Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

by **Nordic** » Sat Aug 06, 2011 10:43 pm

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/192703.html

16 NATO tankers go up in flames

Sixteen NATO supply vehicles transporting fuel destined for US-led forces in Afghanistan have gone up in flames in a bomb attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

A total of 28 tankers were parked at a terminal on the outskirts of the provincial capital Peshawar when an explosion triggered a fire that engulfed 16 of the vehicles, AFP reported.

"We are trying to move away other oil tankers. We are not clear whether the bomb was planted in the terminal or with a tanker," police official Khurshid Khan said. "Sixteen tankers were completely destroyed."

He added that there were no reports of any casualties.

Mohammad Ijaz Khan, another senior police officer in Peshawar, said fire fighters were frantically trying to control the blaze. He said three explosions were heard before the fire swept through the parked tankers.

The police cordoned off the area after the incident and launched a search operation to track down the culprits.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far.

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militants regularly attack NATO convoys in Pakistan.

The US military and NATO rely heavily on the Pakistani supply route into landlocked Afghanistan, more so now that Taliban attacks are increasing.

Supplies arrive by sea in the southern port city of Karachi, where security analysts believe most of the Afghan Taliban leadership is now hiding. From there, they must travel in long, exposed convoys through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwest Pakistan.

Militants in the rugged tribal area have carried out numerous attacks in recent months, torching hundreds of NATO vehicles and containers destined for foreign troops in Afghanistan.

In response, the Pakistani authorities have deployed large contingents of police and military forces on all major arteries in the area to curb the attacks.

Other routes, largely through Russia and the Central Asian states, have proved to be too costly, both politically and economically.

by **Allegro** » Wed Aug 10, 2011 12:30 am

.
The Harvard International Review, April 10, 2011
— Interview with Malalai Joya: The Failure of the United States in Afghanistan
— Malalai Joya: US is the god-father of Islamic fundamentalism in the region

While it’s true that the women’s rights situation may have improved when you compare it with the barbaric regime of the Taliban—some women now have jobs and education—it is used to justify the occupation. In most places, particularly in the villages, the condition of women is still like a hell.

Crimes against women are increasing and there are tens of self-immolation cases every month, and it’s because of this misogynist regime which provides no protection to women.

The green belt of extremism and Jihad concept, which was funded and implemented by the CIA through ISI of Pakistan, has caused all of the current problems, and the US still needs these groups to advance its long-term war agenda in the region.

Through these medieval groups the US and allies continue to suppress democratic-minded groups and individuals

Unlike democratic-minded groups, the fundamentalists are ready to sacrifice our national interests to serve the interests of foreign countries if money is pumped into their pocket

today, we have to fight the warlords, the Taliban, the occupation forces, and the drug-mafia

Although the US government and other Western governments impose war and destruction on us, we are so happy and proud for the people of these countries—those intellectuals, parties, and organizations—that stand in solidarity with us. We need their solidarity and support. We need their educational support, because education is the key to resisting the occupation and ignorance.

under the beautiful banners of democracy, women’s rights, and human rights, the US supports the misogynist warlords

Apparently the US and other Western countries have given over $62 billion in the past ten years for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but due to an awful level of corruption in the Afghan government, national and international NGOs, and even in UN and US offices, a very tiny part of the fund actually reaches the needy people.

When Obama took office, unfortunately the first news for my people was more conflict because he surged the troops’ level, which brought more massacres, more violence, more miseries, and more tragedies. And now Obama’s administration has invaded Libya under the same banner of human rights. For my people, Obama is as dangerous as Bush. He has proven himself a warmonger by his support of his warlords.

They do all their wrong-doings under the name of democracy, and some people say if this is democracy we don’t want it! Democracy without justices is meaningless; there is no justice for our people today. They call for people around the world to support their rights against a non-democratic, misogynistic government. We are very proud of some very positive aspects of our culture. Our problem is not with Islam at all but with the so-called Islam of Bin Laden, Mullah Omer, and the misogynist warlords, who misuse Islam as a weapon for advancing their evil plans.

by **StarmanSkye** » Wed Aug 10, 2011 2:24 am

My GaWd, what an incredible woman!

I love seeing, hearing or reading about her.

She has more courage, integrity, honesty, humanity, decency, dignity, faith and character in her clipped 2-year-old small-toe toenails than can be found in THE WHOLE BUNCH of 95% of America's 'leaders'.

The strength of her honesty is why the US recently refused to grant her a visa -- before it was reversed under challenge and strong public support.

I have a bad habit of often reading youtube comments to guage the audience's political sophistication, and whether a speaker 'connects' to their viewers with their message.

The hostility of many viewers to Joya and their rancor towards those who support her are an awful testimony of the willful, conceited arrogance of people who cling to their ignorance and hate -- it leaves me baffled and terribly sad to realize that so many people squander their intelligence, deny their humanity and repudiate self-awareness. They are SO confused and clueless, and SO devoid of authenticity and the courage of their convictions they are incapable of weighing information and arguments to judge whether something is true and compelling or contradictory and false. Sometimes I really feel humanity is doomed to extinction because too many people refuse to cultivate the best that they are capable of.

Anyway, I admire Joya in part because she reminds us that there IS a best to which we can aspire to; Her speaking Truth To Power even against great odds is a tribute to Love, Peace and Hope.

&&&&&&&&&

Malalai Joya RT Interview: US Acts Like Rambo Killing Already-Dead Bin Laden
June 23, 2011

by **JackRiddler** » Sun Aug 21, 2011 5:55 pm

.

Three interesting items this month about civilian casualties in Afpak.

First, the NYT itself can't really believe the CIA's incredible claim of "not a single collateral death" from drone strikes in more than a year!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world ... nted=print

August 11, 2011
C.I.A. Is Disputed on Civilian Toll in Drone Strikes

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — On May 6, a Central Intelligence Agency drone fired a volley of missiles at a pickup truck carrying nine militants and bomb materials through a desolate stretch of Pakistan near the Afghan border. It killed all the militants — a clean strike with no civilian casualties, extending what is now a yearlong perfect record of avoiding collateral deaths.

Or so goes the United States government’s version of the attack, from an American official briefed on the classified C.I.A. program. Here is another version, from a new report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists: The missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, killing 18 people — 12 militants, but also 6 civilians, known locally as Samad, Jamshed, Daraz, Iqbal, Noor Nawaz and Yousaf.

The civilian toll of the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, which is widely credited with disrupting Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan’s tribal area, has been in bitter dispute since the strikes were accelerated in 2008. Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.

The debate has intensified since President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, clearly referring to the classified drone program, said in June that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Other officials say that extraordinary claim still holds: since May 2010, C.I.A. officers believe, the drones have killed more than 600 militants — including at least 20 in a strike reported Wednesday — and not a single noncombatant.

Cutting through the fog of the drone war is important in part because the drone aircraft deployed in Pakistan are the leading edge of a revolution in robotic warfare that has already expanded to Yemen and Somalia, and that military experts expect to sweep the world.

“It’s urgent to answer this question, because this technology is so attractive to the U.S. and other governments that it’s going to proliferate very rapidly,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or Civic, a Washington nonprofit that tracks civilian deaths.

The government’s assertion of zero collateral deaths meets with deep skepticism from many independent experts. And a new report from the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which conducted interviews in Pakistan’s tribal area, concluded that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes during the last year.

Others who question the C.I.A. claim include strong supporters of the drone program like Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, who closely tracks the strikes.

“The Taliban don’t go to a military base to build bombs or do training,” Mr. Roggio said. “There are families and neighbors around. I believe the people conducting the strikes work hard to reduce civilian casualties. They could be 20 percent. They could be 5 percent. But I think the C.I.A.’s claim of zero civilian casualties in a year is absurd.”

A closer look at the competing claims, including interviews with American officials and their critics, discloses new details about how the C.I.A. tracks the results of the drone strikes. It also suggests reasons to doubt the precision and certainty of the agency’s civilian death count.

In a statement on Tuesday for this article, Mr. Brennan adjusted the wording of his earlier comment on civilian casualties, saying American officials could not confirm any such deaths.

“Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way,” Mr. Brennan said.

If there are doubts about the C.I.A. claim, there are also questions about the reliability of critics’ reports of noncombatant deaths. Reporters in North Waziristan, where most strikes occur, operate in a dangerous and politically charged environment. Many informants have their own agendas: militants use civilian deaths as a recruiting tool, and Pakistani officials rally public opinion against the drones as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

“Waziristan is a black hole of information,” acknowledged Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who is suing the C.I.A. on behalf of civilians who say they have lost family members in the strikes. American officials accuse Mr. Akbar of working to discredit the drone program at the behest of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the Pakistani spy service. Mr. Akbar and others who know him strongly deny the accusation.

American officials, who will speak about the classified drone program only on the condition of anonymity, say it has killed more than 2,000 militants and about 50 noncombatants since 2001 — a stunningly low collateral death rate by the standards of traditional airstrikes.

The officials say C.I.A. drone operators view their targets for hours or days beforehand, analyzing what they call a “pattern of life” and distinguishing militants from others. They use software to model the blast area of each proposed strike. Then they watch the strike, see the killed and wounded pulled from the rubble, and track the funerals that follow.

The video is supplemented, officials say, by informants on the ground who sometimes plant homing devices at a compound or a car. The C.I.A. and National Security Agency intercept cellphone calls and e-mails discussing who was killed.

“Because our coverage has improved so much since the beginning of this program, it really defies logic that now we would start missing all these alleged noncombatant casualties,” said an American official familiar with the program.

In one recent strike, the official said, after the drone operator fired a missile at militants in a car and a noncombatant suddenly appeared nearby, the operator was able to divert the missile harmlessly into open territory, hitting the car minutes later when the civilian was gone.

“Nobody is arguing that this weapon is perfect, but it remains the most precise system we’ve ever had in our arsenal,” the official said.

The agency’s critics counter that an intelligence officer watching a video screen thousands of miles away can hardly be certain of the identity of everyone killed in a strike. In a tribal society where men commonly carry weapons and a single family compound can include a militant fighter, an enlistee in the Pakistani government’s Frontier Corps, and a shopkeeper, even villagers may be uncertain about the affiliations of their neighbors.

Skeptics likewise say that militants can commandeer a car or a compound from neighbors who cannot safely refuse the demands. And civilians may be present among militants: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, for example, found that one strike that killed about two dozen militants also killed two civilians, a prisoner of the militants and a visitor negotiating the release of relatives held elsewhere.

The standard drone weapons, Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, like other ordnance, are not absolutely predictable. A strike last Oct. 18, all reports agree, hit a militant compound and killed a number of fighters. But Mr. Akbar, the lawyer, said the family next door to the compound had told his investigators their 10-year-old son, Naeem Ullah, was hit by shrapnel and died an hour after being taken to the hospital in nearby Miram Shah. Neighbors confirmed the account, Mr. Akbar said.

The C.I.A. declines to publicly discuss the drone program, so it was not possible to talk to an agency drone pilot. But Col. David M. Sullivan, an Air Force pilot with extensive experience with both traditional and drone airstrikes from Kosovo to Afghanistan, said remotely piloted craft offered far greater opportunities to study a target and avoid hitting civilians.

An F-117 fighter or a Reaper drone each carries the same 500-pound bombs, “but the Reaper has been sitting for hours on target,” allowing the operator time to study who will be hit by a strike, said Colonel Sullivan, who is on the staff of the secretary of defense.

Still, he said, there is still a margin of error in drone strikes, even if it is far smaller than in traditional strikes.

“Zero innocent civilians having lost their lives does not sound to me like reality,” Colonel Sullivan said. “Never in the history of combat operations has every airborne strike been 100 percent successful.”

American officials said the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report was suspect because it relied in part on information supplied by Mr. Akbar, who publicly named the C.I.A.’s undercover Pakistan station chief in December when announcing his legal campaign against the drones. But Mr. Akbar, a former prosecutor, denied he had ever received money or instructions from the ISI, which he said he had often faced off against as a lawyer. He said that in July two ISI agents visited him to ask, “who do you work for?”

Christopher Rogers, an American human rights lawyer who lived in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, said that he had helped interest Mr. Akbar in the drone strikes and their legal implications. “The idea that ISI was the puppeteer here is not credible at all,” said Mr. Rogers, now at the Open Society Institute in New York.

Though Pakistani officials often denounce the drone program, even as they have at times quietly assisted it, skeptics about its overall impact include American officials as well. The former director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, said at a public forum in Aspen, Colo., last month that he thought unilateral American strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia should end.

“Pull back on unilateral actions by the United States except in extraordinary circumstances,” said Mr. Blair, who headed national intelligence from January 2009 until May 2010.

Hm. What was the controversy when this guy went, again?

C. Christine Fair, an expert on Pakistan at Georgetown University, said that getting full cooperation with Pakistan on drone strikes might be impossible. But Ms. Fair, who said she began as a skeptic but has come to believe that the drones are highly effective and civilian casualties are very low, said the semisecrecy surrounding the program fuels suspicion and allows propaganda to thrive.

The C.I.A. should make public its strikes and their results — even to the point of posting video of the strikes online, she said.

“This is the least indiscriminate, least inhumane tool we have,” Ms. Fair said.

Wow, who could imagine a better tool than a drone strike, right?

“But until there is complete transparency, the public will not believe that.”

Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from New York.

Second: Is Pakistan really limiting, let alone cutting off, the US drone attack program? I think this is more post-OBL theater.

http://counterpunch.org/porter08172011.html

August 17, 2011

Pakistani Military Steps Up
Veto Over the Drones

By GARETH PORTER

Pakistani civilian and military leaders are insisting on an effective veto over which targets U.S. drone strikes hit, according to well-informed Pakistani military sources here.

The sources, who met with IPS on condition that they not be identified, said that such veto power over the conduct of the drone war is a central element in a new Pakistani demand for a formal government-to-government agreement on the terms under which the United States and Pakistan will cooperate against insurgents in Pakistan.

The basic government-to-government agreement now being demanded would be followed, the sources said, by more detailed agreements between U.S. and Pakistani military leaders and intelligence agencies.

The new Pakistani demand for equal say over drone strikes marks the culmination of a long evolution in the Pakistani military's attitude toward the drone war. Initially supportive of strikes that were targeting Al-Qaeda leaders, senior Pakistani military leaders soon came to realise that the drone war carried serious risks for Pakistan's war against the Pakistani Taliban.

A key turning point in the attitude of the military was the unilateral U.S. decision to focus the drone war on those Pakistani insurgents who had already decided to make peace with the Pakistani government and who opposed the war being waged by Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban against the Pakistani military.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was allowed to run the drone war almost completely unilaterally for years, according to former Pakistani military leaders and diplomats, and the Pakistani military has only mustered the political will to challenge the U.S. power to carry out drone strikes unilaterally in recent months.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf allowed the drone strikes from 2004 to 2007 in order to ensure political support from the George W. Bush administration, something Musharraf had been denied during the Bill Clinton administration, Shamshad Ahmad, who was Pakistan's foreign secretary and then ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to 2002, told IPS.

"Those were the days when we felt that we had to work with the Americans on Al-Qaeda," recalled Gen. Asad Durrani, a former director general of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), in an interview with IPS.

The choice of targets "usually was done by the U.S. unilaterally", said Durrani. Two Pakistani generals confirmed that point in a separate interview with IPS.

The Musharraf regime even went so far as to provide cover for the drone strikes, repeatedly asserting after strikes that the explosions had been caused by the victims themselves making home-made bombs.

But that effort at transparent deception by the U.S. and Musharraf quickly fell apart when drone strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed large numbers of civilians rather than Al- Qaeda leaders.

The worst such strike was an Oct. 30, 2006 drone attack on a madrassa in Chenagai village in Bajauer agency, which killed 82 people. Musharraf, who was primarily concerned with avoiding the charge of complicity in U.S. attacks on Pakistani targets, ordered the Pakistani military to take complete responsibility for the incident.

The spokesman for the Pakistani military claimed "confirmed intelligence reports that 70 to 80 militants were hiding in a madrassa used as a terrorist training facility" and said the Pakistani military had fired missiles at the madrassa.

But eyewitnesses in the village identified U.S. drones as the source of the attack and said all the victims were simply local students of the madrassa. Local people compiled a complete list of the names and ages of all 80 victims, showing that 25 of the dead had been aged seven to 15, which was published in the Lahore daily The News International.

Senior military officers believed the CIA had other reasons for launching the strike in Bajaur. The day before the drone attack, tribal elders in Bajaur had held a public meeting to pledge their willingness to abide by a peace accord with the government, and the government had released nine tribesmen, including some militants.

Former ISI chief Durrani recalled that the strike "effectively sabotaged the chances for an agreement" in Bejaur. That was "a very clear message" from the CIA not to enter into any more such peace agreements, Durrani told IPS.

The Bejaur madrassa strike was a turning point for many officers. "So many of us went in and said this is stupid," Durrani recalled.

When Musharraf was pressured to step down as Army chief of staff, and was replaced by Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in November 2007, the unilateral character of the CIA's drone war "pretty much continued", according to Gen. Jehanger Karamat, who was ambassador to the United States from 2004 to 2006 after having retired as Army chief of staff in 1998.

The CIA's drone war became more contentious in 2008, as the Bush administration concentrated the strikes on those who had made peace with the Pakistani government. Two-thirds of the drone strikes that year were on targets associated with Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Nazeer, both of whom were involved in supporting Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but who opposed attacks on the Pakistani government.

Targeting the Haqqani network and his allies posed serious risks for Pakistan. When the Pakistani Army was fighting in South Waziristan, it had its logistic base in an area that was controlled by the Haqqani group, and it had been able to count on the security of that base.

Meanwhile, ISI had given the CIA accurate information on anti- Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud's location on four occasions, but the U.S. had failed to target him, according to a May 2009 column by retired Pakistani Gen. Shaukat Qadir.

In 2009, more of the drone strikes - almost 40 percent of the total - focused on the Taliban under Mehsud, and Mehsud himself was killed, which tended to mollify the Pakistani military.

But that effect did not last long. In 2010, only three strikes were aimed at Mehsud's anti-Pakistan Taliban organisation, while well over half the strikes were against Hafiz Gul Bahadur, an ally of Haqqani who had signed an agreement with the Pakistani government in September 2006 that he would not shelter any anti-Pakistani militants.

The Barack Obama administration had made a deliberate decision around mid-2010 that it didn't care if targeting the Haqqani network and other pro-Pakistani Taliban groups upset the Pakistanis, as the Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 23, 2010.

But two events caused Pakistani army chief Kayani to demand a fundamental change in U.S. policy toward the drone war.

The first was the arrest of CIA operative Raymond Davis on the charge of killing two Pakistanis in cold blood in January, which was followed by intense U.S. pressure for his release.

The second was a drone strike on Mar. 17, just one day after Davis was released, which was initially reported to have been an attack on a gathering of Haqqani network officials.

It turned out that the drone attack had killed dozens of tribal and sub-tribal elders who had gathered from all over North Waziristan to discuss an economic issue.

A former U.S. official admitted that the strike was carried out because the CIA was "angry" over the fact that Davis had been kept in prison for seven weeks. "It was retaliation for Davis," the official said, according to an Aug. 2 Associated Press story.

That strike helped galvanise the Pakistani military leadership. ISI chief Shuja Pasha took it as a slap in the face, because he had personally intervened to get Davis out of jail. Kayani shocked the Americans by issuing the first denunciation of drone strikes by an Army chief.

When Pasha went to Washington in April, he took with him the first official Pakistani demand for an equal say in drone strike decisions.

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

Kathy Kelly on raids in Afghanistan.

August 11, 2011

"The Raids Come Every Night"
More Lost by the Second

By KATHY KELLY

It's a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I'm ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I'm recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh Brollier and I, having enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Lahore University students, needed to head back to the guest lodgings graciously provided us by a headmaster of the Garrison School for Boys. We had boarded a rickshaw, but the driver had soon become terribly lost and with my spotty sense of direction and my complete ignorance of Urdu, I couldn't be any help. My cell phone was out of juice, and I was uncertain anyway of the needed phone number. I bumped and jostled in the back seat of the rickshaw, next to Josh, as we embarked on a nightmare of travel over unpaved, rutted roads in dizzying traffic until finally the rickshaw driver spotted a sign belonging to our school - the wrong campus, we all knew - and eager to unload us, roused the inhabitants and hustled us and our bags into the street before moving on.

We stood inside the gate, staring blankly at a family that had been sound asleep on cots in the courtyard. In no time, the father of the family scooped up his two children, gently moving them to the cot he shared with his wife so that Josh and I would have a cot on which to sit. Then he and his spouse disappeared into their humble living quarters. He reappeared with a fan and an extension cord, wanting to give us some relief from the blistering night heat. His wife emerged carrying a glass of tea for each of us. They didn't know us from Adam's house cat, but they were treating us as family - the celebrated but always astonishing hospitality that we'd encountered in the region so many times before. Eventually, we established with our host that we were indeed at the wrong campus, upon which he called the family that had been nervously waiting for our errant selves.

This courtyard scene of startling hospitality would return to my mind when we all learned of the U.S. Joint Special Operations (JSO) Force night raid in the Nangarhar province, on May 12, 2011. No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It's normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12 year old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer's head. She died instantly. Nilofer's uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night's patrol because he didn't know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother's home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology.

"The raids occur 'every night. We are very much miserable,' said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament." I am reading a McClatchy news report, dated August 8th of this year. "Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban."

Imagine it. People in an Afghan village pass sleepless nights, anxious that their home might be targeted by a U.S. led night raid. Villagers are enraged when they hear stories of elders and imams being roughed up and detained, of wives and children being killed, of belongings stolen and property destroyed. Increasingly, the U.S. military battles against the so-called insurgency are creating a stronger resistance as more Afghans grow determined to fight back.

In Helmand province, in Nad Ali, the district governor told a New York Times reporter one incident in the spiral of violence: a NATO foot patrol came under fire from a family home on August 5th, 2011, killing one soldier and wounding an Afghan interpreter. The NATO troops called in an airstrike. NATO is now investigating a report that the airstrike killed eight civilians, seven of them children. "The home belonged to Mullah Abdul Hadi, 50, a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban," said Mr. Shamlani. "He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old."

People in Nad Ali are expected to embrace closer relations with the United States and its troops after the deaths at our hands of seven children, children they knew aged one to seven, who had committed no crime.

Now comes the U.S. determination to seal a "Strategic Partnership Declaration" with its client Afghan government. Many in that country (and this one) expect such an agreement to allow the U.S. to establish permanent military bases, a permanent occupation presence that will provoke resistance groups there to declare perpetual war.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a group of young people dedicated to ending wars and inequalities in their country, write in their August 9th statement: "The US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Declaration will perpetuate 'terrorism' and bring it to everyone's doorsteps: "The 'partnership' will allow permanent joint US-Afghanistan military bases to launch and project hard power. The 'extreme' Taliban will conveniently 'use' these bases as a stand-alone reason for their 'holy jihad.' We cannot forget that one of Osama Bin Laden's reasons for attacking the US on September 11th was the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia. ... This Strategic Partnership Declaration will kill any chance for our madness to slow down and our violence to calm down. … It will doom ordinary Americans and Afghans to permanent terrorism. … Why can't we quiet our nerves, look deep inside humanity, and begin healing?"

Everyone wants to be safe, but I think of the Lahore family taking us into their sleeping courtyard and their home that night, knowing nothing of these crazy Americans who had been dropped on their doorstep. We had woken them up but they chose to stay awake and take care of us. Americans seem to respond to our endless wake-up calls from Afghanistan by just going, every time, back to sleep, rather than work to make the situation better. I think of the night raids, families being woken up to sudden horror somewhere every night in the region, children killed sleeping in our efforts to make ourselves more safe (among other motives), and an ever escalating conflict arising from the violence.

We are startlingly, terrifyingly lost, and we're getting ever more so. If we see a sign here in the darkness, an opportunity to make contact with the people around us, we should take it gratefully. The letter from my Afghan Youth friends is another sign for me that we do not belong in the Afghan home forever, occupying it at gunpoint. However groggily we may have awoken or reawoken to this dreadful situation and our role in it, we must act now to free our Afghan hosts of their overstaying guests, and get the U.S. safely back to where it should be.

Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has worked closely with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams published by CounterPunch / AK Press. She can be reached at: Kathy@vcnv.org

A version of this article ran in Waging Nonviolence.

by **JackRiddler** » Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:31 am

.

Sounds like a great conference but is it the start of a revolution?

August 19 - 21, 2011
Confronting the Military-Industrial-Complex
The MIC at 50

By BRUCE E. LEVINE

The majority of Americans oppose the U.S. government’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and believe that defense spending is the area that must be cut to reduce the federal deficit. However, many of us feel powerless to stop the ever-increasing bombings, invasions, and occupations of nations which pose no threat to us. Most of us have acquiesced to the “military-industrial complex” (a term coined by Dwight Eisenhower, who devoted his farewell address in 1961 to its “grave implications”). Having worked with abused people for more than 25 years, it does not surprise me to see that when we as individuals or as a society eat crap for too long, we become psychologically too weak to take action.

Democracy means that if the majority of us want to stop senseless wars and wasteful military spending, then this should be stopped. Are we in the majority? How can we take action?

A March 2011 ABC News/Washington Post poll asked Americans, “All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, or not?”; 31 percent said “worth fighting” and 64 percent said “not worth fighting.” When a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll in December 2010, asked, “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?” only 35 percent of Americans favored the war, while 63 percent opposed it. A 2010 CBS poll reported that 6 of 10 Americans viewed the Iraq war as “a mistake.” And when Americans were asked in a CBS New /New York Times survey in January 2011 which of three programs—the military, Medicare, or Social Security—to cut so as to deal with the deficit, fully 55 percent chose the military, while only 21 percent chose Medicare and 13 percent chose Social Security.

So, how exactly can we bring democracy to the United States? In Charlottesville from September 18-20, there will be a conference “MIC at 50: The Military Industrial Complex at 50” (see MIC50.org) that will energize Americans to take back their rightful power over when our soldiers are put in harms way and how the U.S. government spends Americans’ money. At this conference, organized by David Swanson (who served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign and is the author of War is a Lie), the tools of empowerment will be provided. These include: (1) knowledge of the extent, influence, and destructiveness of the military-industrial complex; (2) tactics, strategies and solutions as to how to “move money from military to human needs”; and (3) acquiring the “energy to do battle” so as to overcome demoralization and defeatism

The MIC at 50 conference will feature over 20 speakers—including former procurement executive and chief contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bunnatine (Bunny) H. Greenhouse, retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and former Pentagon desk officer Karen Kwiatkowski, international affairs analyst Helena Cobban, retired CIA officer Ray McGovern, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space Bruce Gagnon, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Shahid Buttar, author and West Point graduate Paul Chappell.

I will be there to speak about the psychological and cultural building blocks of democratic movements and how we can transform the pain of subjugation into the “energy to do battle.” Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies and oppression don't set people free to take action. They sometimes forget that there are a great many Americans who have been so worn down by decades of personal and political defeats, financial struggles, social isolation, and daily interaction with impersonal and inhuman institutions that they no longer have the energy for political actions.

Many Americans have developed what Bob Marley—the poet laureate of oppressed people around the world— called “mental slavery.” Social scientists have also recognized this phenomenon of subjugation resulting in demoralization and defeatism. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, the El Salvadoran social psychologist and popularizer of “liberation psychology,” understood this psychological phenomenon of fatalism, and they helped their people overcome it. We must first acknowledge the reality that for millions of Americans, subjugation has in fact resulted in demoralization and fatalism. Then, we can begin to heal from a “battered people’s syndrome” of sorts and together begin to fight for democracy.

See you at the conference.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, April 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net. His Web site is brucelevine.net. For more information about MIC at 50: The Military Industrial Complex at 50” September 18-20 in Charlottesville,Virginia, go to MIC50.org

by **semper occultus** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 11:50 am

Militias funded by US accused of rights abuses

By Julius Cavendish in Kabul
Tuesday, 13 September 2011

www.independent.co.uk

Militias in Afghanistan funded by the United States are terrorising the communities they were supposed to protect, murdering, raping and torturing civilians, including children, extorting illegal taxes and smuggling contraband, according to a damning new report from Human Rights Watch.

In a 102-page report entitled 'Just Don't Call It a Militia' the group documents how the Afghan government and the US military have provided guns and money to paramilitary groups without adequate oversight or accountability. Because of their links to senior Afghan officials, many of these groups operate with impunity.

Their behaviour fuels support for the Taliban, and creates insecurity rather than decreasing it. But, under US General David Petraeus, who recently left Afghanistan to head up the Central Intelligence Agency, Nato aggressively pursued a strategy of raising militias as a security quick-fix ahead of its departure in 2014.

Because US law, makes it illegal to finance groups facing credible allegations of human rights abuses, the report's findings could, potentially, put at risk a central plank of Nato's exit strategy if US lawmakers would have it so.

The report follows an investigation earlier this year by The Independent that found US special forces were bankrolling an Afghan mercenary called Commander Azizullah in Afghanistan's south-eastern Paktika province. Under their patronage Azizullah had embarked on a spate of rights abuses including murders, rape, theft, torture, the mutilation of corpses and the desecration of a mosque, according to internal UN documents and testimony from a number of Afghan and Western sources.

Afghan mercenary Commander Azizullah

Azizullah has always maintained his innocence. Despite the severity of the allegations and the questions they raised about the lack of oversight Azizullah was subject to, Nato refused to launch a formal inquiry.

After riding out the storm caused by the revelations, Azizullah was alleged to have killed again at the start of June. The victim was a teenage student who had been travelling the road from Urgun to Sarhawza in Afghanistan's southeast when Azizullah and his men stopped him, shot and killed him.

"Afterwards he placed an AK-47 on the body and took a photo," an Afghan official, who heard the story from local elders, told The Independent.

The official echoed concerns in the Human Rights Watch report about the lax oversight and lack of accountability militias are subject to, and worried that by now, Azizullah's terror campaign had been so effective that "however many investigations special forces or [Nato] conduct, it doesn't matter. No one is going to corroborate any of this evidence because people are too scared."

What makes the Human Rights watch report so important is that it provides credible evidence that behaviour like Azizullah's is the norm rather than the exception. In one instance cited in the report, Afghan paramilitaries abducted two teenagers and drove nails through the feet of one. Another group gang-raped a 13-year-old boy.

On 24 January 2010, a band led by one Mullah Rahmatullah allegedly raided a house in northern Afghanistan. "There were five people, all armed. They came to my house and they tied my hands and my brother's hands. Then they raped my wife and my brother's wife," a family member told Human Rights Watch.

Nato's plans to raise militias has been controversial from the start. US General Dan McNeil, a former commander of the Nato mission to Afghanistan, said in 2008 that Nato had worked hard to disband militias and "we shouldn't seek to go back there."

Afghan officials have been equally critical and President Hamid Karzai only authorised the creation of a new raft of militias called Afghan Local Police under extreme pressure from Nato.

A Nato spokesman said it would evaluate the Human Rights Watch report and "take necessary steps".

Revealed: Afghan chief accused of campaign of terror is on US payroll

Witnesses back leaked UN reports detailing claims of rape and murder against feared Tajik warlord

By Julius Cavendish
Friday, 18 March 2011

www.independent.co.uk

Afghan National Police Commander Azizullah

An Afghan warlord backed by US special forces faces persistent allegations that he launched a two-year spate of violence involving burglary, rape and murder of civilians, desecration of mosques and mutilation of corpses. Yet, despite repeated warnings about the atrocities Commander Azizullah is alleged to have committed, he has remained on the payroll of the US military as an "Afghan security guard", a select band of mercenaries described by some as "the most effective fighting formation in Afghanistan".

Interviews with religious leaders, tribal elders, villagers, contractors and Western and Afghan officials all pointed to a reign of terror in which they believe 31-year-old Azizullah, a ethnic Tajik, targeted Pashtun civilians while fighting the Taliban. Although individual allegations, all from ethnic Pashtuns, might be inaccurate, malicious or motivated by envy of Azizullah's close and lucrative links to US special forces, taken together they come from sources belonging to a range of tribes and from several areas. The testimony also tallied with several independent reports documenting the allegations against Azizullah and seen by The Independent, including two confidential reports compiled by UN officials and circulated to Nato personnel last year.

A Nato spokesman said that its own investigation of Azizullah turned up nothing. "There was a derogatory report via UN channels last summer, but when we tried to research it, there was really little information to substantiate what were essentially claims," said Lieutenant-Colonel John Dorrian, chief of operations at Nato's public affairs unit in Kabul. "As a matter of due diligence, we subsequently tried to backtrack to the origin of the claim, but nothing credible could be found."

Human rights experts say that is not necessarily surprising. The coalition "in general has been slow to the mark in developing transparent, public, and thorough accountability structures", said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundations. "It's getting better, but there's still a lot of foot-dragging.

"And when it does investigate, it doesn't bring a great deal of healthy scepticism to examining the first version of events given. Often an investigation will comprise statements by the commanders or troops on the ground, perhaps a review of video or other signal intelligence, and that's it. That's not a bad methodology to start out with, but if you really want to get the whole story on accusations of misconduct, particularly when they involve local warlords, you need to get out and talk to the community. That just isn't how Isaf investigations work generally."

The allegations of persistent abuses are embarrassing for Nato, and not just because of the closeness with an alleged war criminal. They also showcase the big-gest drawbacks of militias, which US commander General David Petraeus wants to expand aggressively across Afghanistan. He wants to triple the size of "local defence initiatives" [militias] to 30,000 members nationwide. Local community representatives have described the plan as "sending villagers to the front line".

Analysts in Kabul also say that although the plan may temporarily help dent the Taliban, the consequences are too awful to contemplate: resurgent warlords, deepening ethnic tensions, widespread bloodletting and the erosion of what little authority the government in Kabul has left. The cost of some short-term success in the military fight against the Taliban could, over time, see a return to Afghan-istan's darkest days.

UN officials first raised the subject of Azizullah with Nato in February 2010, when a report landed on the desk of US Lieutenant-General David Rodriguez, Nato's deputy commander in Afghanistan. It warned of "grave dissatisfaction with the way in which SOF [Special Operations Forces] operations are conducted and... doubts about the positive impact of SOF 'local defence initiatives'."

The report cited a complaint by Afghan villagers that during a special forces night raid on 7 January 2010, in which six civilians were killed, "an Afghan security commander, by the name of Azizullah, and the men under his command [stole] about $9,600 belonging to three of the killed civilians".

By the summer, the US military had received a more comprehensive list of the atrocities Azizullah was accused of, compiled by Western and Afghan officials lobbying for his removal, and begun looking into the complaints.

A report entitled Evidence against Azizullah stated: "We strongly recommend that this man be removed from his position working in the services of the US military. Numerous complaints have been made to us in recent weeks regarding the behaviour and activities of Commander Azizullah. Elders from a number of districts... have provided independent accounts of Azizullah's involvement in criminal activities (theft), indiscriminate killings and more sordid activities such as detaining young boys... holding them for several weeks [and] sexually abus[ing] them.

"Clearly, it is difficult to confirm the veracity of information provided to us by local community representatives, and there may even be cases where it is inspired by malice towards the government or security forces, but there is an undeniable pattern regarding this individual that cannot be disregarded. We see significant indications that the unintended consequences of employing someone like Commander Azizullah may be the growing hostility of large parts of the population."

The report also warned that as long as special forces continued to act on tip-offs from Afghan sources, some of those sources would feed them false information "to frighten local people into keeping quiet about blatant instances of corruption [and] immoral behaviour, as well as for settling scores. We believe, in the light of so many independent reports, this to be the case with Commander Azizullah".

But by October, and unable to substantiate any of the allegations against Azizullah, his benefactors dropped the issue. Colonel Dorian added: "As always, if there is credible information of wrongdoing, we encourage anyone with such information to take it to the cognisant authorities so it can be fully and properly adjudicated."

Commander Azizullah rubbishes the claims. "Since the Taliban and al-Qa'ida couldn't kill me with their suicide attacks or landmines, they're now using propaganda against me. I have never killed anyone innocent. I'm a very religious person; I respect my religion, so how could I desecrate a mosque or kill a civilian? [...] You won't find a single person who can prove that I've done anything you mention, like raping boys, desecrating mosques or killing innocent people."

During the interview, the leader of the US special forces detachment supporting Azizullah, who called himself Dan, came on the phone. "We've gone a huge way as far as collateral damage and civilian casualties [go]," he said. "That's gone down quite a bit. We have quite a bit of control over our partner's force and... we do everything we can to [avoid civilian casualties]. There's been really no civilian casualties, at least since I've been here."

Azizullah comes from a generation of Afghans growing up knowing nothing but fighting. Life as an ethnic Tajik was hard under the predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime. "The Taliban were disturbing me a lot, they weren't letting me live a normal life," he said. "And after the collapse of the Taliban I became a soldier here in Urgun [district]."

Azizullah claims to have survived between 10 and 20 attempts on his life, and was wounded in recent fighting. He said he has "conducted lots of operations, seen lots of stuff, been blown up by a suicide bomber in 2006".

That blast, which killed his cousin Sardar and several comrades, was a difficult blow. "I wasn't only upset about my cousin," he said. "There were 18 people killed in that incident. Every individual that was killed was [like] Sardar to me."

The Tajiks and Afghanistan's ethnic faultlines

The widespread stories of Azizullah's activities also seem to have stoked ethnic tensions between the small Tajik minority he comes from and the Pashtun majority in the area.

Such tensions have created one of the biggest fault lines dividing Afghanistan, and some argue that much of the violence of the past 30 years has been carried out as part of a war between the country's large Pashtun minority, on one side, and the country's ethnic Uzbeks, Hazaras and Tajiks on the other.

A Pashtun cleric said that friction between the Tajik and Pashtun communities in eastern Paktika province, where Azizullah operates, had never been so high.

A Western contractor with first-hand knowledge of the area said: "Tajiks... say the guy is a national hero. [However] they also say, 'We'll pay for that'. If the coalition leaves they'll have to leave too. They disapprove of his actions. If you send a Tajik as sheriff to a Pashtun area you're bound to fail. It's a very ethnically polarised area."

There are certainly reasons for some Afghans to want to slander Azizullah, who is reputed to use his links with Nato to broker contracts and take a cut of the spoils.

The Western contractor said that the Pashtun majority there feels marginalised by what they see as an unfair distribution of money pouring in. "The perception is [the Tajiks] get all the contracts, all the jobs," he said. "Even if it's only perception, if everyone believes it, it's a fact."

by **semper occultus** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 7:55 am

Afghanistan is lurching towards a civil war
The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president, who was trying to woo the Taliban makes peace talks even less likely.

www.telegraph.co.uk

By Shashank Joshi
8:02PM BST 21 Sep 2011
If Nato’s strategy in Afghanistan seems familiar, that may be because it increasingly seems borrowed from the Black Knight of Monty Python fame, who, after losing both arms, insists that “it’s just a flesh wound”.

When Afghan insurgents laid waste to government buildings in Kabul last week, the US ambassador explained, perhaps in case we’d misunderstood the 24-hour siege, that “this really is not a very big deal”. A day earlier he’d lamented that “the biggest problem in Kabul is traffic”. Apparently not.

A week on, someone has blown up Afghanistan’s former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in the heart of the capital. This is a big deal. It shatters the idea that our enemies are on the ropes, and pushes the country closer to civil war.

Rabbani chaired the High Peace Council, a body tasked with bringing senior Taliban figures in from the cold, but he was always a strange choice as peacemaker. He was a blood-soaked Tajik warlord, who, alongside Afghanistan’s other minorities, had spent the 1990s battling the mostly Pashtun Taliban in a brutal civil war. Rabbani eventually led this Northern Alliance to victory in 2001, helped along by the US Air Force and CIA paramilitaries on horseback. Rabbani’s allies formed a political party, the United National Front, and were given plum ministerial positions.

Years later, with an insurgency raging, Hamid Karzai toyed with the idea of reconciling with the Taliban, perhaps even sharing power. When the US announced that its soldiers would leave by 2014, this became more urgent. Between 2006 and 2010, 80 per cent of the Afghan government’s total spending came from outside. Its choice was simple: reconcile, or die a slow but sure death.

But not everyone saw it like this. The northerners grew frightened. Some had grown fat on Western money in government, while others simply detested the Taliban for the same reasons we do. Last summer, Karzai sacked his anti-Taliban spy chief Amrullah Saleh to ease the way for talks. Saleh railed against this, insisting that “there must not be a deal with the Taliban. Ever”. Along with other veterans from the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, he’s emerged as a political force against reconciliation, drawing crowds of thousands with his denunciations of the Taliban as Pakistani stooges.

Rabbani’s assassination is so dangerous precisely because it sharpens these fears of minority communities. The northern forces never disarmed, and they’ve probably begun rebuilding their strength to prepare for the worst-case scenario. They would find willing sponsors. In the 1990s, Russia, Iran and India chipped in. Today, a richer and more ambitious India would hit back at the rise of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan that would result from any Taliban takeover. Delhi already sends billions of dollars, and probably sees Saleh and his allies as guarantors of Indian interests.

In short, a civil war is a distinct possibility. It would further destabilise Pakistan’s fragile borderlands, and extinguish all hope of nation-building in Afghanistan. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the US ambassador would prefer to focus on the Kabul traffic rather than intractable ethnic politics.

If the northerners are spooked by the prospect of a US withdrawal, why doesn’t Washington stay in the country beyond 2014 and calm everyone’s nerves? The problem is that this would paper over the cracks.

We were not fated to lose this war. It might have been possible to defeat the Taliban if we had enjoyed a reliable partner in Afghanistan, a reliable ally in Pakistan, and a political strategy that took the wind out of the insurgency’s sails. Instead, we have a self-serving oligarchy in Kabul, a jihad-addicted Pakistani military across the border, and a political strategy that shows no understanding of our terrible bargaining position.

The overarching problem is that no party is interested in negotiations, because each is convinced it can win outright. Pakistan has arrested Taliban leaders who try to talk to us and continues to support groups, like the Haqqani Network, that kill British and American troops. The Afghan government, for its part, has expelled British diplomats who tried to talk to the Taliban. Last month, it leaked details of American meetings with a senior Taliban envoy, forcing him to flee.

Both the US and the Taliban have opted for killing each other’s interlocutors, hardly a sound basis for diplomacy. The Americans argue that an aggressive campaign of night raids and assassinations allows us to negotiate from strength. In reality, it means that pragmatic older insurgents are replaced by ever-more radical diehards – those who may well have killed Rabbani.

If the Afghan government fails to reform itself, and negotiations lead nowhere, then the alternative is a gradual disintegration of the country. When Monty Python’s Black Knight is altogether limbless, he concedes to Arthur, “we’ll call it a draw”. An Afghan draw would suit us. But our failure to lay the groundwork for this means that we’re just as likely to wind up in stalemate.

Shashank Joshi is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London

by **JackRiddler** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 10:12 am

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world ... nted=print

September 20, 2011
Assassination Deals Blow to Peace Process in Afghanistan

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — An assassin with explosives hidden in his turban was ushered into the home of the head of Afghanistan’s peace process on Tuesday, embraced him and then exploded the bomb, killing him and dealing a potentially devastating blow to the effort to reconcile with the Taliban and end 10 years of war.

The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former president, on the heels of a carefully planned attack on the American Embassy a week ago, underscored the fierce opposition of those who want to shatter the country’s tenuous stability and thwart its tentative steps toward peace.

It also demonstrated once again the ability of the government’s enemies to reach into even the most secure bastions of the capital, whether through treachery or frontal assaults, and to carry out a rising number of carefully selected assassinations. This one, however, may be the most significant of the war.

Without the 71-year-old Mr. Rabbani, it will be exceedingly difficult to move the peace process forward. A complex figure, he was nonetheless one of the few with the stature to persuade the Taliban’s enemies, the former Northern Alliance, to embark on reconciliation discussions.

Western diplomats said that recently Mr. Rabbani had begun discussions with some Taliban members who might have the power to engage in real negotiations. A number of previous contacts had proved to be with impostors or figures who had little authority.

The attack wounded four others, including Masoom Stanekzai, the head of the peace council’s secretariat, who has also been vital to advancing the talks, according to Afghan security officials. “Whoever did this decided they wanted to disrupt those talks,” a Western diplomat said.

Within hours of the killing, Northern Alliance leaders, most of whom are ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras, as well as some prominent Pashtun figures, were on television, denouncing the peace process and saying that the Taliban could not be trusted. The Taliban are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a former presidential candidate and Northern Alliance leader, summed up the sentiments heard from many Northern Alliance figures in the wake of the assassination: “This is a lesson for all of us that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this group, who has carried out so many crimes against the people of Afghanistan, are willing to make peace.”

Dr. Abdullah added: “We have to be realistic about what we are up against. We are up against people who don’t believe in any humanity. They assassinate people on the streets of Kabul, they assassinate those trying to achieve peace.” Last spring the Taliban had proclaimed that they would kill members of the High Peace Council.

“No one took it seriously and they should have and it is also time for President Karzai to wake up,” he said. “These are the people who he calls his ‘dear brothers,’ they are behind what happened.” He referred to President Hamid Karzai’s predilection for calling the insurgents “dear brothers” or “upset brothers.”

Mr. Karzai, who had planned a week of meetings in the United States and was at the United Nations when the attack occurred, cut short his trip and was on his way back to Afghanistan by Tuesday evening, after discussions with President Obama.

Calling Mr. Rabbani “an Afghan patriot who sacrificed his life,” Mr. Karzai pledged to continue to seek a peaceful way to end the fighting. “This will not deter us from continuing down the path we have started,” he said.

Mr. Obama called the assassination “a tragic loss.”

Western countries, including the United States, have made contacts with Taliban and former Taliban, hoping to jump-start the process. However, Western officials have emphasized that without strong Afghan involvement it will not be meaningful, because it is the Afghans who will have to trust each other enough to decide how to share power over the long term. That possibility seemed increasingly remote late Tuesday.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but several groups could have been involved, including the Taliban; the Haqqani Network, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan’s tribal areas and with affiliations to the country’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence; and even elements of Al Qaeda, given the method and precise and long-term planning involved in the assassination.

The attack, less than half a mile from the American Embassy, occurred in Mr. Rabbani’s home, indicating that he felt confident the meeting would be safe. Dr. Abdullah and other members of the High Peace Council said the bomber, whose name was Esmatullah, had been staying at a guest house in Kabul and had been in contact with the council over the past five months.

He had been in contact with the council through Rahmatullah Wahidyar, a peace council member who was a Taliban deputy minister for refugees and martyrs when the group ruled the country. Mr. Wahidyar, who has been living in Kabul for several years, was removed during the summer from the list of people facing United Nations sanctions. He served as a chairman of the High Peace Council’s detainee release committee, which worked to get people freed from prison, according to diplomats.

On Tuesday, Esmatullah called Mr. Wahidyar and said that he “he had a very serious message and a very important and positive message from the Quetta Shura” to give Mr. Rabbani, Dr. Abdullah said. The Quetta Shura is the Taliban leadership group.

Mr. Rabbani had just returned from a trip to Iran at around 4:30 p.m. and as soon as he was briefed by Mr. Stanekzai, the peace council official, with whom he worked closely, and by Mr. Wahidyar, the man named Esmatullah arrived.

Moments later, Mr. Rabbani was dead. Mr. Stanekzai was seriously wounded and Mr. Wahidyar was also wounded. Early Wednesday he was being questioned by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, but several people said it was unlikely that he had prior knowledge of the attack.

With a political career that spanned more than 40 years Mr. Rabbani, a native of the northern province of Badakhshan, came to symbolize the country with its strengths and weaknesses. He fought the Soviets in the 1980s and was a founder of Jamiat-e-Islami, a political party initially composed mainly of Tajiks.

Later, he served as a rather weak president from 1992 to 1996, when he was unable to abate the wrenching civil war that tore the country apart and paved the way for the Taliban takeover. When the Taliban were pushed out in 2001, he again moved into the political spotlight.

His death generated a sense of profound loss, not only among the northerners who knew him and fought the Russians with him, but also in the Pashtun south. For despite Pashtun doubts about whether Mr. Rabbani could be trusted, and suspicions that he was merely looking to burnish his legacy, his sincerity in his work over the past year had impressed people.

The 70-member High Peace Council, which had representatives of every stripe, had a nucleus of people who were working hard to reach out to senior Taliban commanders in Pakistan and also to persuade low-level Taliban fighters to join the government. Mr. Rabbani had traveled all over the country, setting up reconciliation councils in every province, and had gone to neighboring countries to push the project forward, impressing people with his dedication.

In Kandahar, people were aghast when the news broke of his death. A shopkeeper, Mohammed Raza, was glued to his radio, shaking his head in resignation and sadness.

“Afghanistan won’t be rebuilt,” he said. “Some elements don’t let people work in Afghanistan for peace. I am very sad. He was an elderly white-bearded man, respected by all Afghans, and he was working for peace. He paid attention to the south and was trying to end this ongoing riddle in Afghanistan, but the enemy of peace and of Afghanistan has killed him.”

Reporting was contributed by Sangar Rahimi, Sharifullah Sahak, Abdul Waheed Wafa and Jack Healy from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

More in Asia Pacific (16 of 49 articles)
World Briefing | ASIA: Japan: Typhoon Approaches

http://www.salon.com/print.html?URL=/op ... /19/bagram

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ ... /19/bagram

Monday, Sep 19, 2011 15:20 ET
Glenn Greenwald

U.S. to build new massive prison in Bagram

By Glenn Greenwald

As the Obama administration announced plans for hundreds of billions of dollars more in domestic budget cuts, it late last week solicited bids for the construction of a massive new prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Posted on the aptly named FedBizOps.Gov website which it uses to announce new privatized spending projects, the administration unveiled plans for "the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan" which includes "detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees." It will also feature "guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems." The announcement provided: "the estimated cost of the project is between $25,000,000 to $100,000,000."

In the U.S., prisons are so wildly overcrowded that courts are ordering them to release inmates en masse because conditions are so inhumane as to be unconstitutional (today, the FBI documented that a drug arrest occurs in the U.S. once every 19 seconds, but as everyone knows, only insane extremists and frivolous potheads advocate an end to that war). In the U.S., budgetary constraints are so severe that entire grades are being eliminated, the use of street lights restricted, and the most basic services abolished for the nation's neediest. But the U.S. proposes to spend up to $100 million on a sprawling new prison in Afghanistan.

Budgetary madness to the side, this is going to be yet another addition to what Human Rights First recently documented is the oppressive, due-process-free prison regime the U.S. continues to maintain around the world:

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, few Americans realize that the United States is still imprisoning more than 2800 men outside the United States without charge or trial. Sprawling U.S. military prisons have become part of the post-9/11 landscape, and the concept of "indefinite detention" -- previously foreign to our system of government -- has meant that such prisons, and their captives, could remain a legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the "war on terror" for the indefinite future. . . . .

The secrecy surrounding the U.S. prison in Afghanistan makes it impossible for the public to judge whether those imprisoned there deserve to be there. What’s more, because much of the military's evidence against them is classified, the detainees themselves have no right to see it. So although detainees at Bagram are now entitled to hearings at the prison every six months, they're often not allowed to confront the evidence against them. As a result, they have no real opportunity to contest it.

In one of the first moves signalling just how closely the Obama administration intended to track its predecessor in these areas, it won the right to hold Bagram prisoners without any habeas corpus rights, successfully arguing that the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision -- which candidate Obama cheered because it guaranteed habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees -- was inapplicable to Bagram. Numerous groups doing field work in Afghanistan have documented that the maintenance of these prisons is a leading recruitment tool for the Taliban and a prime source of anti-American hatred. Despite that fact -- or, more accurately (as usual), because of it -- the U.S. is now going to build a brand new, enormous prison there.

One last point: recall how many people insisted that the killing of Osama bin Laden would lead to a drawdown in the War on Terror generally and the war in Afghanistan specifically. Since then -- in just four months since bin Laden's corpse was dumped into the ocean -- the U.S. has done the following: renewed the Patriot Act for four years with no reforms; significantly escalated drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan; tried to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process; indicted a 24-year-old Muslim for "material support for Terrorism" for uploading an anti-American YouTube clip after he talked to the son of a Terrorist leader; pressured Iraq to keep U.S. troops in that country; argued that it has the virtually unlimited right to kill anyone it wants anywhere in the world; and now finalized plans to build a sprawling new prison in Afghanistan. If that's winding things down, I sure would hate to see what a redoubling of the American commitment to Endless War looks like.

-- Glenn Greenwald

by **Gouda** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 7:35 am

"Now, it is also true that we are still trying to kill and capture or neutralize them (the Haqqani network), and they are still trying to, you know, kill as many Americans, Afghans and coalition members as they can. In many instances where there is an ongoing conflict, you are fighting and looking to talk, and then eventually maybe you are fighting and talking. And then maybe you've got a ceasefire. And then maybe you are just talking."

--Hillary Clinton

U.S. open to Afghan peace deal including Haqqani

by **JackRiddler** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 6:38 pm

.

In the aftermath of the US strike from Afghanistan on a Pakistani border post, killing dozens of soldiers.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/NewsDetail.as ... in-15-days

US given 15 days to close Shamsi airbase

Updated 11 hours ago

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Cabinet's Defence Committee on Saturday ordered the United States to vacate the Shamsi airbase within 15 days and closed NATO supply lines into Afghanistan in response to a deadly cross-border NATO air strike.

The military’s top brass including CJSC, COAS and the Naval and Air Force chiefs attended the meeting.

The meeting was also attended by the Interior, Defence, Foreign, Information and Finance Ministers while senior minister Pervaiz Elahi and the secretary defence were also in attendance.

The Defence Committee that met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, hours after the Nato strike in Pakistan that killed 24 troops, categorically said that attacks on Pakistan check posts were unacceptable.

It was also decided that the Prime Minister would take the Parliament into confidence on Pak-US relations. Parliament will also be taken into confidence over the shape of Pakistan's future relations with Nato and ISAF.

Condemning the Nato attack, the committee said that the strike violated international laws.

The defence body said no compromise would be made on the sovereignty and protection of the country. "People and army will ensure Pakistan's sovereignty and integrity at any cost."

It termed the attacks on Pakistan check posts as completely unacceptable and rejected the labeling of today's event as accidental.

Google News, 11/26/11

Pakistan Tells US to 'Vacate' Air Base as Border Strike Inflames Tensions
Fox News - ‎40 minutes ago‎
AP Pakistan's government has ordered the US to "vacate" an air base used for suspected drone attacks, in retaliation for a NATO strike that allegedly killed two-dozen Pakistani soldiers, Fox News has confirmed.

NATO Strikes Kill Pakistani Forces, Raising Tensions
New York Times

Pakistan stops NATO supplies after deadly raid
Reuters

Highly Cited:Nato: 'Highly likely' we caused Pakistan troop deaths [ORLY?]
BBC News

From Pakistan:
Pakistan to have US close Shamsi airbase within 15 days
The News International

Opinion:
Should Australia pull its troops out of Afghanistan?
[What, 5 minutes after the US stuck its troops in Australia?]

by **seemslikeadream** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 7:48 pm

Published on Saturday, November 26, 2011 by Haaretz (Israel)
Pakistan Blocks NATO Supply Route to Afghanistan After Raid Kills 28
NATO helicopters attack military checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan; Pakistan calls the deadly raid a flagrant violation of its sovereignty.
by Reuters and Natasha Mozgovaya

NATO helicopters attacked a military checkpoint in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing up to 28 troops and prompting Pakistan to shut vital supply routes for NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said.

Pakistani protesters shout slogans against America and NATO in Lahore, Pakistan on Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011. Banner reads "Terrorist NATO and America quit our country". (AP Photo/K.M.Chaudary) The attack is the worst single incident of its kind since Pakistan uneasily allied itself with Washington in the days immediately following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. targets.

It comes as relations between the United States and Pakistan, its ally in the war on militancy, are already badly strained following the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces in a secret raid on the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad in May.

Pakistan called that raid a flagrant violation of its sovereignty.

The Foreign Office equally condemned Saturday's attack.

"Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has condemned in the strongest terms the NATO/ISAF attack on the Pakistani post," ministry spokeswoman Tehmina Janjua said in a statement. "On his direction, the matter is being taken (up) by the foreign ministry in the strongest terms with NATO and the U.S."

In a statement released following the incident, U.S. envoy to Pakistan Cameron Munter said that he regretted "the loss of life of any Pakistani servicemen, and pledge that the United States will work closely with Pakistan to investigate this incident."

The commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, said he had offered his condolences to the family of any Pakistani soldiers who "may have been killed or injured" during an "incident" on the border.

A spokesman for the force declined further comment on the nature of the "incident" and said an investigation was proceeding. It was not yet clear, he said, whether there had
been deaths or injuries.

Two military officials said that up to 28 troops had been killed and 11 wounded in the attack on the Salala checkpoint, about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the Afghan border.

The attack took place around 2 a.m. (2100 GMT) in the Baizai area of Mohmand, where Pakistani troops are fighting Taliban militants.

A senior Pakistani military officer said efforts were under way to bring the bodies of the slain soldiers to Ghalanai, the headquarters of Mohmand tribal region.

"The latest attack by NATO forces on our post will have serious repercussions as they without any reasons attacked on our post and killed soldiers asleep," he said, requesting
anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

About 40 Pakistani army troops were stationed at the outpost, military sources said. Two officers were reported among the dead.

NATO supply trucks and fuel tankers bound for Afghanistan were stopped at Jamrud town in the Khyber tribal region near the city of Peshawar hours after the raid, officials said.

"We have halted the supplies and some 40 tankers and trucks have been returned from the check post in Jamrud," Mutahir Zeb, a senior government official, told Reuters.

Another official said the supplies had been stopped for security reasons.

"There is possibility of attacks on NATO supplies passing through the volatile Khyber tribal region, therefore we sent them back towards Peshawar to remain safe," he said.

The border crossing at Chaman in Baluchistan was also closed, Frontier Corps officials said.

Pakistan is a vital land route for 49 percent of NATO's supplies to its troops in Afghanistan, a NATO spokesman said.

Reflecting the confusion of war in an ill-defined border area, an Afghan border police official, Edrees Momand, said joint Afghan-NATO troops near the outpost Saturday morning had detained several militants.

"I am not aware of the casualties on the other side of the border but those we have detained aren't Afghan Taliban," he said, implying they were Pakistani Taliban operating in
Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is often poorly marked, and differs between maps by up to five miles in some places.

The incident occurred a day after U.S. General John Allen met Pakistani Army Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani to discuss border control and enhanced cooperation.

A similar incident on Sept 30, 2009, which killed two Pakistani troops, led to the closure of one of NATO's supply routes through Pakistan for 10 days.

NATO apologized for that incident, which it said happened when NATO gunships mistook warning shots by the Pakistani forces for a militant attack.

The attack is expected to further worsen U.S.-Pakistan relations, already at one of their lowest points in history, following a tumultuous year that saw the bin Laden raid, the jailing of a CIA contractor, and U.S. accusations that Pakistan backed a militant attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

The United States has long suspected Pakistan of continuing to secretly support Taliban militant groups in a bid to secure influence in Afghanistan after most NATO troops leave in 2014. Saturday's incident will give Pakistan the argument that NATO is now attacking it directly.

"I think we should go to the United Nations Security Council against this," said retired Brigadier Mahmood Shah, former chief of security in the tribal areas. "So far, Pakistan is being blamed for all that is happening in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's point of view has not been shown in the international media."

He called the attack unprovoked and said Pakistan should respond by shooting down NATO aircraft and keeping the supply lines closed.

"Those who say that Pakistan cannot afford a war with the U.S. and NATO, I think we should realize that U.S. and NATO also cannot afford a war with Pakistan."

Other analysts, including Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, said Pakistan would protest and close the supply lines for some time, but that ultimately "things will get back to normal."

by **wintler2** » Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:22 pm

That US airstrike into Pakistan killing 26 Pak. soldiers came the day after this:

[url=http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\11\26\story_26-11-2011_pg1_3]No Dictation please![/url]

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan rejected on Friday the suggestion of US Ambassador Cameron Munter that the Pak-Iran gas pipeline project was not in its interest.

Talking to the media, Information Minister Firdaus Ashiq Awan said that Pakistan would not take dictation from any one on the project and would do whatever was in the interest of the country. She said that that Iran and Pakistan were neighbours and that the two countries had been involved in trade and enjoyed economic relations to their mutual advantage. About the Turkmenistan gas pipeline project, she said that there had been significant progress on it during the visit of the Turkmenistan president to Pakistan.

The US has been stalling the Iran-Pak pipeline for many years. I couldn't find any reports on how Pakistan feels about the Canada-US Keystone pipeline.

by **seemslikeadream** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 12:38 am

US Begins Pullout From Pakistan’s Shamsi Airbase
Planes Arrive at Secretive Drone Base to Pack Up After Eviction
by Jason Ditz, December 04, 2011

The secretive Shamsi Airbase in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province saw some new arrivals today, a pair of aircraft from the US arrived to begin the process of withdrawing military personnel, CIA agents and drones from the base.

Pakistan ordered the US out of the base last month after the deadly US attack on a pair of Pakistani bases in the Mohmand Agency. The attacks killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

The base’s history is somewhat convoluted, as the base had been given to the United Arab Emirates in the early 90′s, and it was Emirati officials, not Pakistan, which transferred the base to US control. Since then the base has been used primarily for surveillance drones, but with the drone war increasingly targeting Pakistani soil, it has become a growing issue.

The US control over the base is something of a poorly kept secret, as Pentagon officials continue to express official mystification at the orders and deny that any troops are deployed there, even as Pakistani officials confirm that the troops who are there are indeed leaving. Though US forces in Shamsi was an established fact for years, Pakistani officials only admitted it to parliament in May.

Which is a step up from the last time Shamsi was made an issue by the Pakistani government. In July Pakistan demanded the US leave the base and while publicly denying that they had any troops at the base anonymous US officials told top media outlets that they had no intention of actually leaving. With tensions soaring however, it seems the estimated 70 US personnel on base are now leaving while the getting is good.

by **wintler2** » Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:50 pm

There was a good radio doco today on Afghanistans extensive mineral wealth on ABCs Background Briefing. It adds flesh to the interesting paradox of western/US-allied mining corps not being the biggest winners from the conquest of Afghanistan; China appears to be the big winner so far.

So why would the US expend so much blood & gold to benefit China, when we are reminded hourly by MSM that China & US are supposedly competitors & potential or actual enemies?

Well, perhaps its quid pro quo for China's support of the 'Washington Consensus'/neoliberal BAU, eg. via purchase of US Treasuries. Could the last decade of US military aggression has been at least partly a payoff to China for supplying trillions in credit to US gov? It wouldn't be the first time that supposed enemies had been profiting from quiet cooperation.

by **JackRiddler** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 2:59 pm

.

Prashad, who I often like, predicts the end... about as many of the American heroes will remain in Afghanistan as remain of the Russian, British and Macedonian conquerors before them. But I'm afraid Mean Mr. Dinh's dark jest sings best to me.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/06/ ... awal/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

Weekend Edition January 6-8, 2012

Notes on Afghanistan
The Surge to Withdrawal

by VIJAY PRASHAD

I. Crisis.

Kabul sprawls like an injured lion. Its population has increased four-fold to 4.5 million over the past ten years. War refugees, fleeing the countryside for the relative safety of the citadel, find themselves in permanent slums (“Kabul Informal Settlements” in the bureaucratic argot). These slums (such as Chamane Babrack, Bagrami, Parwan Du, and Charahi Qambar) sit on hillsides or on the edges of Kabul, bursting with people whose lives have been measurably worsened by the ongoing conflict. The UN’s High Commission on Refugees and the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation squabble over definitions: which family has been displaced by war, and who is an economic migrant. These distinctions mean little to the 5.7 million people who have been displaced by the insecurity occasioned by the ten-year war. A friend who works in one of the UN agencies in Kabul tells me that matters have reached a crisis point. He has used the term “crisis” four times over the past few years.

The idea of Afghanistan as “crisis” has a lineage that stretches back at least to 1818. The British thrived on the idea of Afghanistan as ungovernable, since it gave them license to meddle in its internal affairs under the pretense of establishing governance. The Afghans would have none of it, and even at the high-point of British power, in the 1850s, the Marquess of Dalhousie had to admit that relations between Afghans and the British were as “sullen quiescence on either side, without offence but without goodwill or intercourse.” Intrigue between the powers meant that the Afghans could be disregarded, as they were from the 1810s into the present. Dalhousie’s senior, Lord Ellenborough wrote in his diary in 1829, “I feel confident that we shall have to fight the Russians on the Indus, and I have long had a presentiment that I should meet them there, and gain a great battle. All dreams, but I have had them a long time.” That dream became reality a hundred and fifty years later. The U. S. and the English rushed into action in 1979 when the Soviets invaded, beginning a secret war that created Bin Laden and foisted the Taliban upon the desperate Afghans (the National Archives in Britain released some files this week that reveal details of this secret war). The idea of Afghan anarchy was sufficient for the West to either intervene with force or to disregard the well-being of the people.

That disregard has become catastrophic in itself. The UN reports that most of the 7.3 million Afghans who now rely on emergency food assistance will not be able to access it (largely because pledges to the World Food Program have declined as a consequence of the world credit crisis). Food riots are to be expected in the short term.

II. Withdrawal.

Over the past two years, the issue of civilian casualties had bedeviled the relationship between the U. S.-led coalition and the Karzai government. Pressure from tribal elders as much as from the beleaguered human rights community in Afghanistan made it impossible for Karzai to any longer ignore the harsh techniques of warfare used by the technologically superior U. S.-NATO forces. Aerial attacks (some by drones) had wreaked havoc among the population, with civilian casualties (poorly recorded in the best circumstances) on the uptick. The focus of attention became the “night raids,” used routinely by the Coalition to pick up suspected insurgents. Over ten months last year, the “night raids” themselves accounted for the deaths of 1,500 civilians. Reporting that number the United Nations notes, “U. S. night raids are by far the largest cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.”

President Karzai has refused to sign the Strategic Partnership document with the United States until the NATO forces stop using “night raids.” “NATO-led ISAF forces have killed Afghan civilians for no reason,” said Karzai’s office. The pressure on Karzai not to bend on this issue is one of the main levers to eject NATO-U. S. troops from the region. A similar problem with extra-territorial protection of U. S. troops led to their ejection from Iraq. The United States prefers to depart hastily from Afghanistan as well rather than allow its armed forces to be accountable to an occupied people, or even to international law.

Rules for withdrawal were set in the 19th century. The British discovered early enough that technological superiority would surround them with dead bodies but not political victories. Their withdrawals took place through manipulation of the internal political dynamics in Afghanistan, using people like Dost Muhammed when it suited them, and tossing them aside when it no longer did. The Soviets opened up negotiations with the mujahidin before they departed as well (documented in Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan). They hastened across the Amu Darya, abandoning the country into a catastrophic civil war (1992-1996) that killed more people than during the Soviet invasion itself. It was out of this chaos that the Taliban emerged as a kind of demented stability.

Over the course of the past year, the United States and the Afghan government have tried to cut a deal with the Taliban. Burnt by the United States after Mullah Omar’s representatives reached out in the days after September 11, the Taliban have been suspicious of any opening. Tayeb Agha, Mullah Omar’s spokesperson for the past decade, was key to the current discussions, and would have brought that healthy suspicion from the past to the forefront. In late December, the Afghan Peace Council’s international advisor, Mohammad Ismail Qasimyar, announced that six or seven Taliban members and their families had departed South Asia for the emirate of Qatar. There they were going to set up a liaison office, a “post-box” to open direct discussion with the United States, mediated through the increasingly important regime of Qatar. It is to be seen what will come out of these negotiations: at a minimum the Taliban want Afghans imprisoned in Guantanamo to be released into Afghanistan as well as the departure of the foreign forces, while the U. S. and NATO are eager for the creation of “conflict-free” zones in the country. The gap between the two is going to take considerable confidence to bridge.

III. Politics.

The use of Qatar is significant. It indicates that the United States, and perhaps the Taliban as well, want to sideline the government of Pakistan from these negotiations (there is a suggestion from some who know that the assassination of the Afghan grandee Burhanuddin Rabbani last year might have been carried out with the collusion of Pakistani intelligence). All signs indicate that this withdrawal will simply be a repeat of the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89 and the British withdrawal a century before that. It will abjure the region, and play one favorite against another, leaving the country to the mercy of a bloodbath.

Over the past decade, the United States and NATO have worked with almost deliberate intent against a regional solution. The creation of the idea of “Af-Pak” turned out to be a dangerous illusion. It seems, in retrospect, a convenient way to allow drones to attack civilian areas in northern Pakistan rather than to consider Afghanistan’s future in terms of its neighborhood. The United States brought too much global baggage to Afghanistan. Chinese economic clout entered the country in the extraction and trade sectors, but the Chinese were never brought in as political actors. Iran has considerable influence in western Afghanistan, but the U. S. antipathy to Iran (partly drawn through Washington’s confluence with Israel) made it impossible to allow Tehran to play a central role in Afghanistan’s stabilization. India’s close relationship with the backbone of the educated middle class and hence the State bureaucracy (including Karzai, who studied in India) would have made its role crucial. Instead, the Bush administration forged a nuclear deal with India that angered the Pakistanis; the quid pro quo for the nuclear deal was for India to vote against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005. Relations between Pakistan and India soured, and that between Iran and India entered their lowest point. The potential for any regional dialogue was compromised by the itch of the Great Power.

The United States wanted the Afghanistan endeavor to be a joint venture between the G7-NATO and the Afghans, with the Pakistanis and the Central Asian states playing the doormat. The Bonn meeting (December 2001) and the Tokyo meeting (January 2002) set the parameters: NATO would provide the guns, and the G7 would open their wallets. It was a deliberate snub to the regional powers. Russia, China and the Central Asian states had already been involved in a campaign against the Taliban in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The Bush administration disregarded the SCO, and took the G7-NATO route. Last year, Obama tried to open up dialogue with the SCO, but in a ham-handed way: the U. S. wanted to have a directive role in the SCO, bringing in Turkey, India and Pakistan as well as offering its leadership over the SCO. The SCO was loath to become another Organization of American States or an Asian offshoot of NATO. Despite Hillary Clinton’s trips to Dushanbe and the U. S. Congress’ removal of sanctions against Uzbekistan, it seems unlikely that any rapprochement with the SCO is on the cards.

The habits of imperialism forestall a genuine dialogue with and about Afghanistan. The United States will exit Afghanistan in the next few years. None of its promises of health and well-being, democracy and women’s rights will be realized. These failures cannot be placed on the culture of Afghanistan, for the country had been far along the road to its own kind of modernity by the 1960s. Fingers of blame for the catastrophe of Afghanistan in its most recent phase must point directly to the capitals of the G7, with the longest finger vibrating toward Washington, DC.

VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/06/ ... -mad/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

Weekend Edition January 6-8, 2012

Horror and Puppetry
The Whims of an Empire Gone Mad

by LINH DINH

Meat, water, sock or political, it’s not easy being a puppet. Even before the first word tumbles from your mouth, people crack up, and your face alone can bring down the house. Take this passage from Hamid Karzai, from a 2004 address to a joint session of the American Congress:

Our national army is being trained by American forces, American troops, and wherever we have deployed them the Afghan people have welcomed them. We have initiated the fight against narcotics to save our children, to save your children and children across the world from the evil of addiction to drugs.

It’s amazing the Capitol was still standing after these one liners. Need I remind you that Karzai spent much of his adult life on the payroll of the CIA, the world’s biggest drug gang? And that his brother, since assassinated, was a notorious drug dealer? As for the Afghan people’s love for Karzai’s army, it now depends on four times the number of American troops to keep it from disintegrating or being overrun.

The night’s biggest howler, however, came when Karzai related this tale about two American soldiers in Kandahar:

Somebody, a terrorist, threw a grenade at them. The grenade landed in their vehicle. They took the grenade. Instead of throwing it into the street where there were people around them, civilians, these heroic men stuck the grenade under their seat. The grenade exploded. Fortunately, they survived. But they were badly injured. To us, this was also an example of heroism and care for humanity, and we are proud of these two American soldiers. These stories tell a tale of partnership, tell a tale of joint struggle, tell a tale of care and courage and care for humanity.

I’m sorry for being skeptical, but in the long an(n)als of propaganda or warfare, I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that a soldier placed a live grenade under his butts (and jewels). It just doesn’t happen, OK? Even if his mother was standing in that crowded street, I doubt he would shove it right there.

As an American puppet, Karzai had to mouth such absurdities, but these jokes wouldn’t go over too well at home, especially as American atrocities avalanched. When even the New York Times had to report that Afghan children were being blown up just for fun by American chopper crews, Karzai had to protest. He couldn’t follow his supposed outrage to its conclusion, however, by demanding that America quit Afghanistan, because if there were no more American troops in Afghanistan, there would also be no more Karzai… in Afghanistan.

Even Karzai’s own vice-president accused him of being a puppet, so as an American stooge, he had to appear as an uber-Afghan. Thus, the lambskin hat, the bright robe, the tunic. No ordinary suit and tie, Allah forbid, as found on the Syrian President, enemy of the West, or just a discount, JC Penney jacket, as draped on the Iranian leader.

Now, a political puppet can certainly outgrow his role. No longer useful, he can be shoved aside or even killed. Conversely, if he feels that he no longer needs his patron, that he has used this support long enough to consolidate his own power, he can also ditch the patron to stand on his own two feet. This, Karzai hasn’t come close to achieve. Quite the reverse. As recent events have proven, Karzai has become even more superfluous.

Karzai’s only justification for being was that he was an alternative to the Taliban, so when the US started to negotiate with these same Taliban, he went berserk, especially as neither sides bothered to bring him into their discussions. Karzai’s indignation changed nothing, however, so now he’s endorsing this rapprochement between his Yankee masters and his political enemy.

To prove that he’s his own puppet, after all, and a nationalist and humanist, to boot, Karzai’s now demanding that the US returns Bagram Prison to Afghanistan. Citing its atrocious human rights abuses, Karzai considers this complex a violation of Afghan sovereignty. Of course he’s right, but then everything America does in Afghanistan is a violation of Afghan sovereignty, because America shouldn’t be there at all. America’s installation of Hamid Karzai is a violation of Afghan sovereignty.

Since the American invasion, thousands of Afghans have had to suffer indefinite detention without access to a lawyer, often after having been yanked from their home in the middle of the night. Many have been tortured, with some killed in custody. At present, there are over 1,700 prisoners in Bagram. With the National Defense Authorization Act, Americans can now look forward to the same sadistic, inhuman treatment, but who, and how many?

Since there will be no legal presentation or due process, with everything done in secret, you will never know, will you, unless it’s you yourself who are suddenly stripped naked, hung from the ceiling and beaten, forced to endure unbearable cold and to curl up naked on the floor in an empty cell day after day, without any evidence presented whatsoever, with no basis at all for your open-ended suffering but the whims of an empire gone mad.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

By the way, if you hate my color choices you should just switch your skin away from the gloomy default and to the lovely happy-bright Silverfox (with the added radical touch of black text on light background). Then it will all make sense.

Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Re: Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

Who is online