me the land had been given to his tribe by the “King Of Afghanistan” many, many years ago and that he would show me the papers. I told him he didn’t need to show me any papers. His word was enough. He then told me he had given the highlanders 10 days to comply with the request or he and his men would retake it by force...

He had asked for help, a thing he later would tell me was hard for him to do (especially from an outsider) and I had many options. Could I afford to get involved in internal tribal warfare? ...

I made the decision to support him. “Malik, I am with you. My men and I will go with you and speak with the highlanders again. If they do not turn the land back over to you, we will fight with you against them.” ...

Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that the dispute with the highlanders was resolved... (link to pdf)

The current term for actions of this sort is ethnic cleansing, which according to a US State Dept study "entails the systematic and forced removal of members of an ethnic group from their communities to change the ethnic composition of a region." When official enemies do this, it is cause for an international crisis and accompanying vilification in the media. However, when our side does it, few so much as take notice.

Even on its own terms, Gant's approach, as he describes it, hardly merits the term strategy as tribal alliances like the one he modeled are quite ad hoc and don't readily lend themselves to horizontal spread. Thus the basic requirement, under military doctrine, of "unity of effort" would be elusive at best.

In a review of Gant's paper the Long War Journal similarly notes some fundamental flaws in his argument:

[Gant] himself points out that he and his team were safer in the village than in their outpost, and that he was unable to prevent the attacks the village suffered as a result of its cooperation. In other words, there's a real confusion about who was protecting whom... (link)

It is worth noting, however, that one innovation which Gant proposes appears to have been taken up by US military commanders. The latest military jargon for COIN theorists and commentators insists that troops have to live among the people. General McChrystal himself told the New York Times about his hopes in such terms, saying "we literally want to go in there and squat among the people."

Recent announcements indicate that that approach is being operationalised and the above comments from the Long War Journal thus apply equally to McChrystal's emerging strategy.

German forces now ordering airstrikes

2010-03-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

Der Spiegel Online has a very interesting piece on the German army's new found enthusiasm for air strikes and armed drones:

It was a summer's day in June 2009 when the German army in Afghanistan first used US Army drones in combat. With hindsight, some observers say that was the day the German military lost its innocence in Afghanistan. The firing of deadly rockets from drones on the orders of a German commander was part of the new reality of war in northern Afghanistan.

Before that the Germans had only used US drones, lent out to them by the US military as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, to observe Taliban movements. They didn't take advantage of the drones' deadly Hellfire rockets. But on June 15 last year, Colonel Georg Klein pushed the red button for the first time. Seconds later, a booby trap that had been detected on the side of a road was destroyed.

Klein went on to order a deeply controversial air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers on Sept. 4, 2009...

Since last June, the use of the unmanned aircraft has become routine to the Germans, in a similar fashion to their use of air support... (link)

The report indicates a pretty high degree of escalation of German involvement in the war -- a very touchy issue in that country where a strong majority disapprove of the war. I don't know of any reports at all of Canadian troops actually calling in an air strike and neither have I seen anyone asserting the the CF use armed drones. This might be due to rules for journalists which forbid reporting on such things, or it could be that Canadian forces don't call in air strikes or use armed drones.

NATO massacre covered up

2010-03-13T15:33:00.000-08:00

The Times (UK) breaks the story:

Nato ‘covered up’ botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five
Jerome Starkey - The Times

KHATABA, PAKTIA, Mar 13 - 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...

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. Local US forces denied any involvement...

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...

“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.” (link)

One man who witnessed the Paktia raid told an AP reporter he saw "U.S. special forces" surrounding the compound.

Reading the above piece carefully, one notes that NATO didn't say it was their own "Afghan-international" force, at least as it is worded in the article. Despite the American denial, the unit could be a US special forces operation, either under NATO or otherwise. Although the U.S. military recently put more of its special forces units in Afghanistan under NATO command, there are still some who operate outside that command.

In any case, it is not the first time that evidence has suggested that US special forces have committed an atrocity. In November of 2007, residents of Toube village in Helmand province alleged that foreign troops, accompanied by Afghan soldiers, killed over a dozen civilians, including babies, in a commando-style night raid. In October, 2008, locals in Balkh province described a raid by Afghan and foreign special forces in which the foreigners beat civilians while the Afghans looted. A NATO spokesperson confirmed the attack and said NATO forces provided supplies for the operation.

And the Americans aren't the only ones in on such dastardly deeds. In 2008, the CBC reported that American, British and Canadian JTF-2 special forces have conducted "hunt and kill" raids in Afghanistan. Note that such a mode of operation would constitute a targeted assassination, which is illegal under international law.

We have also seen that CIA-trained Afghan special forces, which are not under Afghan command, have been used in the fight against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the drug industry in Afghanistan.

Finally, here's an AP summary of the new NATO guidelines for night raids:

KABUL, Mar 5 (AP) - A new directive from NATO's top commander in Afghanistan orders coalition forces to avoid night raids when possible, but to bring Afghan troops with them if they must enter homes after dark...

[I]f night raids are conducted, Afghan security forces "should be the first force seen and the first voices heard by the occupants of any compound entered."

The order requires that Afghan troops must be included in the planning and execution of all night raids, and that Afghan government representatives must be notified in advance. When possible, community elders also need to be consulted. (link)

Protests multiply in Afghanistan

2010-01-24T13:45:00.000-08:00

We saw that hundreds of people in Ghazni hit the streets in protest on Thursday (Jan 20) after an overnight raid killed several people, alleged by the protesters to be innocent civilians. The protests continued on Friday, when Pajhwok Afghan News reported that "hundreds" of protesters forces the closure of streets and businesses. Shopkeeper Hamidullah told the reporter:

"The victims had links neither with Taliban fighters nor with other anti-government group. Abdullah, a security guard of a mobile tower, was killed along with two sons in the air raid." Driver Fazal Karim was the fourth civilian victim, he said. (link) [N.B.: The shopkeeper is translated as referring to an air raid, when it was a ground forces raid.]

The protesters returned the next day, according to PressTV which reported the mobilization of "500 angry demonstrators". More interestingly, however, PressTV also reports that Afghan workers at Bagram Air Base are on strike against their US employers:

Afghan workers protest at Bagram base

JANUARY 24 - Afghan workers at Bagram Air Base have staged a protest against maltreatment by the US military and laser health hazards at the camp, says a report.

Employees at the US military airport and housing complex in Bagram, 11 kilometers southeast of Charikar in the Parwan province of Afghanistan, gathered in front of the camp to show opposition "to US inappropriate treatment of the workers," a Press TV correspondent reported on Saturday.

Demonstrators said they have to pass through a "scanning device equipped with laser beans" which puts the employees' health in danger.

"We have to stand in queue for many hours to pass the security check post one by one," explained one of the protestors...

Thousands of Afghans work in the camp every day. They warned of quitting in the event the problem is not resolved... (link)

More killings by ground forces reveal emerging tactic

2010-01-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

Another protest following more alleged civilian killings, this time in Ghazni province northeast of Kandahar. What is especially noteworthy about this incident is that ground forces are once again the perpetrators. This is in fact another in a series of incidents involving ground troops, whereas only a few months ago, civilian casualties by foreign forces were nearly all caused by airstrikes. So it appears that new more aggressive (or at least more numerous) ground force operations have become the principle source of civilian casualties by foreign forces.

Afghans protest over alleged civilian deaths

GHAZNI, Jan 21 (AFP) - Angry Afghan villagers took to the streets on Thursday claiming that civilians were killed in a raid by Afghan and NATO troops but the international force said the dead were insurgents.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it killed four insurgents including a 15-year-old boy in an operation in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province on Wednesday night...

But about 50 furious villagers brought five coffins to the provincial capital Ghazni city on Thursday, claiming that three of the dead were civilians, including two children below the age of seven, an AFP reporter saw.

"Doctors told me that there were two children among the bodies brought to hospital," said Mohammad Ismail Ibrahimzai, head of the provincial hospital where the bodies were initially taken... (link)

The day following the alleged killing of the three civilians, NATO troops in Helmand (most likely US Marines) attended to three children wounded in crossfire.

A Taliban charm offensive?

2010-01-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

The New York Times' Alissa Rubin reports that some rural Afghans are seeing an improvement in the behaviour of Taliban insurgents. She also twice notes the disdain which Afghans exhibit for NATO troops, thus echoing Al Jazeera's reporter last week who said that locals "don't hide their hatred" of the foreign soldiers.

Taliban Make Over Their Image to Win Allies
By Alissa J. Rubin

KABUL, Jan 21 (NYT) - The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image and win favor with local Afghans...

Now, as the Taliban deepen their presence in more of Afghanistan, they are in greater need of popular support and are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda, capitalizing on the mounting frustration of Afghans with their own government and the presence of foreign troops. The effect has been to make them a more potent insurgency, some NATO officials said.

Afghan villagers and some NATO officials added that [the Taliban code of conduct issued last year] had begun to change the way some midlevel Taliban commanders and their followers behave on the ground. A couple of the most brutal commanders have even been removed by Mullah Omar...

But the most important factor in their growing reach is the ineffectiveness of the central government and Afghans’ resentment of foreign troops.

Military intelligence analysts now estimate that there are 25,000 to 30,000 committed Taliban fighters and perhaps as many as 500,000 others who would fight either for pay or if they felt attacked by the Western coalition...

Interviews with tribal elders in areas where the Taliban are active suggest a complex picture. Several interviewed in rural Kandahar Province praised the Taliban’s new, less threatening approach, but said that did not translate into enthusiasm for the Taliban. At the same time, there is not much liking for either the Afghan government or NATO troops.

“There is a tremendous change in the Taliban’s behavior,” said Haji-Khan Muhammad Khan, a tribal elder from Shawalikot, a rural district of Kandahar Province

“They don’t behead people or detain those they suspect of spying without an investigation. But sometimes they still make mistakes, people still fear them, but now generally they behave well with people. They had to change because the leadership of the Taliban did not want to lose the support of the grass roots.” (link)

Rubin's figure of a half million almost-insurgents is an estimate I have not seen before. That puts a number value on the potential hornet's nest which the American-led war could be stepping into with their plans to get close to the population and make Afghans like the occupation.

Afghans 'do not hide their hatred' of Canadian troops

2010-01-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

In this BBC translation of a January 15 broadcast of Al-Jazeera Arabic, Kabul correspondent Waliyullah Shahin reports on a Canadian Forces operation in the Panjwai district:

(Shahin:) These forces realize that danger is looming everywhere. They proceed with extreme caution in the Taleban movement's stronghold, which lies a few kilometers away from the city of Kandahar. They are trying to win the hearts and minds of the people of the Panjwai District, which was the scene of large-scale operations.

(Captain Peter, Canadian contingent:) We are visiting the hospital, schools, and the police station in Panjwai's market to ascertain what the people in the area need.

(Shahin:) The residents of the area do not hide their hatred of these forces. They accuse these forces of violating their privacy and depriving them of the basic needs for a secure rural life. Animosity continues to grip the relationship between these forces and the residents of the area.

(Unidentified Afghan, speaking in a local dialect:) The foreign forces bombard innocent civilians, but not the Taleban. We suffer from the Americans and the Afghan government; we experience a great deal of harassment... (link)

Meanwhile, violence in American-held Garmsir district continues as one civilian is killed by what appears to be US Marines (NATO won't say the nationality of the troops responsible):

NATO Troops Shoot Afghan In Area That Saw Unrest

KABUL, Jan 17 (Reuters) - NATO-led troops shot dead an Afghan civilian whose vehicle approached a convoy today in an area that has seen violent civil unrest over the past week in Afghanistan, the alliance said.

It was at least the third time in a week that either NATO or Afghan troops had shot civilians in Helmand Province's Garmsir district, raising the political temperature in an area mostly seized by U.S. Marines from the Taliban last year.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said troops had opened fire after a large vehicle with no headlights approached a convoy at high speed early today... (link)

In a similar incident, German troops killed a civilian in the north:

German troops kill civilian - Afghan official

KUNDUZ, Jan 18 (Reuters) - German troops with a NATO-led contingent killed an Afghan civilian and wounded a second person on Sunday at a roadside checkpoint in northern Kunduz province, a senior police official said...

"Despite hand signals and warning shots, the car didn't stop and instead sped towards the checkpoint. Given the escalation, soldiers then opened fire with small arms," the German Federal Armed Forces said in a statement... (link)

With all this carnage, it is perhaps not surprising that a large Ghilzai Pashtun tribe, the Kharoti tribe, is calling for an end to nighttime raids by foreign forces:

Elders seek end to house searches
By Rahmatullah Afghan

KABUL, Jan 15 (Pajhwok) - Elders from the Kharoti tribe have unanimously asked foreign troops to stop unwarranted night operations in their areas.

The demand came at a meeting attended by 60 elders and representatives of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul.

Mullah Sayed Yaqub, representative from the southern zone and resident of the Sra Roza district of Paktika province, said: "We are fed up with the operations. They enter our houses at night and kill us."

He said the international troops should discuss with locals or others if they had any problem in an area... (link)

The Kharoti tribe since 2001 have it seems been trying to maneuver between the Taliban and the foreign occupation forces (see here and here). While the tribe's traditional lands are further north in Paktia and near Kabul, a sizable number of Kharoti settlers can be found in the Nad-i Ali district of Helmand, where US Marines have been operating for several months now. Those Kharotis settled in the district decades ago to work the new farmland created by a costly irrigation project built by an American engineering firm which soon proved a disaster as salination stunted productivity. It is likely, however, that those settlers are largely de-tribalized, as are other Kharoti settler communities in the north of the country. The warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is loosely allied with the Taliban, comes from such a Kharoti settler community in Kunduz province.

Are rosy opinion polls bogus?

2010-01-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

A new poll conducted by D3 systems for the BBC and ABC and a German TV station has hit the headlines worldwide. The Globe and Mail says the poll shows "that Afghans are more confident about their future, prefer the administration President Hamid Karzai over the Taliban, and support the presence of American and NATO troops".

However, the poll immediately met with skepticism by knowledgeable and experienced observers like the respected expert on Post-Taliban Afghanistan Daniel Korski as well as journalist Jason Burke. They cited the implausibility of pollsters being able to travel to a high enough percentage of districts to make the sample a valid one. But the criticism goes far beyond that.

The Huffington Post has more:

Afghanistan is a highly patriarchal society, meaning that getting a woman's true opinion is extremely hard. [Prakhar Sharma of the Karzai family-connected Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul] said that his research teams have never been able to get even close to the 50-50 male/female split that the ABC survey claims...

Those with experience in Afghanistan were skeptical that the surveyors actually went where they said they did. "If you look at it, the polling was conducted in built-up areas, in urban areas where we have our bases and where the Afghan government has a presence, primarily off the major highways," said [recently-resigned US foreign service official Matthew] Hoh. "So through the South and West of the country, primarily it was done right along Highway 1 where the government has control and where we have control. Off those areas, we don't have control." ...

Hoh said he simply doesn't buy it, both because the areas are impenetrable and because the answers make no sense. "I just don't really believe that, because what I saw in both the East and the South of the country...where all the fighting's really going on, this doesn't jive with, it doesn't agree with what you get when you go out and meet with local villagers. When you go out to these valleys and meet with folks, it doesn't square that they see a central government as a force for good," said Hoh...

Gopal and the others said that Afghan respondents try to figure out what the interviewer wants. "They almost always tell the surveyor what he wants to hear...

"I've seen this first hand when I accompanied surveyors in the field a couple of years ago." ...

Sharma said he has worked directly with the D3 subsidiary and found them to be the best qualified survey contractor among an unimpressive field. But even with that outfit they found "data falsified for insecure provinces (90 respondents in Ghazni had identical responses to all governance related questions, for instance)," Sharma wrote in an e-mail...

"The way the surveys work is by recruiting, say, 34 people for the 34 provinces," [Gopal] writes. "Each of these people are then tasked with finding participants for the survey in their province. In rural Afghanistan, with geographical, logistical and security concerns, these people can't very well go door to door. Moreover, they can't randomly select phone numbers here ... Therefore the surveyors usually find participants by polling their friends and family. This means that you don't have a random sample, and the results of the survey depend entirely on the political outlook of [the] person in charge. Since the surveyors are often educated people who live in urban areas and have ties to the government (in most provincial urban centers, almost every educated person--and there's not many--have family members working for the government, because that's the only job available to them.), there's a heavy pro-government and pro-coalition bias in the surveys." (link)

But easily the most damning criticism of the D3/ACSOR polling comes from Antonio Giustozzi, a British academic who is the recognized authority on the post-2001 Taliban. He was interviewed by British writer Ian Sinclair:

I ask him about the 2009 BBC/ABC News opinion poll conducted in Afghanistan which put support for the Taliban at around 9 per cent and support for the government at 65 per cent.

"The 9 per cent is an underestimate," he replies. Having studied the methodology of previous BBC/ABC polls, Giustozzi explains it is very unlikely that the polling staff travelled to the rural areas in the south - "where the Taliban are" - instead focusing on the cities and provincial centres.

"The sampling is very, very biased ... there are very few unemployed people, whereas even the government says unemployment is 40 per cent.

"In the poll 5 per cent were police and army, whereas in Afghanistan the actual percentage of the population in the army and police is 0.2 per cent. Fourteen per cent were managers and directors. There were no mullahs."

If the sampling was balanced, he estimates the Taliban would get around 15 per cent support nationwide and 30-40 per cent support in the south.

Interestingly, Giustozzi mentions that he has seen polls conducted by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which use different methodologies and get very different results - much higher support for the Taliban and much lower support for the government.

"In ISAF polls in early 2009 support for (Afghan President) Karzai was 4 per cent," he says. "They don't release them, of course - because they show a completely different picture." (link)

US Marines shoot at stick wielding protester

2010-01-15T17:18:00.000-08:00

In the previous blog post, we saw that on January 12, Afghan and (allegedly) US troops shot and killed eight protesters in Garmsir, a town on the edge of the desert in Helmand province. The following day, January 13, saw another protest which met with troops' bullets, but this time the Americans' involvement is explicit:

NATO, Afghan troops fire on Afghan crowd wounding five

KABUL, Jan 15 (Reuters) - At least five Afghan civilians were wounded when a combined force of Afghan troops and U.S. Marines opened fire on a crowd at the gate to a military base in Helmand, Afghanistan's most volatile province, NATO said on Friday.

The incident, which took place on Wednesday but was not reported until Friday, was the second demonstration to turn violent in two days in Helmand's Garmsir district, suggesting mounting civil unrest in a part of the country where U.S. Marines under NATO command made major advances last year.

"ANA and ISAF forces warned a crowd of between 200 and 400 assembled civilians to keep its distance from the outpost," a NATO statement said...

"A number of civilians in the crowd disregarded instructions, resulting in forces firing warning shots. Deliberative escalation of force procedures were followed, but one individual continued to ignore instructions, striking members of the combined force with a stick," the statement said.

Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale said both Afghan troops and the U.S. Marines subsequently fired at the crowd...

The incident came a day after another violent demonstration in Garmsir...

Dawood Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand governor Gulab Mangal, said Wednesday's demonstration had taken place outside a base where U.S. and Afghan officials were discussing the unrest from the day before.

He said Taliban infiltrators in Wednesday's crowd fired at the U.S. and Afghan troops, prompting the Afghans to return fire. The NATO statement made no mention of shots fired from the crowd... (link)

Note that the governor's office claimed the troops had been fired on, while NATO said no such thing. This is a strange discrepancy considering the two-day delay in relasing any news about this. And it bears asking, considering this incident was covered up for two days, have there been similar incidents which have never been reported?

Locals say US troops shot protesters

2010-01-12T13:25:00.000-08:00

Residents of Garmsir in Helmand province are accusing American troops of killing anti-US demonstrators at a protest attended by several thousand. The Americans claim their forces were nearby, but not on scene, as security forces forces clashed with rowdy demonstrators, killing eight civilians and three members of the security forces.

While US military officials have denied the charges, the size of the protest alone is of particular note. Whether the thousands of protesters who came were organized by non-insurgents or whether the Taliban organized them or even coerced them to attend, it is still a significant number of demonstrators.

Deadly Protest in Afghanistan Highlights Tensions
By Dexter Filkins - New York Times

KABUL, Jan 12 - At least eight Afghan civilians were killed and a dozen wounded Tuesday during a street protest in a volatile town along the Helmand River, after a raid on an Afghan home Sunday by American and Afghan forces. The raid was seized on by Taliban provocateurs who organized the protesters and pushed them toward violence, local officials said...

Local officials said the protest, which involved several thousand local Afghans, was organized by the Taliban’s “shadow” governor for Garmsir, Mullah Mohammed Naim...

No eyewitnesses to the disputed raid could be located; it took place Sunday night in the nearby village of Darwashan. American officers in Kabul denied that their soldiers had abused any Afghan women or desecrated a Koran...

The protesters in Garmsir began shouting, “Death to America” and “Death to [local police chief] Kamal Khan,” and overturned several cars. They set a school on fire. Then they stormed the local office of the National Security Directorate, the Afghan domestic intelligence service.

The security directorate is sometimes blamed for providing faulty intelligence to the Americans, who then detain the wrong people. As the crowd moved in, agents opened fire, Mr. Khan said.

In addition to the eight protesters killed and 13 wounded, an Afghan intelligence agent and two police were killed.

As the chaos unfolded, American officials said, a Taliban sniper began firing into the nearby American base, known as Forward Operating Base Delhi, a few hundred yards away. American officers said they killed the sniper, but no one else. In a statement, the Americans denied that they had fired on any protesters...

“The American are blaspheming the holy Koran and violating and disrespecting our culture,” said Jan Gul, a farmer whose son was killed in the protest. “We cannot tolerate such behavior. We will defend our religion.”

Indeed, some Afghans maintained that the American forces were present with the Afghan agents and fired on the crowd... (link)

Reuters reporter Abdul Malek, reporting from Helmand, adds support to the accusations that American troops did in fact take part:

Haji Jan Gul, who described himself as one of the demonstrators, said that his son had been killed in the melee. The foreign forces opened fire when protesters threw stones at them, he said.

"The foreigners shot many people in the streets, some 10 people died and others were wounded," he said... (link)

Also the Financial Times:

Ahmad Khan, a farmer who told the Financial Times by telephone that he was wounded in the demonstration, accused local and foreign forces of opening fire. “We wanted to condemn those foreigners who set fire to the Holy Koran and killed civilians,” he said. “The foreigners and the Afghans fired at us.” (link)

Losing a disastrous war

2010-01-09T00:35:00.000-08:00

A string of developments in the past couple of weeks is revealing that the war in Afghanistan is going rather badly. In late December, NBC did a story on a leaked report prepared for CENTCOM commander David Petraeus which looked at the Afghan National Army and found it in a dismal state. I haven't found a copy yet, but the NBC reporters quoted from it:

'Nepotism, corruption, and absenteeism among ANA leaders makes success impossible. Change must come quickly.' Another line: 'If Afghan political leaders do not place competent people in charge, no amount of coalition support will suffice in the long term.' (link)

Meanwhile, the top American intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj-Gen Michael Flynn, has delivered a bombshell assessment of the war's progress in beating down the Taliban:

'Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely,' Top U.S. Intel Chief Says
By Noah Shachtman - Wired.com

JANUARY 8 - The Taliban not only has the “momentum” after the most successful year in its campaign against the United States and the Kabul government. “The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely,” according to a briefing from Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in the country. “The Taliban retains [the] required partnerships to sustain support, fuel legitimacy and bolster capacity.”

And if that isn’t enough, Flynn also warns that “time is running out” for the American-lead International Security Assistance Force. “Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse,” the report says...

Flynn’s December 23rd presentation on the “State of the Insurgency : Trends, Intentions and Objectives” may be the gloomiest public assessment of the war yet. The “loosely organized” Taliban is “growing more cohesive” and “increasingly effective.” The insurgents now have their own “governors” installed in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. And the “strength and ability of [that] shadow governance increasing,” according to the presentation...

The presentation also cast doubt on some of the war’s stated central aims. The Obama administration has repeatedly said that additional troops are necessary to prevent a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan — which would then allow Al Qaeda to re-establish its safe haven there. According to interviews with detainees, however, the insurgents “view Al Qaeda as a handicap – a view that is increasingly prevalent.” The Taliban feel they have to “manage [the] relationship with AQ to avoid alienating Afghan population, but encourage support from [the] global jihad network.” ... (link)

And here's a rather shocking story that had no legs at all. I couldn't find a single reference to this development in the English world press. The UN's development news agency IRIN has the story:

More IDPs than previously thought - government

KABUL, Jan 4 (IRIN) - The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Afghanistan is significantly higher than estimated by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the government has said.

New Ministry of Refugees and Returnees (MoRR) figures from all 34 provinces indicate that 82,778 households (413,890 individuals) are currently internally displaced...

UNHCR estimates of 275,000 people displaced within Afghanistan are based on the findings of a National IDP Task Force which included UN agencies, government bodies and NGOs.

Many IDPs belong to caseloads dating back to 1998-2002: These IDPs are mainly in camps and settlements in the south and west.

Over one million people were reportedly internally displaced in 2002... (link)

By giving the figure of 1 million IDPs in 2002, the article gives the impression that the number of IDPs has declined since then, albeit not as dramatically as previously thought if the latest report is accurate. In fact, the number of IDPs appears to have dropped quite dramatically after 2002 and began rising a couple of years ago. In November 2007 there were 129,000 UNHCR-registered IDPs, though The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reckoned the true number to be closer to 300,000. A year ago the UNHCR was estimating there were 235,000 IDPs in total, somewhat lower than their current estimate of 275,000.

Finally, a deeply saddening testament to the evils of war:

Afghan women turning to suicide in greater numbers: report
By Murray Brewster

OTTAWA, Jan 6 (CP) - More Afghan women are choosing suicide to escape the violence and brutality of their daily lives, says a new human-rights report prepared by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department.

The 2008 annual assessment paints a grim picture of a country where violence against women and girls is common...

“Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances, and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides,” said the report, completed in November 2009.

The document was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women tried to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire, many of them in their early 20s... (link)

Note that the report was apparently not released publicly.

5000 Afghans shout 'Death to Obama'

2010-01-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

Recently, protests over the alleged US special forces massacre of eight teenagers were held in Kabul and Jalalabad, where hundreds of students rallied, as well as in Asadabad, the capitol of Kunar province where the killings occurred. That protest was attended by 1,500 according to media reports.

But yesterday in Jalalabad, a new protest brought 5,000 people to the streets chanting slogans against the US over the deaths of several civilians in a bomb blast near that city. But the unusual (and vitally important) thing about the protest is that it was an insurgent bombing, not American planes or troops, which took that toll.

In this context, the message of the protest is clear: Afghans blame the occupation for all the violence in that country, even those acts perpetrated by those who resist the foreigners. While this is not an unusual phenomenon, it is one lost on many who write on the war in Afghanistan. Just recently I mentioned the phenomenon to a Canadian military blogger in response to his comment, but "milnews.ca" appeared neither to know nor care. This is certainly not unusual; many commentators, in response to justified outrage about civilians killed by foreign forces, rebut with a breathless catalog of insurgent crimes. This latest protest shows how morally shallow such performances are.

In any case, it is interesting that those Afghans in the streets of Jalalabad are in a way making concrete the Nuremburg principle that aggression is the "supreme international crime [which] contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the whole."

New civilian deaths roil Afghans
Thousands chant ‘Death to America' to protest latest killing of children

KABUL, Jan 7 (AP) - Thousands of Afghans shouting "Death to America" protested the killings of children Thursday, the latest in a string of controversial cases in which international forces have been blamed for civilian deaths...

On Wednesday, an explosion tore through a group of children gathered around foreign soldiers visiting a U.S.-funded road project in Nangarhar province, east of the capital of Kabul. Afghan officials said four children were killed. NATO said two died.

Minutes after the blast, local residents were accusing American forces of throwing a grenade into the crowd — even though several international troops were among the wounded. The Afghan Interior Ministry later released a statement saying the explosion occurred when a passing police vehicle hit a mine.

Still, an estimated 5,000 protesters demonstrated the deaths Thursday along a road between Kabul and Jalalabad in Nangarhar. They waved a banner condemning the attack, set fire to an effigy of President Barack Obama and chanted "Long live Islam!" and "Death to Obama!"

"We are shouting 'Death to America' and 'to the Afghan government,'" Sardar Wali, a university student at the demonstration. "It is the responsibility of the Afghan government to find and hand over the people who are responsible for this attack." ... (link)

Canadian media sits on juicy murder story

2010-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Here's a rather revealing item which got almost no mention in the Canadian press. A cousin of Hamid Karzai kills another cousin of Hamid Karzai in an honour killing. It appears that the killer, Hashmat Karzai, had the support of Hamid and his brothers, one of whom, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the recognized head of the Karzai clan and the de facto governor of Kandahar - and drug kingpin and CIA informant. Police investigation seems to be blocked, likely due to Wali's influence.

This remarkable story got mentioned on page 16 of the Montreal Gazette (Dec 24/09) and nowhere else in the Canadian press.

Killing Bares Karzai Clan Feud, And Doubts on Afghan Justice
James Risen - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec 20 - On Oct. 16, four sport utility vehicles barreled into Karz, Afghanistan, the hometown of the country's president, Hamid Karzai, and pulled up to the home of one of his cousins, Yar Mohammad Karzai.

Teams of armed guards blocked the street and herded passers-by into a nearby mosque while seizing their cellphones, then removed the front door of the house, according to Karzai family members and several people from the mosque. A man in traditional white Afghan robes, accompanied by two security guards, walked inside and found two of Yar Mohammad Karzai's children, 18-year-old Waheed and his 12-year-old sister, Sona, doing their schoolwork in their bedroom.

The girl later said that she remembered the robed man raising a pistol and shooting Waheed three times as she shouted: ''Don't kill my brother! Don't kill my brother!''

As the intruders fled, firing their weapons, a cousin, Zalal Karzai, 25, came running from elsewhere in the house and saw Waheed stagger from the bedroom. ''What happened to you?'' Zalal Karzai recalled asking.

'' 'Hashmat shot me!' '' he said the youth screamed back.

Waheed Karzai, who relatives say provided the same account to other family members before dying two days later at an American military hospital in Kandahar, was referring to Hashmat Karzai, 40, a first cousin of the president and the owner of a private security company that has close ties to the Afghan government and millions of dollars in contracts with the United States military...

Some relatives said they believed that the death was vengeance for an ''honor killing'' of Hashmat Karzai's father nearly 30 years ago by Yar Mohammad Karzai...

While some family members accuse the Karzai government of stonewalling, they do not claim that the president played an active role in blocking an investigation. Instead, they blame several of his brothers, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political boss of Kandahar...

Noor Karzai, 40, a cousin who lives in Maryland, expressed similar disappointment. ''They are protecting Hashmat,'' he said. ''He is sitting in Kabul getting money from the U.S. government. No one will touch him. We are sending billions of dollars of ...

The village of Karz is in Kandahar Province, about three miles outside the city of Kandahar, where Ahmed Wali Karzai, one of the president's brothers, wields enormous political power. But after Waheed's killing, government officials in the Kandahar area were strangely unhelpful...

Meanwhile, at least three of President Karzai's brothers -- Ahmed Wali, Mahmoud and Qayum -- have been urging family members to allow relatives to deal with the killing privately without bringing in the police, said Noor and Mohammad Karzai, the brothers from Maryland... (link)

A few days after the NYT story, which caused quite a stir in Afghanistan, the Associated Press related that President Karzai had finally ordered an investigation:

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Zemeri Bashary, said Karzai ordered the ministry to begin investigating the killing Sunday, the same day the newspaper report was published.

He said counterterrorism police and criminal investigators were assisting local officials, who began looking into the killing earlier.

Yar Mohammad Karzai said he was frustrated the president took so long to acknowledge the slaying. "He did not even give me a condolence call,'' he said... (link)

So President Karzai apparently made no move to order a murder investigation early on and didn't even call to condole his cousin whose son was murdered. It thus seems the alleged murderer's family is closer to Hamid and his brothers than is the victim's family.

But clearly this debacle is not simply a matter of the security forces wisely staying out of difficult family feuds. Forty-year-old Hashmat Karzai, the alleged killer, heads a major security firm contracted to the US military while his younger brother Hekmat, 36, founded the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies and is an advisor to his cousin Hamid Karzai. (It was their father, Khalil Karzai, who was killed in the early 80's by the father of the recently dead teen.)

It seems likely that many Afghans will see this latest slaying not as justice being served, but as another wealthy and powerful man using the immunity of his position to victimize others. Which is surely the last thing that Afghanistan needs right now. It also seems like something people in Canada might want to know about, given our important role in propping up the government there. But boosters for the war - and the media have more than their fair share of those - find such revelations a little bit awkward. Best to leave it out.

Scholars agree: Afghan war is illegal

2010-01-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Marjorie Cohn, former head of the National Lawyers' Guild, was a highly visible and formidable critic of the Bush administration. Her book Cowboy Republic is the best source I know on the various crimes of that era. Below, Cohn admirably continues her efforts, turning her attention to Obama's war.

Cohn is not the only jurist to examine the legal status of the Afghan war in recent years. Canadian law professor Michael Mandel has written substantially on the matter as have Myra Williamson and highly respected scholar Alex Conte, who have each produced a book on the subject. Interestingly, all of them have found that the war in Afghanistan began illegally and those who look past the initial invasion (all but Williamson) find that the war continues to be illegal.

A Grave Breach of the Geneva Conventions
Why the Af/Pak War is Illegal
By Marjorie Cohn

... The UN Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.

“Operation Enduring Freedom” was not legitimate self-defense under the charter because the 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11, or President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” ...

Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. After Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted proof that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him, according to the Washington Post. That proof was not forthcoming, the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden, and Bush began bombing Afghanistan.

Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.

When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense...

The use of these drones in Pakistan violates both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit willful killing. Targeted or political assassinations—sometimes called extrajudicial executions—are carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. As a 1998 report from the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” Willful killing is a grave breach ... (link)

The Afghan peace movement

2010-01-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

As we saw in the previous blog entry, in December there were three disastrous nighttime raids carried out by (so it seems) US special forces and/or CIA in Afghanistan. Two of them involved ground troops allegedly killing civilians at close range, while the third involved a deadly airstrike called in by special forces. In total the incidents killed some 24 civilians.

The reaction among Afghans appears to be quite strong. In the wake of the first incident, the Dec 7/8 attack in Laghman province which killed 12 civilians, Afghan parliamentarians reacted bitterly, as reported on Afghanistan's Tolo TV:

(Mawlawi Sayed Rahman, MP representing Laghman Province:) This is an aggression. This is an advanced way of occupying a country where a number of people are being killed or detained under several pretexts. In this way, they (foreigners) are insulting the people...

(Yunos Qanuni, lower house Speaker:) Basic principles of this country's policies for the coming five years should be presented (to the lower house). This should include debate about country's new policies about the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan. [BBC Foreign Service translation]

Note that the Laghman MP calls the western presence in his country an occupation and that Yunos Qanuni, a very important Afghan politician, calls into question the legitimacy of that occupation.

In the second incident, a Dec 27/28 nighttime operation by US special forces or CIA resulted in at least eight civilians killed by ground forces. Agence France-Presse reports that President Karzai "strongly condemned" the Kunar killings, which is I believe the strongest language he has ever used in incidents of this kind. There are, however, reports that Afghan army soldiers were involved in the Kunar incident, so Karzai's anger may be a rouse to deflect attention from his responsibility.

The Kunar incident sparked at least three major protests in Afghanistan. On Dec 30, protests attracting hundreds of demonstrators were held in Kabul and Jalalabad, the major eastern Afghan city and gateway to Pakistan and on Dec 31 some 1,500 protesters hit the streets of Asadabad, capital of Kunar province.

Afghans burn Obama effigy over civilian deaths

JALALABAD, Dec 30 (AFP) - Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting "death to Obama" to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.

Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangarhar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.

"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangarhar's education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted "death to Obama" and "death to foreign forces", witnesses said.

The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.

"Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country," Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP...

A similar protest was planned in Kabul against the "killing of civilians, especially the recent killing of students in Kunar by foreign forces," said organisers from the youth wing of Jamiat Eslah, or the Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development.

"The demonstration is to show our hatred, anger and sorrow about the current situation," said Sayed Khalid Rashid.

"Our main request is that the American and NATO forces must leave the country and Afghan people must have political autonomy," he said, adding that he expected hundreds of people to turn out for the march through western Kabul... (link)

The organisers of the Dec 30 Kabul protest, Jamiat Eslah's youth section, issued this statement:

1. On behalf of the young generation of our country, we strongly condemn the recent killing of our innocent compatriots by US and NATO troops in the provinces of Kunar, Laghman, Baghlan and everywhere else. We condemn such operations by whatever name carried out, either it is called peacekeeping or enduring freedom, and want an end to cruelly massacring of our people.

2. We urge the Afghan government and law-enforcement agencies to seriously chase these killings and bring to justice the perpetrators.

3. The Afghan youth urge the United Nations, human rights watchdogs and the international community not to stay indifferent towards killing and massacre of civilian Afghans anymore. They must stop brutal killing of innocent Afghans via legal and legitimate ways.

4. The Afghan people believe that US and NATO must think about ending their war policies in Afghanistan, instead of sending out more troops to kill more innocent Afghans.

5. We urge the world community not to impose its mandate on the Afghan people. A nation that has lived together throughout the history can decide its own fate and can coexist as a sovereign nation with no need to foreign intervention.

6. We ask all Afghans to put away their factional and personal interests and work for higher national interests to make an independent, free and prosperous Afghanistan.

The Afghan youth will not allow foreign hands to exploit our disunity for carrying out their imperialistic agendas and destroy our country.

Long live Afghanistan (link)

Note that the Kabul protest statement does not explicitly call for all foreign troops to be pulled out (only that occupying countries "must think about ending their war policies"), though the spokesperson at the protest asserts that their "main request is that the American and NATO forces must leave the country."

On the other hand the Jalalabad students' rhetoric is notable for its bravado, as their statement says that if there is no change, students will take up arms.

One obvious question which arises is who is Jamiat Eslah's youth section, exactly? Information is scant but the parent organization Jamiat Eslah (Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development) appears to be a respected NGO, affiliated with ACBAR and the UN and recipient of international foundation money. Browsing through this flickr photo essay of the Kabul protest reveals a distinct blue headband motif. Can this be seen as a distinctly secular gesture? An echo of the so-called colour revolutions or Iran's green-adorned protesters, perhaps?

The current batch of peaceniks are not a lone voice in Afghanistan, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware. The recently well-publicized Malalai Joya has been calling for foreign troops to withdraw for some time now. And besides Joya and her supporters, the peace camp also includes RAWA and their supporters as well as the National Peace Jirga.

The current protests seem to be having no small effect, spurring the Karzai administration to strike out against the occupying powers over the explosive issue of civilian casualties:

Kabul demands foreign 'killers' handed over
by Sardar Ahmad Sardar Ahmad

KABUL, Dec 31 (AFP) – The Afghan government demanded Thursday to take into its custody foreigners wanted over the alleged killing of 10 civilians, sharply escalating a war of words with its powerful Western military backers... (link)

Boy watches US forces shoot father in head

2010-01-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

Recent reports indicate that a new stage may have been reached in the war in Afghanistan. Secret operations of CIA and special forces appear to have stepped up their infamous night raids, which have induced fear in much of the local population.

We saw in a blog post a few weeks ago that up to 15 civilians in Laghman were killed in a ground forces operation apparently carried out under NATO command. NATO itself, after initial denials, appeared to acknowledge civilian casualties, but was characteristically vague about it.

Now, according to the article below, it seems that the attack-cum-massacre was carried out at night and, according to locals, perpetrated by US special forces on the ground. (The Washington Post, however, mistakenly reported as late as Dec 30 that the attack was an airstrike.)

US forces ‘like to kill us’
Sayed Karim - The National
December 28. 2009

... According to witnesses, US troops entered a number of houses near the provincial capital, Mehtar Lam, in an overnight operation [on Dec 7/8]. The victims included Mohammed Ismail, whose 10-year-old son, Rafiullah, described what happened: “When the soldiers came to our house, my father asked them, ‘Who are you?’ Then they shot him in the head and told us, ‘Be quiet and tell us where the weapons are’.”

Said Ahmad Safi, a spokesman for Laghman’s governor, said insurgents had previously staged attacks against officials and foreign troops in the area. He acknowledged that 12 people – including a woman – had apparently died in the raid, which locals reported was carried out by US Special Forces...

Discontent with the government and the occupation has inevitably fuelled support for the Taliban among the local population. Despite still being relatively secure compared with much of eastern Afghanistan, there has been growing rebel activity here in recent months as the insurgents edge closer and closer to neighbouring Kabul...

Gulzar Sankerwal, chairman of the provincial council, said: “The Taliban do not fight face to face. This is guerrilla fighting so if more troops arrive, they will not solve the problem. When the commander in Kabul asked Obama for the extra troops, he knew the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties.” ... (link)

Note that in spite of (and because of) the two Obama-ordered troop surges, the insurgency continues to spread, moving closer to Kabul.

So it turns out that the deaths occurred in a nighttime raid, one of what appears to be an increasing number of such operations. The Dec 7/8 disaster was recently repeated in Kunar on Dec 27 and again in Baghlan on Dec 28/29 - an incident which has gone largely unnoticed in the media, though it has now been overshadowed by the Dec 30 incident in Helmand - a daytime missile strike by NATO forces. AFP has more on the Dec 27 Kunar incident:

Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had no information on any operations or casualties in Kunar.

A senior Western military official told AFP that US special forces have been conducting operations against militants in the border regions of Kunar.

"They have been killing a lot of Taliban and capturing a lot of Taliban," he said.

The operations were conducted independently of ISAF, which number more than 110,000 fighting to eradicate the Taliban, he said... (link)

And yet that may not be the end of the intriguing details. While locals in Kunar say the 8 teenagers were killed in a US special forces raid, AFP reports that they may have been CIA operatives:

NATO forces have disputed the results of the Afghan probe, saying the foreigners involved were non-military Americans on a sanctioned operation who fired in self-defence after being shot at by villagers. (link)

US special forces like the Green Berets or Navy Seals are military personnel while CIA officers are not. Of course, neither are mercenaries such as Blackwater. It seems possible that "non-military Americans" could refer to either CIA or mercs.

In all likelihood, the recent spate of nighttime raids were undertaken by a mix of CIA, special forces and perhaps mercenaries. CIA agents are known to work alongside special forces in Afghanistan and recent reports about Blackwater revealed their involvement in CIA operations there.

Finally, the recent attack in Baghlan, courtesy of the Afghan press since few if any western media reported the incident:

'Four civilians killed in Baghlan air raid'
Habib Rahman Sherzai - Dec 29, 2009

PUL-I-KHUMRI (Pajhwok) - Four civilians have reportedly been killed and eight others wounded in a fresh air strike by foreign forces in northern Baghlan province, residents alleged on Tuesday.

The overnight attack took place in Kohna Qala area of Baghlan-i-Markazi district, residents told Pajhwok Afghan News...

In the last night air raid, the dead included a father and his three sons, who were killed while running to escape the bombardment, a teacher at the Jamiat Aburjaee High School in the area, Karim Safi, told Pajhwok Afghan News. A student of the school, Karim Javed, said that the air raid also left many people wounded including a student of his school.

Head of the district hospital, Abdul Qahir Qanit, said they had received eight injured people delivered to the hospital with a woman and a child in a critical condition... (link)

Up to 18 Afghan civilians killed in attacks

2009-12-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

On Monday, Dec 28, President Karzai condemned a foreign airstrike in Kunar province, saying the attack killed 10 civilians including eight students. Now the UN's Kai Eide has weighed in on the matter:

UN Says Eight Afghans Killed In Weekend Raid Were Students

KABUL, Dec 31 (Reuters) - The United Nations said today that eight Afghan students died in a controversial nighttime raid last weekend, which NATO-led forces say only targeted insurgents but Afghan officials say killed 10 civilians...

"The United Nations remains concerned about nighttime raids given that they often result in lethal outcomes for civilians, the dangerous confusion that frequently arises when a family compound is invaded, and the frustration of local authorities when operations are not coordinated with them," [UN Special Representative Kai] Eide said... (link)

The New York Times reports that the UN investigation's findings are only preliminary at this stage. Note that the UN doesn't so far shed any light on the other two alleged civilian victims.

Now there are reports of similar incident, this one in Helmand province:

Air Strike Kills Afghan Civilians, Provincial Official Says

KANDAHAR, Dec 31 (Reuters) - An air strike by foreign forces in Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province on December 30 killed civilians, although the number of victims is unknown, a spokesman for the provincial governor said.

"A patrol of foreign troops came under Taliban ambush at 3 p.m. After the ambush, planes came and bombed the area, which caused civilian casualties," said Dawud Ahmadi, spokesman for the Helmand governor... (link)

The New York Times relates reports that seven civilians died in the attack and Xinhua quotes an official to that effect:

"NATO-led troops carried out air strike outside Helmand's provincial capital Lashkargah on Wednesday, killing seven civilians and wounding two others," spokesman for provincial administration Daud Ahmadi told Xinhua.

The attack, he added, took place when some elders in Walizai village were discussing on the irrigation system in their area... (link)

Al Jazeera says "at least eight civilians" were killed in the Helmand incident.

Washington Post: Many Afghans prefer the Taliban

2009-12-09T21:36:00.000-08:00

For many people whom I speak to about the war in Afghanistan, the point which proves the criminality of our occupation of that country is that many Afghans prefer the harsh but predictable rule of the Taliban to the monsters and thugs we have put in power. We have seen in previous blog posts some of the extent of this reluctant support for the Taliban. Now the Washington Post offers us similar sentiments from Laghman province, next to Kabul (and the location of the recent airstrike which is said to have killed up to fifteen civilians).

Taliban shadow officials offer concrete alternative
Many Afghans prefer decisive rule to disarray of Karzai government
By Griff Witte - Washington Post

LAGHMAN, Dec 8 - Like nearly all provinces in Afghanistan, this one has two governors.

The first was appointed by President Hamid Karzai...

The second governor was chosen by Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and, hunted by American soldiers, sneaks in only at night. He issues edicts on "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" stationery, plots attacks against government forces and fires any lower-ranking Taliban official tainted by even the whiff of corruption...

"These people in the shadow government are running the country now," said Khalid Pashtoon, a legislator from the southern province of Kandahar who has close ties to Karzai. "They're an important part of the chaos."

U.S. military officials say that dislodging the Taliban's shadow government and establishing the authority of the Karzai administration over the next 18 months will be critical to the success of President Obama's surge strategy. But the task has been complicated by the fact that in many areas, Afghans have decided they prefer the severe but decisive authority of the Taliban to the corruption and inefficiency of Karzai's appointees.

When the Taliban government was ousted in 2001 following five disastrous years in power, a majority of Afghans cheered the departure of a regime marked by the harsh repression of women and minorities, anemic government services and international isolation. Petty thieves had their hands chopped off, and girls were barred from school.

Today, there is little evidence the Taliban has fundamentally changed. But from Kunduz province in the north to Kandahar in the south, even government officials concede that their allies have lost the people's confidence and that, increasingly, residents are turning to shadow Taliban officials to solve their problems.

Pashtoon said that on a recent visit to Kandahar, he heard from constituents who were pleased with the Taliban's judges...

Afghans who live under Taliban control say the group's weaknesses remain the same as during the movement's five-year tenure ruling the country. The Taliban provides virtually no social services, leaving Afghans on their own when it comes to health care, education and development... (link)

More deaths, more denials (Updated)

2009-12-09T01:42:00.000-08:00

Reuters reports on an incident in Afghanistan's Laghman province, which neighbors the capital of Kabul:

NATO Denies Civilians Killed In Afghan Attack

KABUL, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The NATO-led force has denied it had killed any civilians in an operation in eastern Afghanistan, but a provincial official said 12 people, probably civilians, had been killed in the attack...

The statement said the joint force came under "hostile fire from multiple positions and returned fire" in Armul village, in Mehtar Lam district.

"The joint force searched the compound without further incident and recovered multiple AK-47 rifles."

The spokesman for Laghman's governor, Sayed Ahmad Safi, said 12 people in four houses were killed during the operation.

"We have launched an investigation to find out how many of them were civilians and how many were Taliban," he said. "It looks like all of them may have been civilians, including women." (link)

Pajhwok Afghan News says locals reported 15 civilians dead, as does Iran's PressTV, who apparently have a reporter on the ground.

The Associated Press reports that Afghan security forces killed one protester on Tuesday (Dec 8) in the provincial capital as hundreds of demonstrators protested the airstrikes.

Update:
It seems that NATO is now coming (somewhat) clean:

NATO Says Civilians May Have Died In Afghan Raid

KABUL, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Civilians may have been among those killed in a NATO-led attack in eastern Afghanistan on December 8, the U.S. general in charge of the NATO force's day-to-day combat operations has said...

NATO said on December 8 that no civilians had died in its raid in Laghman Province... (link)

Repeating the Russian disaster

2009-12-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Robert Fisk doing what he does best:

This strategy has been tried before – without success
Dec 3, 2009

... Victor Sebestyen, who has researched a book about the fall of the Soviet empire, has written at length of those frozen days after the Russian army stormed into Afghanistan just after Christmas of 1979. He quotes General Sergei Akhromeyev, commander of the Soviet armed forces, addressing the Soviet Politburo in 1986. "There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centres, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize."

As Sebestyen points out, Gen Akhromeyev demanded extra troops – or the war in Afghanistan would continue "for a very, very long time". And how's this for a quotation from, say, a British or US commander in Helmand today? "Our soldiers are not to blame. They've fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills." Yes, of course, this was Gen Akhromeyev in 1986...

Outside the city, I was told that the "mujahedin" – President Ronald Reagan's favourite "freedom fighters" – had destroyed a school because it was educating girls. Too true. The headmaster and his wife – after they had been burned – were hanging from a tree.

Afghans approached us with strange stories. Political prisoners were being taken from the country and tortured inside the Soviet Union. Secret rendition...

The "mujahedin" infested Helmand province and crossed and recrossed the Pakistani border, just as they do today. A Soviet Mig fighter-bomber even crossed the frontier in early 1980 to attack the guerrillas. The Pakistani government – and the United States, of course – condemned this as a flagrant breach of Pakistan's sovereignty. Well, tell that to the young Americans who control the unmanned Predators so often crossing the border today to attack the guerrillas... (link)

Pull Canadian troops, says Globe and Mail journalist

2009-11-27T19:06:00.000-08:00

The Globe and Mail's foreign correspondent Graeme Smith has written an opinion piece calling for Canadian troops to be pulled out of Afghanistan.

Smith's assessment is important for at least two reasons: first, he is easily the best Canadian journalist working in Afghanistan for the past three years, as well as the perhaps the most experienced. Second, his newly declared opposition to the mission is not a principled position. That is, Smith has never seen a problem with NATO's military might being used to install a friendly regime in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the whole operation stems from an illegal invasion and regime change by the world's only superpower.

Thus, Smith's conclusion that Canadian troops should be withdrawn reflects his opinion that the war is unwinnable, not illegitimate:

The Mark - Nov 12 2009
Graeme Smith

... We should start by recognizing Canada's dwindling importance in Kandahar... Commanders once proudly declared they were chasing insurgents across 60,000 square kilometres of territory, but now Canadians are relegated to guarding Kandahar City and its approaches. From a practical standpoint, we're replaceable.

Symbolically, a Canadian withdrawal would signal to our allies that more soldiers aren't helpful at this point. That's a useful message... Every year I spent in the country, from 2005 to 2009, saw major troops surges – and terrible surges of violence. With every fighting season, more women and children were killed... The mission has failed, so far.

We need to acknowledge this failure if we're going to think clearly about what's next. I have profound respect for optimists... But how many roads are built in rural Afghanistan these days without paying bribes to local insurgents? How many villagers in Kandahar would get polio vaccinations without permission from the Taliban? Making the country better doesn't necessarily require fighting the insurgents – in many cases, it requires working with them.

Our soldiers have bravely followed orders in Kandahar. But they're being swept aside by a tidal wave of U.S. forces, and this surge is likely doomed to bring the same results as previous surges. Canada should withdraw its battle group, and push its allies toward peace talks. (link)

Afghanistan's Colombia connection

2009-11-18T00:52:00.001-08:00

The Afghan press has an interesting dispatch on burgeoning relations between Afghanistan and Colombia:

Jawad seeks Colombia's support on terror, narcotics
By Lalit K Jha

WASHINGTON, Nov 3 (Pajhwok) - Afghan Ambassador to the US Said T Jawad on Tuesday met the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez to expand security and development cooperation between the two countries.

Jawad, who also holds the charge of the Afghan Ambassador to Colombia, sought Colombia's help in fighting both terrorism and counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan.

We need Colombia's assistance with deployment of your special forces to help us fight terrorism, as well as training our counter-narcotics police and the Afghan National Army's counter-narcotics battalion, Jawad specifically requested President Uribe.

He also asked for establishment of a longer-term institutional relationship between Afghanistan's Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and Colombia's Accion Social** program implemented by the Office of the President of Colombia.

A key feature of Accion Social is its Center for Coordination of Integrated Action, which delivers timely integrated assistance to the affected populations in remote regions of Colombia.

Jawad also requested Colombia's assistance with establishing a Counter-Narcotics Police Academy at Afghanistans Ministry of Interior, which he said would immensely help improve governance and the rule of law in the country.

President Uribe responded positively...

Colombian National Minister of Defense Gabriel Silva Lujan and Vice-Minister for Policy and International Affairs Sergio Jaramillo Caro invited Jawad to visit a region of Meta, which until a few years ago was under the firm control of narco-terrorists... (link)

Earlier speculation about this budding relationship was reported this past spring in the Washington Post:

[After numerous failed eradication programs] Colombia's government may have found a remedy palatable to a Democratic-led U.S. Congress not only interested in emphasizing social development over military aid for this country but also looking for solutions to consider in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is entrenched and drug crops are flourishing.

The plan underway here is an ambitious state-building effort designed to incorporate a once-forgotten region into the legitimate economy by bringing in police and courts, paving roads, improving schools and offering farm aid. The idea is to provide broad incentives for farmers in this town in the southern state of Meta to stay put and grow legal crops.

Colombian authorities are working to duplicate the plan in five other drug-infested regions, and U.S. officials say it could work in other conflict zones far from Colombia.

The results here are promising: From 2007 to 2008, coca production fell 75 percent in a quadrant of the southern state of Meta that is bigger than Rhode Island, Colombian authorities say. With most hamlets around Vista Hermosa pledging to cooperate in exchange for help, eradication efforts have accelerated this year and the amount of coca here is now negligible... (link)

One doesn't need to be a close follower of Colombian affairs to know that the offer of a US-backed "Colombian solution" to any problem is not likely to be a solution at all. While rates of violence were dropping throughout Latin America (from a US-tutored peak in the 80's), Colombia's were soaring in the 1990's as that country became the Americans' number one aid recipient in the hemisphere.

Mentioned in both articles above as a model for the new anti-drug approach, the Colombian department of Meta, where Calgary-based Petrobank has operations, is also soon to host an American air force base for at least a decade. (Similarly, the US is making itself at home in Afghanistan with a booming mega-base near Kabul.) The back story of Meta department's pacification includes the assassination of virtually all of the leftist Patriotic Union's city councilors in the 1980's after that party had successes at the ballot box. Assassinations of other subversives like human rights activists was next on the repressive agenda, led by government and military officials and carried out by right wing death squads. American training for Colombian military units in the area soon followed. The area was also considered the home of the FARC and still hosts that group's most feared units.

** On the Colombian government's Accion Social, here's Human Rights Watch:

The report [by the Colombian government's Monitoring Commission on Public Policy for IDPs] notes that the reports of displacement caused by paramilitaries in the official information system have been dropping "probably because, among other factors, of the difficulties that have arisen in the process of registration…due to the paramilitary demobilization process…[because] as has been reported by many organizations… some Territorial Units (TUs) of Acción Social began to systematically refuse to register persons and homes who reported that paramilitaries were responsible for their displacement. According to the reports about the situation, the TUs were operating on the assumption that since the paramilitaries [are] demobilized, [they] could not be accused of having caused the displacement." (link)

Narco News also reports that Accion Social does not record pesticide spraying as a reason for displacement.

British protests greet an unpopular war

2009-11-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

In Edinburgh this weekend, NATO delegates attending a meeting in the city were reported among some one thousand who rallied against NATO's war in Afghanistan:

Among those addressing the demonstration was Joan Humphreys, whose grandson, a British soldier, was killed in Afghanistan in August.

"I would like the troops to come home walking -- not on stretchers or in body bags," she said.

John Cannell, of the Stop the War Coalition, which helped to organise the march, added: "The only solution has to be a political one, but we need the troops out now to make the space for that political solution." ... (link)

The Press Association notes that "The protest even involved some delegates from the assembly itself, including Dutch senator Tiny Kox."

The protest taps into growing anti-war sentiment in Britain, as revealed in a poll commissioned by The Independent:

In a ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday this weekend, an overwhelming proportion – 71 per cent – supported this newspaper's call for a phased withdrawal of British forces from Afghanistan within a year or so, while just 22 per cent disagreed... (link)

Afghan war 'probably illegal, certainly immoral'

2009-11-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

In a classic case of partisan journalism, Rupert Murdoch's London tabloid The Sun harangued the UK Prime Minister after it was revealed that a condolence letter which Gordon Brown had penned (in his own hand) spelled the addressee's name wrong. The recipient, the mother of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan, was evidently upset, prompting the Tory-supporting paper's well-timed outrage. (A by-election in Glasgow was then underway; held Nov. 12, returning Labour as the victor.)

One letter writer to the Guardian (UK) has a response worth quoting:

... The exploitation of the bereaved by the media, politicians and the military hierarchy poses a serious threat to a rational debate about the Afghan disaster. As public opposition to the war climbs, the apologists claim it is because the Labour government is not doing enough to support the war with helicopters and armour-plating. This is a perversion of the views of the majority, who believe that the war itself is wrong, probably illegal and certainly immoral...

Bill Major
Liverpool (link)

Malalai Joya: 'End the war now'

2009-11-13T11:00:00.000-08:00

Outspoken Afghan women's leader Malalai Joya begins her Canadian speaking tour today:

Afghan women's leader in Vancouver: '2011 too late, Canada should end the war now'

Malalai Joya, the youngest woman ever elected to Afghanistan's parliament, is in Vancouver today to start a cross-Canada book tour for her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, written with Vancouver writer and anti-war activist Derrick O'Keefe.

Ms. Joya will be appearing at several events Friday, Nov. 13, including a luncheon hosted by NDP MP Libby Davies, 12 Noon at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden, 578 Carrall Street and a talk at Langara College at 2:30p.m. Her main public event and book launch will be Saturday, Nov. 14, 7pm at Saint Andrew's Wesley church (1022 Nelson Street at Burrard). Her visit is being organized by StopWar.ca.

The 31 year-old Joya has been called "the bravest woman in Afghanistan" by the BBC, having survived five assassination attempts. In her book she recounts her life story growing up in refugee camps and working as an underground activist during the Taliban regime, and also spells out her views on the war in Afghanistan. She has a clear message for the Canadian government: "Ending the war in 2011 is too late, this occupation of Afghanistan must end now."

Malalai Joya has been a consistent critic of corruption in the NATO-backed Karzai government. Last month the New York Times reported that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother -- who said to have links with drug trafficking -- has been on the CIA payroll for years.

"In Afghanistan we call this brother of Karzai in Kandahar a 'little Bush,'" Joya said about the most powerful man in Kandahar, where close to 2800 Canadian troops are currently stationed.

"On behalf of the Afghan people I offer my condolences to those Canadian families who have lost loved ones in my country," Joya added. "But I believe these troops are themselves the victims of the wrong policies of Canada, US and NATO -- these countries must stop supporting the warlords and end this occupation."

Cop who killed 5 UK soldiers 'a hero' say locals

2009-11-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

The recent killing of five British troops at the hands of an Afghan police officer has set the UK reeling, prompting wider calls for the pull-out of troops from Afghanistan. Once again, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting is the only outlet able (or willing) to put reporters on the ground to relate the story from the local point of view:

What Drove Afghan Policeman to Kill UK Troops?
By Aziz Ahmad Tassal and Mohammad Ilyas Dayee

LASHKAR GAH, Nov 5 (IWPR) - Western and Afghan forces try to find out why an otherwise normal young man snapped and killed men he had worked with for months.

The young man’s name was Gulbuddin and he came from Musa Qala, in the northern part of Helmand. He was big and strong with a reputation for fierceness in fighting the Taleban. Gulbuddin was a graduate of the police academy, had served honourably for two years in the Afghan National Police in Helmand, and his commander describes him as trustworthy.

That was until the afternoon of November 3, when he suddenly took a machine gun and mowed down his British colleagues, killing five and wounding six others. Two Afghan police were also injured in the incident...

Some people in Helmand believe that Gulbuddin belonged to the Taleban and had infiltrated the police. Others think that he may have lost friends or family in the bombardments by foreign forces that have ratcheted up tensions between Afghans and western forces, especially in the south.

“Gulbuddin was a soldier like me,” said Khairullah, one of the wounded policemen. “He did not have psychological problems, and he was not a drug addict. He was a disciplined policeman. Nobody knows why it happened." ...

Gulbuddin fled the checkpoint where the shooting took place and a Taleban commander said that Gulbuddin was with them...

But most Helmandis think it is unlikely that the Taleban will give him up voluntarily.

“That boy is a hero,” said Khial Mohammad, a resident of Greshk. “The Taleban will treasure him like a flower.” ...

[S]ome Helmandis welcomed the news of British losses.

“(Gulbuddin) is a good boy, and the parents that bore him should be proud,” said Gul Agha, a resident of Greshk. “He should be given a medal. Let the foreigners know the pain of losing your own people. Let them know how death smells.”

“Let them know how tragic is the death of a son, a father or a brother,” said Abdul Majid, another resident. “Just last night they bombed innocent people in Babaji. Didn’t they have fathers and mothers? They were just farmers, threshing corn, and they were killed on the spot. All their young sons are dead. I am sure they would welcome that soldier as a hero.” ... (link)

Note that the residents who called the turncoat a hero apparently did so under their own names, rather than declining to be named, as did others quoted for the article.

Civilians die, protests result

2009-11-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

Several recent incidents have resulted in foreign troops killing Afghan civilians. First, AP reports on incidents in Helmand province and Khost province:

Afghan villagers say air strike kills 9 civilians
By Noor Khan

NOVEMBER 5 - An overnight air strike by international forces killed nine civilians, including at least three children, villagers said today. Afghan authorities said they had no reports of civilian deaths...

Residents of Korkhashien village drove the bodies to the governor's office in the nearby provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, and AP footage and photos showed at least two children among the dead...

Villager Abdul Rashin said the people were killed while harvesting corn in their fields.

The convoy of vans and station wagons from Korkhashien drove from the governor's office to a central market, where the villagers shouted blame at both President Hamid Karzai and his international allies.

"Death to Karzai! Death to the foreigners!" they yelled as passers-by looked through the car windows at the blanket-covered corpses...

In eastern Khost province, several hundred people demonstrated today against an overnight raid that killed a resident of Baramkhil village. Walishah Hamat, head of the Mandozayi district government, said the dead man was innocent... (link)

Meanwhile, in northern Badghis province, American and Afghan soldiers and Afghan police in search of two missing American paratroopers have reportedly clashed with insurgents, killing civilians in the process:

The U.S. military said the soldiers on the search operation came under an attack that killed four Afghan soldiers and two policemen and wounded five American and 17 Afghan troops.

Afghan officials said the NATO airstrike hit a coalition base in the area or hit near it. The district's mayor, Abdul Shukor, put the death toll at 20 -- six Afghan soldiers, two policemen and 12 civilians. Shukor described the bombing site as a military checkpoint near a warehouse.

A NATO statement said authorities were investigating whether "close air support" caused some of the casualties... (link)

Earlier reports said that more than 25 foreign and Afghan soldiers were injured in the clash.

Malalai Joya a 'worthy choice' for Nobel

2009-11-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

Malalai Joya, fittingly described by the BBC as the bravest woman in Afghanistan, begins the Canadian leg of her speaking tour this week in Vancouver. She has been in the US the past few weeks, where her autobiography impressed the heck out of America's leading intellectual.

Noam Chomsky writes, a propos of Obama's Nobel win:

The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai Joya.

This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the warlords under the Karzai government.

Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.
(link)

Troops feeling the antiwar vibe

2009-10-31T19:38:00.000-07:00

British lance corporal Joe Glenton, facing court martial for refusing to return to Afghanistan, reports that fellow soldiers have expressed support for his position:

Joe Glenton, 27, who serves with the Royal Logistics Corps, returned to his barracks near Oxford this week after speaking at a London peace rally in defiance of orders.

After calling for a complete withdrawal of troops, he feared a hostile reaction, but he said that instead of being branded a coward he was applauded by fellow soldiers.

"When I came back to barracks I was wondering what they would throw at me, but the reaction was heartening," he said. "There were handshakes and a lot of pats on the back. Someone said I was saying what everyone else is thinking. I heard that from several people.

"A lot of these guys had just come back from tours of duty. Many senior people said they respected me for following my convictions." ...

''A lot of guys around me didn't know why we were there. The confusion happening in the UK today was evident among the troops three years ago [i.e. when Glenton was on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan]." ...

[According to Chris Nineham, a Stop the War campaigner:] "The number of families getting in touch with us has risen. There were virtually no soldiers contacting us last year and now we are hearing from a couple a week who want to get involved."

At a civic reception to mark this week's homecoming of the 2 Rifle battle group from Helmand province, which suffered 23 fatalities in six months, soldiers' parents said they wanted the troops out...

[The father of one returning soldier said:] "Now, I don't think we should be there. If we can't sort it out with the number of troops we have, I don't think we ever will." (link)

Meanwhile, the Guardian's Sean Smith, embedded with US soldiers, has produced a video journal showing, in his words, "the soldiers are losing heart for a fight they feel their presence is only prolonging." See: 'These people just want to be left alone' (video)

UK soldier leads 'Troops Home' demo

2009-10-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Both President Karzai and challenger Abdullah have apparently rejected the idea of a deal to avoid a run-off vote for the presidential spot. In addition, Karzai has rejected Abdullah's demand to sack the head of the election commission, though Abdullah has not said what he might do if his demand is not met. (Some say Abdullah made a tacit threat to boycott the election, though few expect him to actually pull out, threat or not.)

Meanwhile, the rising tide of opposition to the war in the UK has brought ten thousand out to the streets of London. More from the Observer:

Rebel British soldier calls for Afghan exit
Thousands march in London anti-war demo

Oct 25 - A serving soldier facing a court martial for refusing to return to Afghanistan called on Britain to withdraw all troops from the country at an anti-war demonstration in London yesterday that attracted 5,000 protesters.

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, said the presence of British forces in one of the world's poorest countries was making the situation worse. "It is distressing to disobey orders, but when Britain follows America in continuing to wage war against one of the world's poorest countries, I feel I have no choice," he told anti-war protesters at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.

"Politicians have abused the trust of the army and the soldiers who serve. That's why I am compelled and proud to march with the Stop the War Coalition."

The father of a soldier killed in Iraq, who recently refused to shake hands with Tony Blair, also attended the march. Peter Brierley, 59, whose son, Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, was killed in Iraq in 2003, recounted how he told the former prime minister at a memorial at St Paul's Cathedral, London, that he had blood on his hands and that one day he would have to answer for what he had done... (link)

You can see more coverage of the demonstration at the Stop the War website, where you can watch Youtube videos of short speeches by Tony Benn, Tariq Ali, George Gallaway and others. The Seumas Milne speech is quite good.

Afghans are doing their own protesting, according to Reuters:

In Kabul, shouting "Down with America," Afghans clashed with police protesting against what participants said was the desecration of a copy of the Koran by foreign troops...

Underscoring many Afghans' unease with the presence of foreign troops, hundreds of people gathered in central Kabul on October 26 shouting anti-American slogans and throwing stones.

For the second consecutive day, police fired into the air to break up the crowd as protesters prepared to set fire to a crudely made effigy of Obama outside the parliament building.

Protesters say NATO forces burned a copy of Islam's holiest book during a raid in eastern Afghanistan last week.

The NATO-led force in Afghanistan has denied any involvement and blamed the Taliban for spreading false rumors.

Police arrested up to 30 people, a Reuters witness said. At least one police officer was injured in the clashes, another witness said.

Hundreds of people also gathered in the western city of Herat on October 26 in related anti-U.S. protests, a Reuters witness said. (link)

As if Afghans didn't have a enough to protest about, some US Special Forces have added more grief:

U.S. Forces Kill Four Afghans In Car, Police Say

KANDAHAR, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Four Afghans, including a child and two women, were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on a car in southern Kandahar city, police have said.

A man in the car also was killed when a U.S. military convoy opened fire on the civilian vehicle, Kandahar police official Shah Agha told Reuters. He said a U.S. Special Forces convoy appeared to be involved...

A NATO spokesman in Afghanistan said three civilians were killed and two were wounded when NATO forces fired on the car because it failed to stop when repeatedly signaled to do so. (link)

Update:

At a subsequent protest the following day in Kabul, witnesses tell of police violence and arrests:

Police beat, open fire on demonstrators
by Sardar Ahmad

KABUL, Oct 26 (AFP) - Afghan police Monday opened fire and turned a water cannon on demonstrators angry about allegations that Western troops torched a Koran, wounding at least three people, officials and witnesses said.

Clashes erupted as police tried to prevent around 300 students, most of them men, from marching on parliament, the city's criminal investigation police chief, Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, told media.

"Police fired at the crowd, one bullet hit me. I was closing my shop at the time," Sherullah, an 18-year-old man who suffered a bullet wound to his hip, told AFP from his hospital bed. "They (policemen) were just firing. They were firing at the people," the wounded young man said.

Sayedzada denied that police fired towards the crowd, saying they only aimed their guns in the air. They also used water cannon, the police chief added.

But a doctor at the emergency ward of Ibn Sina hospital told media that at least three men suffering from "bullet wounds" had been admitted for treatment.

More than 15 police were also wounded in clashes between the angry mob and security forces, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.

An AFP reporter at the scene saw about three dozen people, mainly young students, herded into a police vehicle and taken away.

"We were demonstrating, we wanted to protest the burning of Qoran by the foreign forces but the police came and started beating us," a young man, refusing to give his name, told media from the back of a police vehicle... (link)

The maybe run-off

2009-10-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration is widely seen to be dithering on the Af-Pak file even as reports say it may be a couple of weeks before the administration announces its new direction.

Meanwhile, the momentum in Afghanistan seems to be toward a run-off election, despite Khalilzad's claim that the Obama administration wants to see a deal between Karzai and Abdullah to avert a run-off. There are rumours to the contrary, however, as Julius Cavendish relates.

Reporting for The National (UAE), Cavendish writes from Kabul:

Turnout estimates [in the first round of the election] were as low as five per cent in some areas hit particularly hard by the insurgency... Although both candidates claim more voters will turn out on November 7, the reality is that there is little appetite for more voting, even if the insurgents have less time to organise a campaign of intimidation...

The UN has told the [Independent Election Commission] that 200 of the 380 district election chiefs who helped run things first time round ignored procedures or were actually complicit in the cheating and must not be hired again. But a shake-up of the leadership a fortnight before voting has the potential to be a political and managerial nightmare, so senior architects of the first round fraud will remain in place...

Dr Abdullah has said that he will only take part in the runoff if certain conditions are met. He has not yet said what those are, and given the proximity of the runoff, this sounds more like an escape clause than a serious anti-corruption programme.

Rumours persist that the two candidates will cut a deal but the probability of this happening is diminishing. Diplomats say what dialogue there is between the two camps – there are whispers of a meeting between Mr Karzai and Mr Abdullah within the next day or two – has the tenor of preparation for post-election discussion, not an 11th- hour compromise. (link)

Note that Cavendish says diplomats don't expect a deal between Karzai and Abdullah. Karzai, however, might be hinting at that:

"If (Abdullah) wants to come and work in my government, he is most welcome. I'm known for consensus and building it and for inclusivity, and that's a good trademark," he told CNN in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday. (link)

Afghan election finalized - almost

2009-10-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

At long last, the Electoral Complaints Commission, headed by a Canadian professor, has passed on its findings of fraud to Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission. In what is evidently a poorly kept secret, those results show that Karzai won just 48% of the August 20 vote, rather than the 55% which the preliminary count found. While this, in theory, necessitates a run-off vote, it is widely reported that Karzai will be cutting a deal with challenger Abdullah to avoid a run-off.

The Christian Science Monitor has more on the legality of such deal-making:

Afghan election law says that if nobody gets 50 percent plus one vote in the first round, a runoff must be held to determine a winner. If one of those two parties concedes, it's unclear if the election can be called without the runoff.

"There is an absence of law, a silence, and for this you need an interpretation," says Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

It would fall to the Supreme Court – appointed with no oversight by Karzai – to provide that interpretation.

"The Supreme Court is not strong enough to be able to get that much trust on [such a] decision that it was impartial," he says...

If no deal is reached, a runoff vote could be derailed by extremely low turnout, Taliban disruption, or failure to organize it before the snow starts falling. (link)

Reuters today reveals Karzai's apparent willingness to take part in a run-off:

Karzai indicated his willingness to accept a run-off in meetings this week with visiting Western officials, including U.S. Senator John Kerry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. (link)

Yet such a pledge may simply be a signal for Abdullah, as former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad indicates that Obama wants to see a deal made:

Zalmay Khalilzad, returned from Kabul on Monday and said Karzai was willing to "power-share" and that differences with Abdullah appeared to be in the timing of such an agreement.

"The international community and the Obama administration appear to favor the unity government rather than an election," said Khalilzad. (link)

Canadians in the quagmire

2009-10-18T15:31:00.000-07:00

A couple of vignettes of the war. First from the Ottawa Citizen:

Cost of mission weighs heavily on soldiers
Some in Afghanistan frustrated by toll, lack of clear purpose

By Bruce Ward - Oct 11

... most of the soldiers interviewed over the past five weeks have been upbeat, driven by their sense of duty and determined to do their job as best they can.

But when given the assurance they would not be identified, some expressed their frustration with the mission.

"Our guys get killed but there doesn't seem to be any gains made," one said.

"The Afghans take all kinds of humanitarian aid, but they don't really help us find the Taliban. They never give anything back."

Others said they had no clear idea of what their purpose is here, or what they are expected to accomplish... (link)

And from the Walrus:

Lessons Learned
Canadian troops in Afghanistan get a little help from a former jihadi
by Graeme Wood - The Walrus

... Teacher has picked out one of the halal rations offered by his employer, the Canadian military... [H]e translates Dari and Pashto for a small Canadian battle unit that trains the ragtag Afghan National Army [and] advises Sean Wilson, a wiry captain from the Royal Canadian Regiment, and shadows him on raids, searches of suspected Taliban hideouts, and patrols through mined and booby-trapped defiles.

Today Teacher and Wilson are leading an Afghan-Canadian patrol...

... the Afghan soldiers have already arrived, and seem to have been celebrating their summiting before they even start the search. Some have taken watermelons from a local villager; others have sparked up a morning toke, wreathing the area in a fog of hash.

Wilson tells Teacher to warn Captain Faizullah that his men are baked out of their minds, and probably not ready for an operation that could involve doors rigged to explode and snipers perched on the mountain nearby. Faizullah demurs, and when Wilson’s warrant officer takes away a stoned Afghan soldier’s gun, bitter words are exchanged, including some between the warrant and Faizullah, who says a mere enlisted man should not presume to speak to a toron, or mid-level officer, about how to do his job. Relations between the two forces are strained for the rest of the morning.

By early afternoon, we are back at our makeshift base, near the district centre. Wilson patches the rift with Faizullah, but none of the Canadians trust the Afghan soldiers with their safety anymore... (link)

The war on civilians

2009-10-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." - E. Hemingway

On October 8th, NATO's ISAF force acknowledged that they "accidentally killed an Afghan child" in a nighttime raid against suspected insurgents in Logar province, which borders on Kabul. While reports of that incident were picked up widely, an incident which followed a couple days later was only reported in the Afghan press:

Coalition troops kill three, detain as many
By Rehmatullah Afghan

PUL-I-ALAM, Oct 10 (Pajhwok) - US-led coalition troops and Afghan intelligence operatives have killed two civilians and a militant in Pul-i-Alam, capital of central Logar province, a police chief said on Saturday.

The fatalities happened in Kaji village, where the combined force stormed into a house during a predawn swoop, provincial police chief, Brig. Gen. Ghulam Mustafa Mohseni said... (link)

The Afghan press again goes where others don't in reporting on the predictable fallout from three decades of war, which our efforts are seeking to continue:

66pc of Afghans suffering from mental health problems

KABUL, Oct 11 (Pajhwok) - Sixty-six percent of Afghans are suffering from stress disorders and mental problems, says the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) citing recent surveys conducted by national and international organisations...

A 2002 nationwide survey found high levels of depressive symptoms (59.1pc among males and 73.4pc among females), anxiety symptoms (59.3pc among females and 83.5pc among males) and post-traumatic stress disorder (32.1pc among males, 48,3pc among females)... (link)

A soldier writes

2009-10-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

Casualobserver, a soldier stationed in Wardak province, writes concerning my posting the other day:

I have been in Wardak province for almost a year now. I am quite positive that the author of this article has not been in Wardak, and if he has it has only been for a short time and has not been in a position where his opinion is even remotely valid to include Kabul and Bagram air field.

Just because one article comes out stating that soldiers in Wardak are of low morale doesn't mean that the enemy is winning in Wardak. In truth, the "locals fighting" here are people paid by foreign insurgency to fight Americans. IED attacks are just about the only tactic being used to attack soldiers here because it is a method that can be employed by 1-2 people where they can hide from the people they are attacking without actually having to fight. In few instances do the enemy utilize small arms to combat, and when they do it is from a far distance where the chance of effective retaliation is low. From that far distance, their ability to be effective is extremely low as well. In short, the enemy is in few numbers and is cowardly.

The people in Wardak are extremely friendly to Soldiers, and in reality I am one of the soldiers who has "handed candy out to children." The problem with this article is that children have never hurled it back to me. The "installed government" has been working with US money to better the lives of the people here and the people here have actively resisted insurgency and attacking of coalition forces which include Canadian soldiers, American soldiers, Afghan Soldiers, Afghan Police, and other organizations. I have literally not entered a town during the 156 patrols I have been on that has not welcomed us in or explained to us their problems.

These people are actively supporting their Afghan government. They go to the government with their problem and this government works from the provincial level to the local level to do all they can to help them. In truth, it is a new government and there is still a reliance on other government support, namely from the Turkish government and the US government.

The people conducting attacks are very, very few in numbers and are paid to do so. Basically, the people attacking the government here are poor and looking for sources of income. The extreme majority of people here are not attacking the Afghan Army nor the American Army.

In truth, soldier's morale in some cases may be low, but this is the case for all deployments. Any time that a soldier leaves home to go somewhere else that morale will drop. Soldier's morale is lowered in places like Qatar, Kyrgystan, Africa, and Kuwait where there is no large media interest.

The people reading this article need to know that this author is gaining popularity because he is writing about an opinion which people who have not been to war, have not been to Afghanistan, and have not been to Wardak have. Just because you are an armchair politician does not mean that you know what you are talking about.

Casualobserver makes several dubious claims which seem to indicate that he or she did not read the relevant blog posts very well, in particular claiming that I relied on the opinions held by people who "have not been to Wardak". This is of course false, as the opinions offered were of people who in fact live in Wardak, as well as journalists reporting from the province.

Turning to the more serious questions raised, Casualobserver's central claim against me is that the "people in Wardak are extremely friendly to soldiers," offering as evidence the 156 patrols he or she has been on. There is, however, plenty of evidence from more credible sources that the opposite is true.

One McClatchy reporter embedded with newly arrived troops back in February had no problem finding dissenting opinion even in the presence of the armed troops. Addressing the soldiers, one local was clear:

"Look at how we are standing here and talking. You are asking questions. Why don't you do more of that instead of snatch-and-grab operations?" said Samur Gul, a bearded taxi driver, to the approval of onlookers. "Innocent people are being killed." (link)

Journalist Sayad Kharim wrote in May that "Few people [in Wardak province] are happy with what the US-led war has brought them and they want the troops out." He quotes a 30 year old woman in Wardak named Jamila:

“I don’t like the foreigners or what they have done for this country and for its women. During the Taliban time my husband had a job, now he doesn’t. The foreigners should leave the country because it's not just me - no one likes them. They have killed lots of people.” (link)

In July, Anand Gopal citing Habibullah Rafeh, a policy analyst at the Kabul Academy of Sciences, wrote:

"Most of the troops [in Wardak] live in small, heavily fortified outposts near urban centers. Most Afghans, however, live in rural areas - only 0.5 percent of Wardak's population is urban, for example." [Rafeh himself says:] "The local village people view the Americans as occupiers, not as allies... Many don't have direct contact with the Americans, but almost everyone in those areas feel the Taliban presence." (link)

While Casualobserver sees only smiling, grateful locals in Wardak, the American commander in neighbouring Logar province is much less of a pollyanna:

"We're trying to make inroads with the local people, build relationships," said Capt. Jason Wingeart, commander of COP Charkh in Logar province. "But many are scared or just plain ambivalent, and building trust takes time." (link)

Casualobserver's claim that the foreign troops are overwhelmingly welcomed by locals in the region of Wardak thus finds little support from independent observers or even other soldiers. But such deafness to evidence is certainly not unique in military circles. After several locals gave detailed descriptions of incidents of civilian casualties, the Boston Globe's Farah Stockman inquired of the American forces: "Captain Rebecca Lykins, a public affairs officer for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, who is working with the US special forces in Wardak, said her team was not aware of any such incidents."

Casualobserver claims that insurgents in Wardak are few in number as well as relatively ineffective against the foreign troops. Before examining that claim, it would be useful to consider the extent of the physical area held by the American troops. As mentioned above, the US troops are concentrated around a few urban centres, while in Wardak as of July "the Taliban, who hail from nearby villages [] rule over vast, remote areas," according to the Boston Globe.

Little seems to have changed in Wardak since February when US forces were deploying and journalist Anand Gopal wrote that "insurgents today control six out of nine districts, according to interviews with locals and government officials here." (The Taliban controlled four while Hizb-e Islami controlled two.) Media reports indicate that US forces have a presence along the highway in perhaps four districts ( Chak, Jalrez, Saydabad and Nerkh) - while the remainder of even those districts is beyond their reach.

Casualobserver's claim that the insurgents are few in number may thus hold true for the small areas where foreign forces have a significant presence. However, the fact that insurgents have succeeded in detonating 180 IEDs and have killed 19 American soldiers demonstrates that they are far from ineffective, as Casualobserver claims.

The evidence indicates that a small number of insurgents are seeing success against a large foreign force confined to a small area of operations, while the rest of the province is still under insurgent sway. Such a situation is reminiscent of what occurred last year in Helmand province in the south. There, a spring of 2008 "mini-surge" of US Marines managed after tremendous struggle to secure just 11 square kilometers of territory while fending off an enemy that had largely retreated, yet was still able to offer the Americans numerous heavy fire fights. While the western media kept a lid on the fact, the UN's humanitarian news agency reported that "about 30,000 individuals, mostly women and children - are estimated to have abandoned their homes" in the areas near the fighting. As we have seen, a similar exodus appears to be underway in Wardak.

Casualobserver also claims that insurgents are paid for their work, implying that they are not, as I hold, motivated in part by a desire to rid their country of foreign troops. Yet serious observers generally do not share Casualobserver's opinion. The recent DfID report which looks at reasons why Afghans join the insurgency posits three key contributing factors: religion, government corruption and the presence of foreign troops in the country. The cash incentive is mentioned as an ancillary factor, alongside social status, self-protection and leverage for political disputes.

It is not difficult to guess the reason why a soldier on the ground might get different responses from the Afghan public than does a journalist: It is likely that locals simply pretend that they have no problem with the presence of heavily armed foreigners when they are questioned by the same heavily armed foreigners. While many foreign soldiers serving in Afghanistan have noted this phenomenon, it appears not to have occurred to Casualobserver.

It reminds me of something Louis Dupree wrote. Dupree, the dean of Afghanistan studies, noted that Afghan villagers universally display a talent for quick agreement with outside meddlers. The point is they know that the foreigners will leave sooner rather than later, and they humor the foreigner to hasten his exit so that things can return to normal. In light of this, Casualobserver's claims and those of locals have a logical fit.

Finally, any skeptical reader would note that the Afghan politicians and citizens quoted above say such things publicly - at no small risk to themselves, one might add. So too did the US combat soldiers currently serving in the province publicly state their concerns - also a risky, thus brave, move. Yet Casualobservers comments are anonymous, giving us less reason to take them seriously.

Nihon wa fantasutikku desu

2009-10-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

In recent years, the fates of various Japanese politicians have been closely linked to the war in Afghanistan. In September 2007, notorious right wing Prime Minister (and grandson of a war criminal) Shinzo Abe resigned in part due to popular opposition to Japan's participation in naval support for the conflict. Leading opposition politician Ichiro Ozawa's words resonated with the pacifist tradition in Japan when he said the war in Afghanistan "had nothing to do with the United Nations or the international community." Abe's successor was himself soon replaced by Japan's own version of George W. Bush. Taro Aso, heir of an industrialist family whose coal mine used POW's for labor during WW2, was known for his sub-par intellect and soon led his Liberal Democratic Party to a historic landslide defeat this past summer.

Now, new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is faced with a long-standing crisis over Japan's pacifist constitution existing side by side with military engagements such as the naval mission in support of the war. While Obama's commitment to change has proven rather weak, Hatoyama's government has already moved to end the death penalty and the naval mission:

Japan To End Afghan Refueling Mission: Defense Minister

TOKYO, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Japan will end its refueling mission in support of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan when its legal mandate expires in January, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa has said, a month before President Barack Obama visits Washington's close Asian ally.

"The law will expire in January. We will solemnly withdraw based on the law," a ministry official quoted Kitazawa as telling reporters.

It is the clearest statement so far by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's new government, which has pledged to take a diplomatic stance more independent of Washington, that it is set to end the nearly 8-year-old mission.

The mission supplies fuel and water to U.S. and other ships policing the Indian Ocean for weapons and drug smugglers, as well as terrorists. (link)

Disillusioned in Wardak

2009-10-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

Some stories come full circle. Back in February, we saw that the people of Wardak, located just south of Kabul, "were completely, 100 percent against the arrival of foreign troops," according to a local member of parliament. The Taliban in the area were said to be entirely comprised of local men.

By July, there were reports that children took candy from soldiers only to hurl it back at the invaders. We also saw last month that locals in Wardak are feeling increasingly under threat from both the Americans and the Taliban insurgents, prompting an exodus of those able to leave.

In light of this, current developments in that province are quite revealing. The Times reports on what US Army chaplains in Wardak are hearing from the troops lately:

American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains
By Martin Fletcher

WARDAK, Oct 8 - American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban...

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion.

“They feel they are risking their lives for progress that’s hard to discern,” said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division’s 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion. “They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.” The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not...

Several men approached by The Times, however, readily admitted that their morale had slumped.

“We’re lost — that’s how I feel. I’m not exactly sure why we’re here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday...

The only soldiers who thought it was going well “work in an office, not on the ground”. In his opinion “the whole country is going to s***”.

The battalion’s 1,500 soldiers are nine months in to a year-long deployment that has proved extraordinarily tough. Their goal was to secure the mountainous Wardak province and then to win the people’s allegiance through development and good governance. They have, instead, found themselves locked in an increasingly vicious battle with the Taleban.

They have been targeted by at least 300 roadside bombs, about 180 of which have exploded. Nineteen men have been killed in action, with another committing suicide. About a hundred have been flown home with amputations, severe burns and other injuries likely to cause permanent disability...

Staff Sergeant Erika Cheney, Airborne’s mental health specialist, expressed concern about their mental state — especially those in scattered outposts — and believes that many have mild post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “They’re tired, frustrated, scared. A lot of them are afraid to go out but will still go,” she said.

Lieutenant Peter Hjelmstad, 2-87’s Medical Platoon Leader, said sleeplessness and anger attacks were common...

The chaplains said soldiers were seeking their help in unprecedented numbers...

The men are frustrated by the lack of obvious purpose or progress. “The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It’s hard to catch someone you can’t see,” said Specialist Mercer.

“It’s a very frustrating mission,” said Lieutenant Hjelmstad... "There’s no tangible reward for the sacrifice. It’s hard to say Wardak is better than when we got here.”

The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia...

Lieutenant-Colonel Kimo Gallahue, 2-87’s commanding officer, denied that his men were demoralised...

He said the security situation had worsened because the insurgents had chosen to fight in Wardak province, not abandon it... (link)

So US troops introduced early this year, who were not welcomed by the population, have seen continued civilian hostility, and many are now demoralized. Their Taliban opponents, largely composed of locals fighting what is to them a foreign occupation, have stepped up the fight and dug in - on home turf.

Note that the troops have apparently been targeted by some 300 roadside bombs, 180 of which have exploded. While it is not clear what exactly these figures refer to, this seems to represent an improvement in insurgent capabilities. Normally, troops discover and disarm a larger proportion of overall IEDs.

General Vance strikes again

2009-10-04T01:27:00.000-07:00

General Vance's recent tongue-lashing of Afghan elders having caused something of a stir in Canada, spin doctors no doubt set to work to create a more acceptable impression of the general's work. Vance himself evidently went along, giving away candy to children in the presence of the Ottawa Citizen's Bruce Ward, who obligingly produced a puff piece for the top soldier.

How puffy is the piece? Quite puffy. For instance, Ward writes: "Vance is fiercely protective when it comes to his soldiers. His concern for their welfare is one reason why he holds their respect and affection." And Ward's coda for the piece leaves no mystery as to its purpose: "Why does the commander work so hard? 'Gotta win,' he says."

Yet General Vance himself foils the effort, offering an encore performance of his child-chasing routine back in June. Then, a boy threw a rock at the general's convoy - a common occurrence, as many journalists attest. Vance pursued the boy, aiming to teach him a lesson and providing an irksome example for his troops.

This time the culprit is a boy with a laser pointer, a common -- and, given the presence of occupation forces, dangerous -- toy for Afghan youngsters. General Vance, atop a gun turret while riding along on a nighttime patrol, again descended off his steel steed to harangue a child for his impudence.

Besides moving him a few notches up the creepy scale, Vance's second attempt to publicly scald a minor malfeasant is bound to count as a setback in the battle for hearts and minds. Surely Afghans are unlikely to see the general's behaviour as worthy of respect.

A force for change
Bruce Ward, The Ottawa Citizen
October 3

... Lots of kids here carry toy laser pointers that cost pennies. After dark, they make a game of flashing the laser at soldiers passing in vehicles. It's a dangerous trick, which makes it loads of fun for wayward boys and one of them has just zapped Vance's vehicle.

Soldiers on alert for ambush and IED strikes take a dim view of being targeted with the laser dots because certain snipers' rifles do much the same thing in lining up a shot.

The kebab seller says he saw the boy who did it, but the child is long gone, probably laughing about it with friends several blocks away. Lucky kid. If Vance had caught up with him, he would have been told, and told forcefully, what a foolish stunt that was and how he could have been shot.

Vance would not have shouted or lost his cool, but his immense displeasure would have been conveyed to the child...

Vance commiserates with one ANP officer, wounded in a skirmish with the Taliban. It emerges that he has not been paid for weeks and doesn't know when -- or if -- he will get his money.

Although Canada's military has developed a direct deposit system, fraud is still common... (link)

From that last line, one might surmise that Canada bears some responsibility, at least in the minds of Afghans, for cases of non-payment of soldiers' salaries - another hitch in the counterinsurgency effort.

Canadians and Dutch kill civilians

2009-10-04T00:28:00.001-07:00

The toll rises, this time with Canadian bullets:

Canadian troops fatally shoot two teens
Gloria Galloway - Globe and Mail

KABUL, Oct 3 - Two teenage boys travelling by motorcycle through the dangerous Panjwai district southwest of Kandahar city were shot and killed Thursday by Canadian soldiers on patrol.

The boys, 14 and 16, were going from their home village of Zangabad to see a friend in the Panjwai district centre, villagers said.

Shortly after 6 p.m., they rounded the corner in the hamlet of Pay-e-Moluk and came upon the Canadian soldiers conducting a meeting, or shura, near a mosque with village elders.

The troops, who were surprised by the sudden appearance of a motorcycle heading toward them at close distance, said they shouted and used visual warnings. They also fired a warning shot... (link)

Recently, the Germans got in on the act of killing civilians in a big way. Now Dutch pilots have killed civilians:

NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands)
Civilians Killed in Dutch Air Raid

OCTOBER 2 - A Dutch F-16 fighter plane made a number of civilian casualties during an air raid in the Afghan province of Helmand on Wednesday.

The Dutch Defense Ministry said it is still unclear how many people died in the air raid, but it confirmed that a woman and several children were wounded. The French press agency AFP quoted a local authority saying nine people died, including six children.

Two Dutch F-16 fighter planes provided air support during what is referred to as "heavy fighting" between British ground troops and the Taliban in Helmand Province, the Defense Ministry said. British troops on the ground gave the planes the coordinates of a house from which they were being fired upon. One Dutch F-16 then dropped one precision bomb on the house.

"Afterwards it appeared that apart from the Taliban fighters, there were civilians in the house as well. The Taliban had hidden among the civilians," the ministry said... (link)

The Associated Press the British military's Lt-Col Nick Richardson relayed unconfirmed reports that 12 people had been killed - six children, two women and four insurgents in the incident in Helmand.

While military officials are quick to blame the Taliban for hiding among civilians, locals tend to view the occupiers and more blameworthy.

'The Americans killed everyone. I hate them.'

2009-10-03T01:42:00.000-07:00

Once again, Afghan journalists go where few outsiders bother to go themselves. Mustafa Saber goes back to Azizabad in Herat province, where last year an American airstrike called in by special forces who had Oliver North along as a Fox News embed (I am not making this up), killed upwards of 90 civilians.

Tragic Fate of Afghan Bomb Survivor
By Mustafa Saber

AZIZABAD, Sept 17 (IWPR) - Seven-year-old Zahra looks like a typical Afghan girl...

On the night of August 22 2008, all of Zahra’s immediate family was killed by American bombs... An investigation by the United Nations said that 90 people, 60 children and 30 adults, died.

The American military initially denied that any civilians were harmed in the attack. Only after prolonged pressure, in October of last year, did they acknowledge that the strike killed 33 civilians.

Zahra’s father, mother, sister and two brothers died that night. She is the only survivor, together with her grandmother, Maryam...

“I loved my family very much,” she said, tears in her dark eyes. “Every moment I hear the voices of my mother, father, sister and brothers calling me, but I can’t see them. We had a good life. I used to play with my brothers and sister on the street. My father was Abdurrashid, my mother was Khumari, my sister was Huma and my brothers were Halim and Salim. The Americans killed them and now I am alone.”

Suddenly bitter, she adds, “The American killed everyone in the village. They killed my friends and other children. I hate them.” ... (link)

Dead civilians go unnoticed in the news

2009-10-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

Today we're doing a little catch-up with civilian casualties and abuses by foreign forces in the past week and a half. This first one was virtually ignored by the Canadian media, despite it taking place in Kandahar province. In fact, the Arghandab district where this occurred used to be in the Canadian area of operations, though American troops have lately been doing the occupying there. The Canadian press actually outperformed others: the Globe story (below) was the only one outside Afghanistan.

As is frequent, the embattled and repressed Afghan press broke the story, while western journalists who possess many advantages came up empty:

Six dead in Kandahar air strike
By Basher Ahmad Nadem

KANDAHAR, Sept 24 (Pajhwok) - Six people were killed and several others wounded in an air strike by foreign forces in Arghandab district of the volatile southern Kandahar province, residents said Thursday.

The air raid was conducted late Wednesday night in Nagahan area that lasted one hour, according to residents, who had brought their injured relatives to the Mirwais Civil Hopital in Kandahar City.

Abdul Wahid, a resident said, several gunship helicopters arrived in the area and suddenly started bombing their houses...

He feared the death toll could be increased as residents were searching for bodies...

Locals said there was no Taliban in the area. They expressed their wonder why the foreign forces conducted the air strike.

Foreign forces based in Kandahar have said nothing about the air raid... (link)

Four days later, the Globe and Mail's Gloria Galloway writes in a September 28 article:

Mohammed [an innocent victim who lost his legs in the airstrike] said the men he was with in the vineyard had no guns.

When asked if the ISAF forces found weapons among the dead, Col. Shanks said: “Our forces did go back in to look at the area later that day and they reported enemy killed and materials removed.” ...

A local official from the Arghandab district, who did not want to be identified for fear of Taliban reprisal, said intelligence was received to indicate that insurgents had come into the vineyard and were eating grapes with the farm workers.

“We gave this to the coalition forces and the coalition forces sent planes to this place,” the official said.

But Mohammed insists the intelligence was wrong.

When the ISAF soldiers arrived after the air raid, he said, “they didn't find weapons or anything, they saw only boxes of grapes.”

Doctors and nurses treating the injured said they believe the men in their care are not insurgents because of the anger expressed by family members who have travelled from their home districts just outside Kandahar city to visit. Local people have a good idea about who is a Taliban and who is not, they said... (link)

In Wardak province, just south of Kabul, civilian killings prompt a large protest:

Foreign troops slay father and son in Wardak
Ahmad Qureshi & Basharat

KABUL, Sept 26 (Pajhwok) - Foreign troops have allegedly killed a father and his son during a raid on their house in central Maidan Wardak province late Friday night, residents said on Saturday.

Nearly two hundreds residents of the Chadra village in Syedabad district brought the dead bodies of the victims to the provincial capital and put them in front of the Governor's House to protest the killing, said Dr. Muhammad Pandi, a relative of the deceased.

He added the foreign troops first fired a rocket at the gate of his uncle's house and then entered inside. "The forces brutally murdered my uncle and his son at midnight," he added... (link)

The September 25 Wardak incident appears not to have been reported outside Afghanistan. Neither was the following, which also took place in Wardak province:

NATO raid leaves three civilians dead
By Hakim Basharat

KABUL, Sept 27 (Pajhwok) - An ISAF air strike killed three civilians and wounded as many in central Maidan Wardak province late Saturday night, officials said on Sunday.

A spokesman for the governor, Shahidullah Shahid, told Pajhwok Afghan News the air raid was carried out in the Sanglakh area of Jalrez district. He confirmed the strike killed three civilians and wounded three others.

The victims were asleep near piles of wheat crop in their fields, added the spokesman...

Provincial council head Hazrat Mohammad Janan verified the raid that happened in Polak village at about 10pm last night killed three civilians and wounded four others.

Residents of the district also confirmed the incident... (link)

In Khost, US airstrikes killed battling friendlies - rival tribes who haven't (yet) declared war on the US/NATO occupiers:

Two tribesmen killed in US air strike
By Saboor Mangal

KHOST CITY, Sept 28 (Pajhwok) - Two armed people were killed in a US air strike as rival tribesmen sat in trenches in the southeastern Khost province, a senior official said on Monday.

Acting Governor Tahir Khan Sabri told Pajhwok Afghan News the bombing occurred this afternoon in Ovom area of Nader Shah Kot district, where the tribes have locked horns over barren land.

The dispute between Moqbil and Mangal tribes erupted last month and they have since been sitting in trenches, Sabri said, adding American forces mistook the armed tribesmen for Taliban militants. (link)

Finally, news agencies revealed on September 30 that a girl was killed in Helmand in June when a British plane dropped leaflets onto civilian areas. A box of leaflets failed to open as it was supposed to and struck the girl.

Instability and chaos near Kabul

2009-10-02T23:02:00.000-07:00

Pamela Constable has been reporting from Afghanistan for several years as a correspondent for the Washington Post. We heard from her in February when she asked numerous locals about Obama's planned troop surge and found that a majority of Afghans opposed the troop increase - a finding consistent with polling.

Recently she visited the Shomali (Northern) Plain located just north of Kabul and found evidence of ominous developments:

A Protection or a Provocation?
Residents of Afghanistan's Shomali Plain Deeply Conflicted Over Presence of U.S. Troops
By Pamela Constable - Washington Post

QARABAGH, Oct 3 - The last time Taliban forces swept across the Shomali Plain, they left behind a wasteland of scorched vineyards and decapitated fruit trees that farmers have spent the past eight years nursing back to life.

Now, the inhabitants of this fertile region north of Kabul are fearful that the whirlwind will come again, destroying their hopes and hard work. Yet they are deeply conflicted about whether American and NATO troops should remain here to defend them, or whether the Western forces are exacerbating problems that Afghans should settle among themselves...

Like many other Afghans who have survived years of conflict and hardship, Shomalis express both resentment of the foreign military presence and bitterness that the United States abandoned their country after Soviet forces left in 1989. Some, with harsh memories of Taliban abuses, still call members of the Islamist militia fellow Muslims who should be given a second chance...

Signs of trouble are already appearing in the political void across Afghanistan, as people wait anxiously for two commissions to investigate the election fraud charges and announce the final results. Campaign workers and government officials have been targeted in an atmosphere of rising partisanship and criminality as well as terrorism...

A grape seller named Hayat Khan recounted how marauding Taliban forces had once burned down his house and thrown him into jail. In the next breath, however, he complained that Western troops were "killing innocent civilians" and declared that "all Afghan Muslims want them to leave. The Taliban are Muslims, too." He added: "We hope this time they will behave differently from the past."

A melon vendor named Turan Amoor complained that as Western influence has grown in Afghanistan, "we have begun to see the open faces of women in the bazaars and a lot of un-Muslim activities."

"This shows that the foreign troops are a bad influence," Amoor said. "If we get a better government, maybe things will settle down. Otherwise, one day we will go for jihad against the foreigners, and they will leave as they came." ...

Many people here associate the international forces with Karzai's government, which has increasingly lost credibility because of ... (link)

And an Afghan reporter with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting reports from Wardak province, just south of Kabul. He finds an exodus of residents who cannot convince the occupying American forces, or the Taliban, that civilians are not legitimate targets:

Crossfire Forces Wardak Farmers Off Land
Locals abandon orchards after getting caught up in fighting between US forces and insurgents.
By Habiburahman Ibrahimi in Wardak

WARDAK, Sept 23 - [...] Those whose lands are located near the American bases or Taleban checkpoints fear for their lives when they go to tend their orchards. Farms that are not destroyed by direct fighting are withering from neglect.

“The people have been caught in a trap,” Khan said bitterly. “They can be killed by the Americans or the governmental forces as well as by the Taleban.”

People are leaving en masse, he said. And it’s not just Sayed Abad district – farmers from Nerkh, Jalrez and Chak are also fleeing the fighting...

Sayed Rahman hired a labourer for his orchard five months ago. “One night he was out watering, but then the Americans started shooting at him. He ran away and now the orchard has completely dried up,” he said.

Rahman’s employee was lucky. Another labourer named Sayed Hassan lost his life when he was watering the trees. According to Alam Gul, the chairman of the local council in Sayed Abad district, there are also two other cases of villagers who were shot by American forces while they were watering their orchards at night...

In most areas of Afghanistan, the water level drops in mid-summer and farmers are allocated specific hours for irrigating their lands. They have to follow the schedule, no matter the time, so many farmers find themselves watering their orchards in the middle of the night.

But both United States forces and insurgents are apt to be jumpy when they see someone out at odd hours, and several villagers have paid the price...

According to [the spokesman of Wardak's governor] the provincial government has agreed with the Americans that if a farmer has to water his lands at night, he should carry a lantern with him at all times to identify him as a non-combatant.

But this does not always help.

“I know that a farmer in Sayed Abad was shot even though he had a lantern,” he said... (link)

No more elections, thanks

2009-09-30T01:04:00.001-07:00

As Western concern mounts over the delayed Afghan election results, interest among locals may be ebbing. It seems that, for a host of reasons, many Afghans see only trouble to be had in a push for a run-off election. Many feel that conflict and foreign interference are becoming increasingly more likely as the crisis wears on:

Little Afghan appetite for more voting
BBC News Online

KABUL, Sept 23 - It's hard to find Afghans with much enthusiasm for a second round presidential election run-off - or even for the drawn-out process of investigation into widespread allegations of electoral fraud.

Even supporters of the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, seem sceptical at best.

"Many people are poor here," Gul Ahmad, a 53-year-old bus driver, told me.

"A second round would cost a lot of money that should be spent on other things.

"I voted for Dr Abdullah but we should accept the election result now. Everybody should compromise in the interests of the nation."

Afghans know that elections here bring violence. They can also divide the country's main ethnic groups against each other.

Taliban intimidation, together with attacks on polling stations, meant that in much of Afghanistan it took real courage to vote last month. Few want to go through it all again.

Human rights activist Ozala Ashraf Nemat said she, too, was against a second round.

"Why would a second round be any different from the first?" she said.

"Why would it be more free or more fair? Who would guarantee it?

"People feel they have already voted. If there is a second round there will be a much lower turn-out."

The result of that, she added, could be even less credible than that of the first round.

"People are fed up with the delays," she says.

"They just want to get the election over with, they have families to feed - they want to get on with their lives." ...

It is coming from outside the country. Foreign governments have to keep persuading their own populations that the effort they are putting into the war is worth it.

An election that is widely perceived to be flawed beyond redemption - stolen even - stokes scepticism in Western, not Afghan, public opinion... (link)

Orzala Ashraf, founder of Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan, was mentioned on this blog some time ago. Ashraf was a participant at an Oslo peace-building conference, the resulting paper from which reports: "It is now generally agreed that a military solution will not work in Afghanistan."

As odd as the BBC report may sound to Western ears, Afghan reporters have heard similar sentiments:

Run-off polls spurned as a conspiracy
Pajhwok Afghan News
By Hamid & Ahmad Javed

Sept 29 - A large number of people in northern Jawzjan and central Kapisa provinces supported the August 20 presidential polls but voiced aversion to a run-off election.

Participants of separate gatherings said last month's presidential and provincial council elections were transparent and called on foreign countries to stop interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs...

In Kapisa, participants of a similar gathering said taking the elections into the second round was against the interest of Afghans. Religious scholars, former mujahideen and youths took part in the public meeting... (link)

Maybe General Vance needs anger management

2009-09-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

Some people have issues with anger. For many, their anger makes them unable to carry on healthy relationships or hold a job. A few, however, find a niche in society where their issues are afforded more tolerance, such as professional tennis. Or the military's officer corps.

Recall that Canada's main man in Afghanistan is General Vance. We saw back in June that Vance flew off the handle when a young boy threw a rock at the general as he rode by in a convoy. The boy was of course merely voicing an increasingly common sentiment, repeated since time immemorial in Afghanistan. Indeed, the general is probably in the company of Alexander the Great; no doubt that ancient general's convoys endured more than a few child-thrown ripostes.

But if Alexander was as cool as he was portrayed in that Brad Pitt movie, I suspect that, when similarly attacked, he would not have jumped off his elephant and chased the boy who threw the rock.

Recently General Vance was at it again, this time getting angry at local elders in Dand district. He demanded a meeting with them following an incident where a Canadian soldier was badly wounded by an IED in their district. Vance evidently thinks that the elders are not doing enough to stop such incidents. Not shy about sharing his feelings, Vance told the assembled elders that he sometimes feels that "I am more concerned about Dand district than you."

"There has to be a change starting now and we need to make sure the roads stay clear of IEDs," he said, referring to deadly improvised explosive devices that have repeatedly caused Canadian casualties.

"If we don't start getting some serious cooperation from the people ... then I wonder whether or not it's worth another Canadian life."

Deh-e-Bagh [i.e. the village where the IED attack took place] is the centrepiece of the Canadian counter-insurgency strategy in Kandahar province... (link)

Vance's patronizing words and negotiation-by-threat seem ill-suited to improve what are evidently already strained relations with the elders.

U.S. planning afoot

2009-09-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

We are all waiting to see what will happen with the Afghan election: Will the recount induce a run-off election, or will the election stand? It is too early to tell just yet. The Electoral Complaints Commission, partly appointed by the UN, is recounting about 10% of the disputed votes, with final results due out in about two weeks.

Meanwhile, however, it looks like the American administration is tipping toward Karzai, according to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post. Might this be taken by Karzai as tacit permission to carry through on electoral fraud?

U.S., Allies Vow Support for Karzai
Karen DeYoung - Washington Post

September 28 - The United States and NATO countries fighting in Afghanistan have told President Hamid Karzai's government that they expect him to remain in office for another five-year term and will work with him on an expanded campaign to turn insurgent fighters against the Taliban and other militant groups.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other NATO foreign ministers, meeting Friday in New York with their Afghan counterpart, reached "consensus" that Karzai would probably "continue to be president," whether through a runoff or as the legitimate winner of more than 50 percent of votes cast in disputed Aug. 20 elections, an Obama administration official said.

What Karzai has called "reconciliation" with insurgents who agree to lay down their arms is emerging as a major factor in administration deliberations about a way forward in Afghanistan, officials said. Along with plans to increase the size of the Afghan security forces, the U.S. military is developing programs to offer monetary and other inducements to insurgents it thinks are only loosely tied to the Taliban and other militant groups...

The U.S. force in Afghanistan is scheduled to reach 68,000 by year's end. The number of troops McChrystal has requested remains unknown, although Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said he spoke with Obama on Saturday, called it "one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. It's 30,000 to 40,000 troops." McCain also spoke on ABC.

[Defense Secretary] Gates has said he is still thinking about his position on a troop increase. But he appeared to disagree with the view of a number of senior administration officials, led by Vice President Biden, that the U.S. effort should move away from full-fledged counterinsurgency toward a greater emphasis on targeted attacks on insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone-fired missiles and other standoff weaponry... (link)

The Biden plan which Gates disagrees with includes a reduction in US forces in Afghanistan. A piece by DeYoung last week gives some of the background:

General's Review Creates Rupture
As Military Backs Call for More Troops In Afghanistan, Civilian Advisers Balk
Karen DeYoung - Washington Post

September 22 - Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's grim assessment of the Afghanistan war has opened a divide between the military, which is pushing for an early decision to send more troops, and civilian policymakers who are increasingly doubtful of an escalating nation-building effort...

[B]efore any decision is made, some of President Obama's civilian advisers have proposed looking at other, less costly options to address his primary goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing itself in Afghanistan. Those options include a redirection of U.S. efforts - away from protecting the Afghan population and building the Afghan state and toward persuading the Taliban to stop fighting - as well as an escalation of targeted attacks against al-Qaeda itself in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Obama's public remarks on Afghanistan indicate that he has begun to rethink the counterinsurgency strategy he set in motion six months ago, even as his generals have embraced it... (link)

The Sunday Times provides some support for reports (like above) of US planning to refocus on drone strikes on targets in Pakistan:

US threatens airstrikes in Pakistan
The Sunday Times - Christina Lamb in Washington

September 27 - The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan...

Senior Pakistani officials in New York revealed that the US had asked to extend the drone attacks into Quetta and the province of Baluchistan.

“It wasn’t so much a threat as an understanding that if you don’t do anything, we’ll take matters into our own hands,” said one... (link)

Of course, the Obama administration would not be the first in recent memory to use expllicit threats of violence to gets its way with Pakistan. George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage threatened that the US would bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" if Musharraf did not comply with US demands in 2001.

NATO's illegal Afghan militias

2009-09-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

A recent report from the Center on International Cooperation examines the use of private security companies and tribal militias by occupying forces in Afghanistan -- a practice the report shows is illegal under Afghan law. This of course strikes one as important news, yet only the Guardian of Britain chose to notify their readers of the findings. Since the CIC boasts Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin as its leading light, one cannot chalk it up to being unqualified or dodgy. One suspects that news editors felt instead that this was the "wrong story," and filled their papers with more musings about the right strategy for the war. A new strategy is widely anticipated, though it seems to be shaping up to be simply a continuation of the same thing, only more of it.

Here's the Guardian's coverage of the report:

Nato forces rely on illegal Afghan militias, report says
Julian Borger - The Guardian
16 September

Nato forces in Afghanistan are increasingly reliant on illegal militias, often run by warlords responsible for human rights abuses and drug trafficking, according to an independent report published tomorrow.

New York University's Centre on International Co-operation (CIC) reports that the use of private security companies and militias is growing exponentially and accounts for up to a fifth of the funds spent on Afghan reconstruction.

The CIC report, called The Public Cost of Private Security in Afghanistan, says many of the troop contingents in Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) use private militias not only to guard their camps and secure convoys, but also for "black ops", including detention and interrogation.

The militias function entirely outside Afghan law, which bans unlicensed armed groups, nor is there any legal basis for their employment in the "status of forces agreement" with the Kabul government, the CIC says in its report... (link)

And for fans of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," here are some excerpts of the CIC report:

Militia groups employed by foreign military forces pose an even greater regulatory challenge than private security companies (PSCs) and do more long-term harm to stabilization efforts in Afghanistan. Although there is a well-defined legal framework outlawing militia and paramilitary groups, it is unclear whether these laws apply to the “armed support groups” (ASGs) used by foreign forces. Nonetheless, these forces are prima facie violations of Presidential Decree 50 on demobilization and disarmament, the Law on Firearms, Ammunition, and Explosives, the “Procedure for Regulating Activities of Private Security Companies in Afghanistan” and the “Strategy for Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups in Afghanistan”...

Use of private security by the US in combat zones has grown despite congressional legislation and guidance stating that PSCs cannot undertake “inherently governmental functions.” ... Contractors comprised 57 percent of the DoD’s workforce in Afghanistan in March 2009 – the highest percentage ever used by the US in any conflict...

Senior Afghan government officials and their relatives “up to the second degree” are banned from ownership or part ownership [of PSCs]. However, holding companies and other means are used to obscure the true ownership of PSCs; close relatives of senior officials – including President Karzai and Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak – are previously documented owners and partners in companies, but often have removed their names from licensing documents despite indications of continued ownership, though not day-to-day management...

Despite public concerns of criminal behavior by some PSCs in Afghanistan, there is no formal complaint mechanism...

While ISAF and US contingents employ licensed security companies in some locations, the use of unregistered companies and illegal armed support groups, with little oversight or accountability, appears to be widespread among international military forces.

Sources estimate that there are also as many as 1,000 to 1,500 illegal ASGs that have been employed, trained, and armed by ISAF and Coalition Forces to provide security to forward operating bases, escort supply convoys, and perform other functions, as well as by development agency contractors and provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) to protect assistance projects...

In Kandahar province, the Canadian Forces have contracted defense services from Gul Agha Shirzai (via Commando Security) and Gen. Gulalai, both former military commanders. Shirzai, currently governor of Nangarhar province, was previously governor of Kandahar. The Canadian PRT has hired the militia of Col. Haji Toorjan, an ally of Sherzai, to provide camp security services...

The mandate of the Coalition Forces and ISAF is to support the Afghan government and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). However, by employing ASGs, the international community strengthens PSP power relative to Afghan government institutions...

PSPs, especially unlicensed security companies and ASGs, are dependent on short-term contracts with foreign entities and have no prospect of sustainability. Hence, when the foreign entities eventually leave or terminate their contracts, these PSPs are likely to refocus on illegal economic activities and will fight among themselves for market share – better trained and better armed than before.

PSPs are generally the most lucrative option available to former combatants that have either been excluded from – or failed by – the international community’s disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration initiatives... (link)

Malalai Joya's book: Get it now

2009-09-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

I trust that readers are aware of Malalai Joya's recently-released autobiography entitled Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out. Set to be published in several languages (there's already a German edition out, just in time for their elections) and put on paper with the help of Rabble's own Derrick O'Keefe, her story promises to captivate readers worldwide.

Malalai needs no introduction to readers of this blog, as we have followed her exploits since she was kicked out of parliament. But it's not just Afghan right-wingers who attack Joya, as we have our own holy warriors (these ones who worship the holy state) who delight in insulting a woman repeatedly threatened with rape and murder. The west coast's version of Fox News, Terry Glavin, writes that Joya is "given to hyperbole," and is "contradictory" and "completely out of step with the overwhelming majority of women's rights leaders in Af'stan, and with the overwhelming majority opinion in Afghanistan." Glavin, in step with the corporate media, was quick to (uncritically) cite older opinion polls in Afghanistan which showed majority support for the US/NATO occupation, but he seems to lack the courage to address recent polling which gives a rather different picture. One wonders what Glavin would say to the majority of Kandaharis who would prefer that our troops leave the country.

So, to save readers from reading several reviews of Joya's book, I have excerpted some good bits from numerous reviews both in North America and Britain.

Ian Sinclair, who writes frequently in Britain on the Afghan war, finds that Joya's book "is quite simply the most passionate and devastating critique of Western intervention in Afghanistan I have ever read." He continues:

In the book's hopeful conclusion Joya calls for the withdrawal of all US/NATO troops and asks that concerned citizens in nations with forces fighting in Afghanistan "monitor, criticise and work to improve your own government's foreign policy". Interestingly, she is very critical of attempts to negotiate with the Taliban ("criminals and misogynistic killers" she calls them)... (link)

Isabel Hilton writes in Britain's New Statesman:

As Malalai Joya's memoir makes clear, it is not as if the election will solve anything substantial; but eight years, thousands of lives and billions of dollars later, not even to be able to hold an election in Afghanistan would look like failure, and too much so to be tolerable. Those who remember Vietnam will find the narrative of the redemptive next election quite familiar...

This biography should have made Joya a leading player in Afghanistan's post-Taliban political life. Instead, she is a poster child for its failure. Saluted abroad for her courage and nominated for, or the winner of, a long list of international human rights and peace prizes, she lives clandestinely in Afghanistan itself, suspended from parliament for allegedly insulting the warlords and drug barons who occupy most of its seats...

[The book's] indispensable function is to remind us that the next time we are told that progress is being made, or elections have produced a credible result, or that just another 10,000 pairs of boots on the ground will fix the problem, we should remember what happened to a young woman who disagreed. (link)

Johann Hari, a columnist in Britain's Independent:

Her enemies call her a "dead woman walking". "But I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice," she says plainly. "I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: 'I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.'" ...

While a "showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the U.S. in Kabul", the real power "is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul". As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own "vice and virtue" squads which terrorized women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own "private militias, private jails"...

I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. "I am never frightened when I tell the truth." She is speaking fast now: "I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me." ... (link)

Finally, a review in the Irish Times:

Life for women is the same now as it was under the Taliban – the only difference, Joya claims, is the new rulers have US backing...

Joya lays out essential steps for Afghanistan’s future: the removal of foreign troops; a more transparent aid system; a refusal to allow warlords into parliament; and an end to the war in which civilians bear the brunt of suffering... (link)