Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

[American Dream]

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Pakistan's Democracy Movement Flexes its Muscles


In an apparent, but by no means guaranteed, victory for pro-democracy forces, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was forced to reinstate Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and other judges dismissed by the Musharraf regime in 2007.

Chaudhry, a lightning-rod for opposition to military rule, resumed his duties March 22, when supporters "of the reinstated jurist raised the Pakistani flag at his residence, in keeping with a vow made by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before her assassination 15 months ago," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Last week's announcement by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was a major climb down for the Zardari administration and followed an escalating revolt against his authoritarian rule. The move however, came after intense behind-the-scenes pressure by the United States and the Army's General Headquarters in Rawalpindi.

More than a thousand activists, including lawyers, party workers, left-wing and labor organizers had been arrested when the crisis accelerated February 25. The Pakistan High Court barred former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and his younger brother Shabaz, toppled as the Governor of Punjab, from holding elected office, sparking outrage among citizens who believed Zardari had engineered the move.

The government has ordered that arrested protesters be released from jail and house arrest. Ali Ahmad Kurd, a leader of the protesting lawyers, told The New York Times, "No country can progress without an independent judiciary and the government--by restoring the chief justice and other judges--has also realized it, and we think it is a big success."

Among the lawyers' most prominent demands, now realized, was the restoration of Chief Justice Choudhry. Toppled by the Musharraf dictatorship, Choudhry had championed the rights of the dispossessed and disappeared, some of whom were "rendered" to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and CIA "black sites."

In addition to hauling intelligence officers into court and demanding that illegally detained citizens receive a proper hearing, the Chief Justice enraged the country's venal ruling class by blocking the privatization of the Pakistan Steel Mills Corporation.

Despite a pledge to restore the Court when he assumed the presidency in September 2008, Zardari reneged on that pledge, sparking the political crisis that ended in a route for the President.

Fearful that Choudhry would overturn the shameful National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), an unprincipled agreement brokered by the criminal Bush regime, President-General Musharraf and the late Benazir Bhutto, Zardari imposed executive rule in Punjab. As part of the U.S.-brokered deal, Musharraf had agreed to drop corruption charges against the Bhutto clan.

The die for Zardari was cast March 15, after several hours of pitched battles in Lahore between activists and police. After cruelly beating demonstrators and hurling tear gas grenades at peaceful protesters, police cordons melted away leaving the city center to triumphant pro-democracy activists.

The New York Times reported March 16, that Saturday's Lahore clash transformed into a giant antigovernment protest when "phalanxes of riot policemen here in Lahore melted away rather than continue to confront protesters who had rallied around the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, when he defied a house arrest order early Sunday."

Additionally, "party workers armed with cranes" began dismantling roadblocks by police "at junctions along the route to the capital." One of the senior officials of the Lahore government, chief magistrate Sajjad Bhutta, "told reporters he refused to carry out what he called the illegal acts of the police crackdown. He appeared among the crowds on the mall, surrounded by cheers and waving flags," according to the Times.

Top police officials in Lahore, Punjab and even nationally, refused to carry out Zardari's orders and resigned. The World Socialist Web Site reported, these "included the Deputy Inspector General and the Superintendent of Police for Lahore. In quitting his post as Pakistan's Deputy Attorney-General, Abdul Hai Gilani accused police of torturing protesters."

With the situation spinning out of control, Aitzaz Ahsan, a former PPP official and leader of the lawyers' movement declared, "The writ of the government has ended. Nobody can stop us from reaching Islamabad."

Meanwhile behind the scenes, frantic phone calls from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama's special envoy Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson demanded Zardari bring the crisis to a halt.

Dawn reported that "US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told President Zardari and opposition leader and PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif over the weekend US aid could be at risk unless they defused a crisis over a top judge, US officials said on Monday."

U.S. efforts, according to the Karachi-based newspaper, were "coordinated with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband" and "had exerted strong pressure for a deal." In the aftermath of the crisis, Clinton told journalists that the decision to reinstate Chaudhry "was a first step for much-needed reconciliation and political compromise in Pakistan"--on U.S. terms.

According to The New York Times Holbrooke said the United States applauded "the statesmanlike act by President Zardari and hope that it will help defuse a dangerous confrontation so that Pakistan, with the help of its many friends, can address the nation's pressing and urgent needs."

Pivotal to resolving the situation, the Pentagon had repeated consultations with Army Chief of Staff General Asfaq Pervez Kayani. While the Times claimed that "General Kayani has said he wants to keep the army out of politics," after prodding by Washington Kayani reportedly laid down the law to Zardari and Gilani after meetings on Sunday.

Dawn revealed Wednesday that "Pakistan's army chief played a crucial role behind the scenes to resolve the long march crisis, illustrating how a military with a record of seizing power could use its influence in the future, analysts said."

After nearly a decade of incompetent and corrupt rule under Musharraf, the Army now prefers to control political events from the shadows.

Security analyst Ikram Sehgal said the army was reverting to the sort of role it played through most of the 1990s, when it declined to take power but exerted its influence discreetly during periods of political turmoil.

"The army wants desperately to keep out of the situation. They realise they do not have the capabilities to run a government," Sehgal said.

"One will definitely see the army playing a role behind the scenes ... If they stepped back in it would probably be on a Bangladesh model: set up a technocratic government and run the people who run the government," he said. ("Pakistan military helped broker end to long march," Dawn, March 18, 2009)

This is a "model" the Global Godfather in Washington will likely exploit, especially as the Obama administration seeks to expand U.S. military operations--including increased drone attacks and commando assaults by CIA paramilitary officers and U.S. Special Forces--into Baluchistan, according to The New York Times.

America's Role

It is no secret that the United States, first under Bush, and now under Obama, view Pakistan as the "central front" in imperialism's oxymoronic "war on terror." For decades, the U.S. has viewed Pakistan as little more than a "strategic asset" to advance America's geopolitical goals in Central- and South Asia.

While "terrorism" and "stability operations" in Afghanistan are the pretexts for increased military intervention across the region, resource extraction and pipeline politics are the unspoken reasons for military escalation. Amid a backdrop of global capitalist economic meltdown and crisis, imperialism is playing a desperate hand to gain control over the region's vast oil and gas reserves from their geopolitical rivals, Russia and China.

Despite the crisis inside the country, CIA drones killed 24 people in tribal area of Kurram March 13, in a demonstration that come what may, the United States will do as it pleases. 50 other people were wounded in the attack, said to have targeted a "training center" run by the Taliban. The World Socialist Web Site reports,

On Thursday, US Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus and Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, delivered a closed-door briefing to leading members of the US Senate in what was apparently part of the preparation for the public presentation of the new strategy for waging the war that was first launched by the administration of George W. Bush nearly seven and a half years ago.

In an appearance on PBS Television's "Charlie Rose Show," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the strategy review would focus on "the safe haven in Pakistan, making sure that Afghanistan doesn't provide a capability in the long run or an environment in which Al Qaeda could return or the Taliban could return." (Bill Van Auken, "U.S. missiles kill 24 in Pakistan," World Socialist Web Site, March 14, 2009)

While the Zardari government has mendaciously called on the U.S. to halt attacks by CIA Predator and Reaper drones in NWFP and FATA, as I reported February 22, the CIA and Special Forces have been using the Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan for more that a year as a launching pad for drone attacks.

The New York-based whistleblowing intelligence and security website Cryptome published a series of satellite images as part of their "Eyeball" series on February 18. One image, captured in 2006 before construction of a huge hangar meant to conceal America's robot killing machines was completed, show Predator drones on the Shamsi air strip.

According to Cryptome's anonymous correspondent, "This is a very capable base facility with a large hangar in addition to the two Predator support hangars. Nearby is a large secured compound (appears empty) which could support up to a battalion of special ops and associated command and control. The large parking area inside the compound is perfect to land choppers and leave with relative security. All security measures seem fresh." ("Surging Towards Disaster in the 'Afpak Theatre'," Antifascist Calling, February 22, 2009)

Despite Zardari's compliance with the Global Godfather's demands to use his nation as a launching pad for attacks on Pakistan's citizens, the question remains: how long will the Army's General Headquarters in Rawalpindi continue to support his discredited regime?

Army Chief of Staff Kayani, a former ISI director under Musharraf, is the current darling of the political and military elite in Washington, one with whom they can "do business."

With Obama's "Afpak" policy review nearing completion and after Zardari initially rejected the "compromise" brokered by Prime Minister Gilani and Kayani--with active "encouragement" by the U.S. Pentagon and State Department--will the United States, ever-fearful that a democratic alternative will "send the wrong message" to Pakistan's oppressed workers and farmers, opt for the military "alternative"?

Meanwhile, the "Old Mole" Reemerges

In Pakistan, the struggle for civil liberties and basic democratic rights, is inextricably tied to "the severing," as the World Socialist Website points out, "of the Pakistani-US strategic alliance, and the dismantling of the vast Pakistani military apparatus."

One sign that the grip of the discredited PPP and PML-N, neoliberal parties that adhere to World Bank-IMF dictates, may be loosening up is the emergence of left-wing alternatives after decades of right-wing domination.

Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the socialist Labour Party Pakistan (LPP), told researcher Ron Jacobs that "what is transpiring in Pakistan is mass power."

While conceding that the Lawyers' Movement could not have emerged victorious without the rightist PML-N and the far-right Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), which had hitched their political wagons to the movement for opportunist ends, leftist forces have garnered new supporters based on the political reemergence of the trade unions and militant farmers' organizations. According to Tariq, some 5,000 new supporters have joined LPP since January.

While the corporate media in Europe and the United States portray Pakistan as a nation in need of rule by a strong hand to stem the jihadi tide, the socialist and labor movements are reemerging with a vengeance, though you wouldn't know if you only read The New York Times or watched CNN.

As the situation heated-up, leftists' and labor leaders fell victim to particularly brutal attacks by the police and security services across Pakistan. The LPP reported that Nasir Mansoor, the organization's national labor secretary, was beaten up by Karachi cops and whisked away in an ambulance March 12 to an unknown location.

Dozens of LPP members and other left-wingers had been seized by police. In addition to LPP, a founding organization of the radical leftist Awami Jamhoori Tehreek (People's Democratic Movement, AJT), members of the National Workers Party, Awami Tehreek, Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP), Pakistan Mazdoor Mehaz (PMM) and the Inqalabi Workers Committee had been seized.

Opposed to IMF-dictated economic "reforms," religious sectarianism and state repression, AJT has pledged "to strengthen the workers and peasants organization and special attention will be given to the issues of women and minorities. It calls for the abolition of all discriminatory laws against women and minorities. It has discussed the draft programme of the AJT which is mainly an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist and feudal programme."

A threat to the existing set-up in Pakistan, the AJT was formed as a principled left-win response to the military bureaucracy and feudalist oligarchs who rely on the Army and jihadists' to maintain their rule. According to the AJT's founding document,

We consider that the religious extremism and militancy has grown beyond proportion, and is a new form of fascism. These forces blunt the people's social consciousness and keep them out of political process that resultantly facilitates exploitative forces to maintain an unjust and oppressive social order. The world imperialist forces have time and again used the religious extremists for their objectives. The ruling establishment in Pakistan has deep relationship with these forces, which have been extensively deployed within and beyond Pakistan by them. This anti-people lobby is responsible for promoting aggressive religious sectarianism in the country and they havoc played on Pakistan society in the name of religion. They are responsible for permanent military infiltration in our constitution and administrative structure. Their collaboration with the military junta has seriously prejudiced national independence and democratic image of the Pakistan state. (Programme of the AJT)

Asked by Jacobs to define the current situation in Pakistan, Tariq said:

There are multiple reasons for the constant unrest in Pakistan. The foremost reason is the inability of the ruling classes in Pakistan to solve all the basic problems faced by the masses. There exists a feudalistic relationship and land is not distributed to peasants. This brings a very feudal culture and atmosphere in Pakistan. Both the main bourgeois parties, PPP and PMLN, do not speak about it anymore. The major parts of the main leadership in both parties are from the feudal class. They use the ownership of land for political purposes and to win the elections. Sixty-one years of independence have brought no real independence for the majority of the people. This is the real crisis of leadership in Pakistan. Both main parties rely on the military generals. Even in this (most recent) crisis over the days from 12-16 March 2009, the army chief was mediating between the president, prime minister and the Nawaz brothers. The Nawaz brothers (said they) were very thankful to the "positive" role of the army chief.

The failure of reformist parties like the PPP paved the way for the growth of religious extremism. The extremists were and are supported by a major section of the army. It is a very complex relationship between the rich, the army and religious extremists. It changes and adjusts all the time. 9/11 made an indispensable difference to this relationship. The fact is that the support of the ruling class for religious extremism is not open as was the case in the past, but the presence of the American forces in the region has given a real momentum for the growth of the religious fundamentalists. (Ron Jacobs, "An Interview with Farooq Tariq: Pakistan in Turmoil," CounterPunch, March 20-22, 2009)

Neither Zardari, Sharif nor other capitalist grifters are capable of resolving Pakistan's systemic crisis. Despite decades of harsh, merciless rule by oligarchs and the military, the Pakistani people are flexing their democratic muscles. Their struggle for basic economic and social rights despite the odds stacked against them, serve as an inspiration to all those who believe "another world is possible!"

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... itary.html

As Washington Escalates Military Operations, American Officials "Discover" ISI-Taliban Nexus


Long considered the realm of "conspiracy buffs" The New York Times, citing anonymous "American government officials," have belatedly "discovered" that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) is aiding the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

That ISI operatives were reportedly involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, the ostensible reason for the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan remains as they say, "off the table." Yet, as The History Commons reports, Operation Diamondback uncovered a 2001 plot jointly-run by ISI operatives and organized crime figures to illegally purchase weapons, including Stinger missiles and nuclear components, for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. According to The History Commons, citing The Washington Post and MSNBC:

Informant Randy Glass plays a key role in the sting, and has thirteen felony fraud charges against him reduced as a result, serving only seven months in prison. Federal agents involved in the case later express puzzlement that Washington higher-ups did not make the case a higher priority, pointing out that bin Laden could have gotten a nuclear bomb if the deal was for real. Agents on the case complain that the FBI did not make the case a counterterrorism matter, which would have improved bureaucratic backing and opened access to FBI information and US intelligence from around the world. ("Sting Operation Exposes Al-Qaeda, ISI, and Drug Connections: Investigators Face Obstacles to Learn More," The History Commons, no date)

In 1999, ISI operative Rajaa Gulum Abbas is recorded telling Glass as he gestures towards the World Trade Center in New York during an earlier phase of Operation Diamondback, "those towers are coming down." Yet authorities fail to stop the plot and two years later, 3,000 people are murdered by terrorists in New York and Washington.

The appearance of these reports in the corporate media arrive as the United States prepares a "surge" of some 17,000 American troops into Afghanistan and as the Obama administration escalates CIA drone attacks inside Pakistan. On March 18, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is contemplating "broadening the target area" to include "a major insurgent sanctuary in and around the city of Quetta."

Extending military operations into the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, with the potential for "surging" CIA paramilitary officers and Special Operations troops to "kill or capture" senior Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives represents a significant escalation of the conflict.

In a March 27 announcement outlining America's new regional strategy in the "Afpak theatre," President Obama vowed to send an additional 4,000 troops under cover of "training" recruits for the Afghan National Army. The Pentagon plans to raise the total strength of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2011.

Echoing Bush administration pronouncements, Obama told diplomats and soldiers headed to Afghanistan, "I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." Employing rhetoric designed to sell the war to a sceptical public, Obama went on to say: "Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe havens in Pakistan."

As I reported March 7, with a recently concluded agreement amongst Pakistani Taliban fighters and their Afghan counterparts, the prospects for a bloody spring offensive are a nettlesome reminder that U.S. regional plans are so many illusions soon to be cast to the four winds.

Orchestrated by Afghan Taliban chieftain Mullah Mohammed Omar in coordination with Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), North Waziristan commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur and South Waziristan "emir" Maulvi Nazeer--grouped under the banner of the Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen (Council of United Holy Warriors, SIM)--the United States and their NATO allies face the prospect of ferocious multi-front attacks.

According to the Times, ISI support "consists of money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance to Taliban commanders." Despite billions of dollars in military assistance to the corrupt Musharraf regime and the equally venal Zardari administration, Pakistan's search for "strategic depth" against their geopolitical rival India has only resulted in a furtherance of ISI/Army connivance with the Islamist far-right. The Times avers:

Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan's spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections. (Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, "Afghan Strikes by Taliban Get Pakistan Help, U.S. Aides Say," The New York Times, March 26, 2009)

Citing "electronic surveillance and trusted informants," anonymous Pakistani officials have denied these ties "were strengthening the insurgency." While publicly denying state links to Islamist insurgents, the Army and ISI have historical ties--as does the CIA--to organizations such as the Taliban and the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda.

As readers of Antifascist Calling and websites such as Global Research and the World Socialist Web Site are well aware, for three decades the United States has pursued a ruthless policy in pursuit of its own narrow interests. Far from being concerned with the economic and social well-being of the people of Central- and South Asia, America's imperialist project is designed solely for regional military domination and resource extraction vis-à-vis their geopolitical rivals Russia and China.

Indeed, since the fall of Kabul's socialist government, the United States has singlemindedly pursued policies to control the vast petrochemical resources of Eurasia.

As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky pointed out, anticipating the current political demonization of the Pakistani people as a selling-point to secure the giant oil and natural gas reserves of Central Asia for American corporations,

Demonization serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth. The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.

The US led war in the broader Middle East-Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region. ...

The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under "free market" supervision. This control also extends to strategic oil and gas pipeline corridors (e.g. Afghanistan). ("The 'Demonization' of Muslims and the Battle for Oil," Global Research, January 4, 2007)

All of the features described above are in play today. That media outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have discovered ISI-Taliban-al-Qaeda "connections"--while glossing over and suppressing--America's operational links to these same terrorist and narcotrafficking networks, is indicative of the dire straits faced by an economically depleted and politically bankrupt empire.

Drawing (false) distinctions amongst the welter of jihadist groups that American and Pakistan have cultivated since the 1980s, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, retired admiral Dennis Blair, told Congress that the CIA's counterparts in crime, the ISI, believe there are some that "have to be hit and that we should cooperate on hitting, and there are others they think don't constitute as much of a threat to them and that they think are best left alone."

While pursuing Mehsud and others who threaten the state's writ, the Army has been loathe to run to ground proxies such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, veteran narcotrafficking jihadists' who were key Pakistani-linked commanders during the anti-Soviet jihad. Considered "strategic assets" by ISI, Haqqani and Hekmatyar's networks direct fire inside Afghanistan and are therefore considered candidates "best left alone" in Blair's laconic phrase.

However, according to anonymous officials it was none other than the Haqqani network, in collusion with ISI operatives who helped plan last summer's Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul that killed 54 and wounded dozens of others.

While American and European officials are hell-bent on finding (or manufacturing) "good Taliban" with whom they can negotiate a climb down, Pentagon analysts are far-less sanguine of the prospects.

A March 1, 2009 presentation for deploying troops prepared by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2 and the TRADOC Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA), posted by the intelligence and security website Cryptome, lays out the formidable problems posed by the insurgency--and the extent of Pakistani involvement. Under the heading, "Insurgent Syndicate Characteristics," TRISA analysts aver:

The nature of the enemy in AF HAS NOT CHANGED:

* This enemy is primarily Pashtun in nature and Sunni Muslim (Wahhabi and Deobandi).

* This enemy is funded by the drug economy and Gulf Arab money (for religious reasons).

* This enemy is trained and assisted by ISID or ISID affiliated elements (Kashmiris/HuJI/LeT/HuM, with some Uzbeks.

* They are assisted by AQ [al-Qaeda] in terms of funding, foreign fighters, and other assistance.

* Logistics is the Achilles heel of ISAF operations in AF. Pak control of FATA and the Torkhum Gate. ("HB 9 Paramilitary Terrorist Insurgent Groups: Afghanistan," U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, March 1, 2009, p. 5)

As if to drive home the point that "logistics is the Achilles heel" of U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan, Dawn reported March 29 that "hundreds of suspected Taliban armed with rockets and Kalashnikovs entered the Farhad terminal at about 2am and set on fire four vehicles, three cranes, a mini-truck and six power generators." The Al-Faisal terminal near Peshawar is a major jump-off point supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan.

TRISA's "Threat Lay Down" (p. 7) estimates that some 60,000 insurgent fighters are currently arrayed against U.S. and NATO forces. Estimating Afghan Taliban strength at 30,000 fighters, fully half of the estimated number of insurgents are Pakistani. These include: TTP, 15,000; TNSM, 5,000; Lashkar-e-Toiba, 3,000; Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, 2,000.

With 2,000 Al-Qaeda commandos (Brigade 055) and smaller contingents drawn from the former Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and other Central Asian and Middle Eastern factions, it becomes clear that Pakistan's intelligence services, given continued support to "moderates" such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as well as to terrorist outfits such as LET and LEJ are a major source of support behind the insurgency.

This is all the more remarkable considering that LET commandos, operating in close coordination with ISI and Dawood Ibrahim's organized crime-linked D Company carried out last November's attacks in Mumbai, whilst LEJ was reportedly behind the assault on Sri Lanka's national cricket team in Lahore earlier this month.

Significantly, TRISA analysts claim that amongst the "Warlord Militias" (p. 10) currently backing Hamid Karzai's government, their operations unsurprisingly, are also financed through "crime, narco-trafficking, smuggling, illegal taxation, including illegal road checkpoints for taxation." One might reasonably infer that U.S. operations amount to little more, despite the role of the narcotics trade on both sides of the "Afpak" divide, than a battle for control over lucrative drug manufacturing and smuggling routes.

Ironically enough, despite the grave threat to Pakistani citizens in Swat Valley, indeed throughout the entire country, the Zardari administration cut a deal last month with local TTP commander Maulana Fazlullah.

The sociopathic son-in-law of Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-i-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, TNSM) leader Maulana Sufi Mohammed, a close ally of Mullah Omar, Fazlullah's criminal network has instituted a reign of terror in Swat under the banner of "Sharia law." Despite the truce, TTP militants continue to murder Swat residents and enhance the reach of various criminal enterprises, ranging from extortion, kidnapping and illegal logging through heroin processing for export.

Pakistani workers and farmers continue to pay a heavy price for the state's move to mollify the jihadist Frankenstein. For decades, having proven themselves politically useful when it comes to murdering leftists, trade union activists or uppity women and cultural workers, reactionary forces such as the TTP or the ever-pliant Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are a shadowy "third force" that can be counted on by "Military Inc." to "keep the rabble in line."

In this context, "holy warriors" linked to the TTP carried out a horrific suicide bombing inside a mosque packed with worshipers in the Khyber region on Friday, killing 50 people and wounding 158 others.

Dawn reported that the two-storey structure collapsed onto the heads of worshipers after a suicide bomber "jumped into the Friday congregation and blew himself up just when the prayers were about to begin."

Eyewitnesses told Dawn they believe the casualty figures are being under-reported by authorities and that upwards of 70 people may have been killed by the blast and the subsequent collapse of the mosque's ceiling.

The News reported Saturday that upwards of 76 people had been killed in the vicious blast, including the prayer leader, his brother, as well as truck drivers carrying goods to neighboring Afghanistan.

There were tragic scenes at the site of the explosion. Many of the dead were mutilated beyond recognition. Rescuers and grief-stricken relatives of the missing and the dead were collecting pieces of bodies in the hope of locating their near and dear ones. A goat killed by the blast was also lying near the destroyed mosque. ...

Meanwhile, some residents and injured belonging to the villages of Rekalay and Kufar Tangi said they saw aircraft flying above the area since Friday morning. They feared the blast at the mosque could have been caused by a missile fired by a US drone. (Daud Khattak & Nasrullah Afridi, "76 killed in Jamrud mosque bombing," The News, March 28, 2009)

While eyewitness accounts describe a suicide bomber as the party responsible for the horrendous attack, part and parcel of SIM's campaign to cut NATO supply lines into Afghanistan, America's escalating robot drone wars are a reminder of growing anti-American sentiment amongst Pakistanis who are the overwhelming victims of the CIA's death-from-above air campaign.

If the Swat truce is an indication of what Pakistani citizens will now face at the hands of Mehsud's TTP and their minions, the prospects for a "normal" life--short of smashing the medievalists' and their ISI handlers--are grim.

Even as CIA and Pakistani intelligence officials "are drawing up a fresh list of terrorist targets for Predator drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border," The Wall Street Journal reports that ISI officials are "directly supporting the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan, even as the U.S. targets those groups."

Indeed, as the Times avers, "when the Haqqani fighters need to stay a step ahead of American forces stalking them on the ground and in the air, they rely on moles within the spy agency to tip them off to allied missions planned against them."

An unspoken subtext to the Times and Journal reportage is the continued utilization of these terrorist networks--by the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Command--for covert war against Iran--even as the Obama administration seeks Tehran's assistance in battling the Taliban and al-Qaeda. As investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported last July in The New Yorker the Pentagon funded the narcotrafficker Baluchi-based Jundullah organization to attack security personnel inside Iran.

While an open secret in Washington, Obama's new product roll-out in the form of an ill-conceived plan to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban has everything to do with the construction of the $7.6 billion dollar "Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline that would cross western Afghanistan east of Herat and advance south through Taliban-controlled territory towards Pakistani Balochistan province," according to Asia Times. As the World Socialist Web Site points out,

Afghanistan and Pakistan stand at a nexus of pipeline and trade routes between the Middle East, Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent, and US domination of the countries would give it decisive influence over developments in trade and strategic relations between many of Eurasia's largest and fastest-growing economies. In particular, it would cement the US' ability to mount a blockade of oil supplies for China and India in the Indian Ocean. (Alex Lantier, "Obama announces escalation of war in Afghanistan, Pakistan," World Socialist Web Site, March 28, 2009)

And with the imperialist military project going off the rails in Afghanistan as the Taliban's spring offensive looms ever-larger on the horizon, the prospects for a deadly confrontation between nuclear-armed world powers over control of oil and gas will inevitably increase.

[American Dream]

www.willtotruth.com/2009/03/31/af-pak-obamas-war/

Af-Pak: Obama’s War
Commentary No. 254, April 1, 2009
by Immanuel Wallerstein


Af-Pak is the new acronym the U.S. government has invented for Afghanistan-Pakistan. Its meaning is that there is a geopolitical concern of the United States in which the strategy that the United States wishes to pursue involves both countries simultaneously and they cannot be considered separately. The United States has emphasized this policy by appointing a single Special Representative to the two countries, Richard Holbrooke.

It was George W. Bush who sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan. And it was George W. Bush who initiated the policy of using U.S. drones to bomb sites in Paklstan. But, now that Barack Obama, after a "careful policy review," has embraced both policies, it has become Barack Obama's war. This comes as no enormous surprise since, during the presidential campaign, Obama indicated that he would do these things. Still, now he has done it.

This decision is likely to be seen in retrospect as Obama's single biggest decision concerning U.S. foreign policy, one that will be noticed by future historians as imprinting its stamp on his reputation. And it is likely to be seen as well as his single biggest mistake. For, as Vice-President Biden apparently warned in the inner policy debate on the issue, it is likely to be a quagmire from which it will be as easy to disengage as the Vietnam war.

There are therefore two questions. Why did he do it? And what are likely to be the consequences during his term of office?

Let us begin with his own explanation of why he did it. He said that "the situation is increasingly perilous," that "the future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," and that "for the American people, [Pakistan's] border region [with Afghanistan] has become the most dangerous place in the world."

And why is it so dangerous? Quite simply, it is because it is a safe haven for al-Qaeda to "train terrorists" and to "plot attacks" - not only against Afghanistan and the United States but everywhere in the world. The fight against al-Qaeda is no longer called the "war on terrorism" but is hard to see the difference. Obama claims that the Bush administration had lost its "focus" and that he has now installed a "comprehensive, new strategy." In short, Obama is going to do this better than Bush.

What then are the new elements? The United States will send more troops to Afghanistan - 17,000 combat troops and 4000 trainers of the Afghan forces. It will send more money. It proposes to give Pakistan $1.5 billion a year for five years to "build schools and roads and hospitals." It proposes to send "agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers" to Afghanistan to "develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs." In short, Obama says that he believes that "a campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone."

However, implicitly unlike Bush, this will not be a "blank check" to the two governments. "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders." As for Afghanistan, the United States "will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behavior." The Afghan and Pakistani governments are pleased to be getting the new resources. They haven't said that they will meet Obama's conditions. And Obama hasn't said what he will do if the two governments don't meet his conditions.

As for the way forward, Obama asserts that "there will be no peace without reconciliation with former enemies." Reconciliation? Well, not with the "uncompromising core of the Taliban," or with al-Qaeda, but with those Taliban "who've taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price." To do this, Obama wants assistance. He proposes to create a new Contact Group that will include not only "our NATO allies" but also "the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran, Russia, India and China."

The most striking aspect of this major commitment is how little enthusiasm it has evoked around the world. In the United States, it has been applauded by the remnants of the neo-cons and McCain. So far, other politicians and the press have been reserved. Iran, Russia, India, and China have not exactly jumped on the bandwagon. They are particularly cool about the idea of reconciliation with so-called moderate Taliban. And both the Guardian and McClatchy report that the Taliban themselves have reacted by creating unity within their hitherto divided ranks - presumably the opposite of what Obama is trying to achieve.

So, where will we probably be six months from now? There will be more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the U.S. commanders will probably say that the 21,000 Obama is sending are not enough. There will be further withdrawals of NATO troops from there - a repeat of the Iraq scenario. There will be further, perhaps more extensive, bombings in Pakistan, and consequently even more intensive anti-American sentiments throughout the country. The Pakistani government will not be moving against the Taliban for at least three reasons. The still very influential ISI component of the Pakistani army actually supports the Taliban. The rest of the army is conflicted and in any case probably too weak to do the job. The government will not really press them to do more because it will only thereby strengthen its main rival party which opposes such action and the result may be another army coup.

In short, the "clear and focused goal" that Obama proposes - "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future" - will probably be further than ever from accomplishment. The question is what can Obama do then? He can "stay the course" (shades of Rumsfeld in Iraq), constantly escalate the troop commitment, while changing the local political leadership (shades of Kennedy/Johnson and Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam), or he can turn tail and pull out (as the United States finally did in Vietnam). He is not going to be cheered for any of these choices.

I have the impression that Obama thinks that his speech left him some wiggle room. I think he will find out rather how few choices he will have that are palatable. I think therefore he made a big, probably irreparable, mistake.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/p ... llerstein/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Wallerstein

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... rrors.html


Lahore Attack: an Object Lesson in the Horrors to Come


Monday's brazen assault on a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city and cultural capital, is a grim reminder that the "killing season" has begun in earnest across Central- and South Asia.

At least 13 police recruits were killed and another 100 wounded, according to Dawn.

The Lahore assault followed the horrific Jamrud mosque suicide bombing March 27 in the Khyber Agency that killed upwards of 80 people during Friday prayers.

The raid by as yet unknown gunmen is a stark demonstration to Lahore residents that last month's attack on the Sri Lankan national cricket team, also carried out by heavily armed and well-trained commandos, was not a one-off affair but the opening round in a destabilization operation by any number of suspects.

Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets also known as al-Qaeda, as well as militants "trained-up fierce" by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and America's CIA have all been named as the responsible parties. Fleshing out the rogues' gallery one finds: Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), or, when all else fails, a "foreign hand," e.g. India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Given the modus operandi of the attack, one cannot preclude Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. LEJ is a virulently anti-Shia sectarian outfit that evolved from the neo-Wahabbi Sipah-e-Sahaba during the 1990s. With strong connections to Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the group served as a training ground for notables such as the operational whiz-kid behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, and the reputed "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Like LET, the LEJ has aligned itself--and fought alongside--the Afghan Taliban and, according to some analysts, was involved in the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Daniel Pearl; a murder orchestrated by ISI asset and 9/11 bagman, former London School of Economics student Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Historically, LET and LEJ have been ISI proxies and have targeted leftist and secular opponents of the shadowy intelligence agency as well as serving as a cats' paw for plausibly deniable attacks against Pakistan's geopolitical rival India.

On Tuesday however, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chieftain Mehsud claimed it was the TTP that carried out the assault, according to The New York Times.

Mehsud told the BBC, that the raid was "in retaliation for the continued drone strikes by the US in collaboration with Pakistan on our people". During a phone call, the TTP's head honcho told Reuters, "We wholeheartedly take responsibility for this attack and will carry out more such attacks in future."

But Mehsud went further and claimed that TTP-aligned militants will mount a terror operation in Washington, perhaps targeting the White House. The Wall Street Journal reported Mehsud told Pakistani journalists from--where else--an "undisclosed location (!) that "soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world."

As if on cue, CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus of Iraq "surge" fame told the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday, that the "government was doing a 'deep dive' investigation" into Mehsud's claims, according to The New York Times. The "newspaper of record" failed however to inform readers whether the "threat level" had been raised in response!

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department issued a $5 million bounty for Mehsud, a frequent target of CIA Predator and Reaper drone strikes that have killed scores of innocent civilians in Pakistan's "lawless" borderlands.

The New York Times reported April 2, that missiles fired from a CIA drone struck an alleged "militant training camp," killing at least 10 people. The raid, according to the Times targeted Hakimullah Mehsud, one of Baitullah's top lieutenants.

According to Times, Hakimullah's forces "have been held responsible by Pakistani officials for attacking NATO supply depots in Peshawar used to resupply international forces in Afghanistan. His influence is such that he has imposed Sharia Islamic law in the Orakzai region, residents said."

However, according to Dawn, "at least 14 people, including 12 militants were killed and 13 injured." The Karachi-based newspaper reported that "two women and several children were also among the victims of the strikes."

To further muddy the waters, the Associated Press reported March 31 that Omar Farooq, the spokesman for the little-known jihadi outfit, Fedayeen al-Islami, also claimed responsibility for Monday's attack.

Claiming the assault was a reprisal raid for U.S. drone strikes and Pakistani Army intervention in the tribal areas, Farooq also demanded the release of former Red Mosque chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz.

While Pakistani officials have blamed the TTP for a series of attacks, including the December 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, it is just as likely the police academy raid had been carried out by Punjabi-based militants such as LET or LEJ.

The overwhelming majority of Mehsud's forces are Pashtun-speaking residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). While Shahid Iqbal, the deputy inspector general for operations for the Lahore Police Department claimed the attackers were "Afghans," many recruits described the attackers as Punjabis speaking a local dialect.

According to The New York Times, the militants, some dressed in police uniforms scaled the walls, fired automatic weapons and hurled grenades while shouting "'Oh, Red Mosque attackers, we have come,' a reference to the 2007 takeover by Pakistani authorities of a militant mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital." Meanwhile, "according to militant contacts" Asia Times Online reports,

A group of militants once associated with the Harkat-e-Jihad-i-Islami and the Lashkar-e-Taiba--groups with strong roots to the struggle over divided Kashmir--a few days ago traveled to Lahore from a militant camp in the North Waziristan town of Razmak, a year-round hill station situated at the crossroads of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the Afghanistan border. ...

In light of statements made by some cadets, intelligence agencies maintain that some of the militants came from Pakistani Punjab and spoke three languages--Urdu, Punjabi and Seraiki. (Seraiki is spoken in southern Punjab.) (Syed Saleem Shahzad, "Pakistan braces for more attacks," Asia Times Online, April 1, 2009)

The unmistakable message to the Zardari administration and the United States, according to the online publication is that Monday's attack, "mark ominous muscle-flexing by Pakistan's 'original' jihadis, mostly Punjabis trained by the military in the 1990s as the first line of defense for the country, especially in Kashmir."

As I reported March 29, the corporate media's belated "discovery" of linkages amongst ISI officers, the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the form of "money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance to Taliban commanders," one cannot rule out the possibility that some ISI officers, still committed to Pakistan's policy of seeking "strategic depth" against India may have been complicit in Monday's attack.

However, it is U.S. imperialism which for decades nurtured, armed and financed such retrograde outfits to advance its own geopolitical agenda--military bases and resource extraction--that is fueling the far-right insurgency, and the justifiable rage felt by Pakistanis over the continued slaughter.

Cheekily, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, perhaps channeling the spirit of the British Raj, said that Pakistan "must prove" it is willing to take on the insurgency "before the U.S. delivers financial aid or weapons to the government there," the Associated Press reported March 31.

Such comments by leading imperialist spokespersons are nothing new and are fully within the framework of American neocolonial arrogance. Calling for "benchmarks" and "metrics" by which Washington power brokers will measure "progress," what are these if not so many flaming hoops through which sovereign nations must jump through like so many trained poodles to curry favor with the Global Godfather.

As if Pakistani workers and farmers, crushed beneath the iron heel of venal, ruling class elites fêted by Pentagon bureaucrats or IMF/World Bank thieves who tout Islamabad's "responsible" policies that line the pockets of international debt merchants beholden to shady American and European banks have but one role, that of mute spectators!

As if to drive home the point, Daily Times reported that "Pakistan has suffered economic losses amounting to $6 billion during 2007-08 while supporting the global war on terror."

Dr. Hafiz Pasha, heading a panel of Planning Commission economists, told the Pakistan Institute of Development Economists' annual meeting,

"This loss to the economy, according to the government of Pakistan, is over $8 billion," said Pasha, adding that the US should double the funds being given to Pakistan for its support to the war on terror in view of the massive losses. He said the prevailing economic situation was "not very positive", as tax collection had fallen, imports were very high, real effecting exchange rate was functioning at the level of last year and the ministries' expenses had increased by Rs 100 billion. (Sajid Chaudhry, "'Pakistan suffered $6bn terror war losses in 2007-08'," Daily Times, April 2, 2009)

Stating that the IMF's role in Pakistan "focused on stability rather than growth," I might add for corporate grifters and comprador elites, Pasha went on to comment that such program's are "not good for Pakistan in the long run". "Pakistan paid a heavy price for stability at the cost of growth during the previous regime's tenure ... and [Pakistan] should not repeat the same mistake."

Committed to so-called "structural adjustment" policies that sacrifice the economic well-being of the Pakistani people so that huge debts incurred by previous military regimes are repaid to international banks, the IMF continues to urge the sell-off of state assets at fire-sale prices even as Western imperialist nations pump trillions of dollars into their failing economies to stave-off the capitalist melt-down.

Let it be said, once again: the entire drive by the United States to "secure" the "Afpak theatre" has very little to do with "fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them here," and everything to do with that most American of motives: greed and plunder.

As analyst Pepe Escobar points out in Asia Times, the "U.S. Empire of Bases" is "still in overdrive and in New Great Game mode--which implies very close surveillance over Russia and China via bases such as Bagram, and the drive to block Russia from establishing a commercial route to the Middle East via Pakistan." Escobar goes on to comment:

Last but not least, the energy wars. And that involves that occult, almost supernatural entity, the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which would carry gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan east of Herat and down Taliban-controlled Nimruz and Helmand provinces, down Balochistan in Pakistan and then to the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. No investor in his right mind will invest in a pipeline in a war zone, thus Afghanistan must be "stabilized" at all costs. (Pepe Escobar, "The secrets of Obama's surge," Asia Times Online, April 2, 2009)

A dozen dead police recruits? Fifty or a hundred or thousands more people transmogrified into corpses by CIA drones or suicide bombers? "So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG," Escobar wonders. "We gotta bail them out, can't let them fail?"

"Whatever it is, it's not about 'terrorists'. Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map." Indeed, but whatever we do, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

[chlamor]

I am much honored to be here today with all of you in this beautiful building. My special thanks go out to Joan-Felip who both translated the book and provided such dedication to seeing the project come to fruition, to General Alberto Pires who wrote such an insightful preface and of course to all those at Ediciones AKAL who made this publication possible. Thank you.

I am especially happy to see the first publication of this book here and in Spanish, a country and people I have admired and known for many years, the country to which the International Brigades went to and died for, a country where the aerial bombing of civilians in Guernica became a dark page of the twentieth century, and the ground where Republicans, Communists, democrats and anarchists - men and women - came together to stop fascism. A cousin of my father (Edmond Taylor) served as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Spain in the latter 1930's.1 As a teenager I grew up with the names of Irun, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel, the Ebro River. One of my favorite books was and remains Mourir a Madrid by Frederic Rossif and Madeleine Chapsal (1963).

Yes, it is such an honor to be here today with you. But my focus is upon another war, another occupation, another great injustice, another monument to the slaughter of simple, common people trying to live their daily lives.

If we are to believe the words uttered in early 2002 by Hamid Karzai who has been called "the mayor of Kabul" since late 2002, it all began so tranquilly in December 20012:

"This is the first time since a long time that a government comes to power in Afghanistan without violence."

But as I demonstrated in my original Dossier released on December 10, 2001, over 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians had been killed during just three months of U.S. bombing.3 At least another 3,000 have been slaughtered since then by U.S/NATO actions. One can only wonder what a violent transition might mean to Mr. Karzai. With the Taliban dispatched back to the countryside by year end, the hope flickered that finally after twenty-two years, the average Afghan might see an end to immiseration and violence.

At least another 3,000 Afghan civilians have been slaughtered since January 2002 by U.S/NATO actions. And what was the response of U.S defense establishment intellectuals? Well, William Arkin, a favorite of Human Rights Watch and the Washington Beltway crowd, a commentator for the Washington Post, asked Afghans,

When are you going to pay the U.S. for the cost of the bombs and the jet fuel and the American lives selflessly given to topple the Taliban and rout Al Qaeda, all done so you can have a future?4

My book documents and explores why immiseration and war, but also the new extravagant opulence and corruption (throughout the Karzai regime but also the vast "non-governmental organization (NGO) mafia") have increased across much of Afghanistan. Maybe most importantly, a culture of impunity reigns under the Karzai regime. The key resides in that Afghanistan represents an empty space and the war is fought mainly in the media of Europe and North America. The deputy of Osama Bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was very clear about this in 2005, saying most "of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media."5 NATO is allegedly handicapped by its 'stone age' media skills in Afghanistan.6 The U.S/NATO occupation forces simply prevent access to embarrassing sites where they killed civilians, practice news management as I describe in a chapter of the book7, or arrest and beat up "un-embedded" news reporters (as in recent case of the Iranian TV journalist, Faez Khorshid8). Karl Rove is alleged to have described the post-9/11 politics of surrealism:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."9

Put in other terms,

This is the ultimate post-modern war. The actual theatre of operations is the realm of symbols, and the target is people's minds -- their very innate capacity to reason and question. In every modern war, propaganda has been deployed in the service of military objectives. In this war, military operations are not even in the service of propaganda: they are the propaganda.10

Let me be concrete, why are Spaniards presented by the Spanish media with a detached picture of their troops' activities in Badghis more akin to managing an exotic Disneyworld or a social democratic paradise rather than engaged in the harsh reality of a deadly, multi-faceted war in which Spain like Germany play their parts in counter-insurgency as for example with their Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs)?11 Conservative Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy noted "Mr. Zapatero does not say Spain is in a war and all but argues that it is there as a relief organization."12

As I discuss in the book, PRT's blur the distinction between soldiers and aid workers. France's nobel-prize-winning Medecins Sans Frontieres left Afghanistan in 2004 because the American reliance upon PRT's endangered the lives of humanitarian workers – yet the MSF had remained in Afghanistan thoughout the years of Soviet occupation, tribal anarchy and Taliban rule.13 Five MSF staff workers were killed in Bagdhis in June 2004. Such blending was marvelously expressed by a U.S. Army officer visiting a remote Afghan village, "the more they help us find the bad guys, the more good stuff they get."14

The book is comprised of five inter-related sections. First, I document how the United States and its client state in Afghanistan, has no interest in real socio-economic development in Afghanistan. Secondly, I describe the largely invisible economy where most Afghans carry out a harsh daily struggle to survive. The third section exposes the grotesque forms of pseudo-development in Karzai's Kabul. The next section delves into how an illusionary image of progress and governance which I call Brand Karzai is constructed and marketed by the corporate media to the Euro-American publics. I close with an in-depth analysis of the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan which is geared to maintain at least cost an "empty space," a modern reincarnation of the nineteenth century buffer state.

I shall now quote extensively from the book's introduction.

Four years after the U.S.-led attack upon Afghanistan, the true meaning of the U.S occupation is revealing itself. Afghanistan represents merely a space that is to be kept empty. Western powers have no interest in either buying from or selling to the blighted nation. The country possesses no exports of interest. The impoverished Afghan civilian population is as irrelevant as is the nation's economic development. But the space represented by Afghanistan in a volatile region of geo-political import, is to be kept vacant from all hostile forces. The country is situated at the center of a resurgent Islamic world, close to a rising China (and India), borders the restive ex-Soviet Asian republics and is adjacent to oil-rich states. The U.S. attack launched on October 7, 2001 was motivated by two concerns: the opportunity provided by 9/11 to march towards Baghdad riding on the U.S. public's clamoring for revenge; and securing a space in a geo-politically important part of the world.

The only populated centers of any real concern are a few islands of grotesque capitalist imaginary reality – foremost Kabul – needed to project the image of an existing central government, an image further promoted by Karzai's frequent international junkets. The twin illusions of an effective central government and a process of nation-building need to be maintained.15 In a few urban islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, a sufficient density of foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community, carpetbaggers and hangers-on of all stripes, money disbursers, neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, bribed local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians (of the city planner or aesthetician types), members of the development establishment, imported Chinese, Russian and Thai prostitutes, do-gooders, enforcers, etc. warrants the presence of western businesses like foreign bank branches, luxury hotels (Serena Kabul, Hyatt Regency of Kabul), shopping malls (the Roshan Plaza, the Kabul City Centre mall), import houses (Toyota selling its popular Land Cruiser), image makers (J. Walter Thompson), and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola.16 The book describes all this in meticulous detail. Even feminism will be harnessed to sell the war designs of imperialism.17 Author Tamim Ansary observed that virtually all the loud Western talk about empowering women in Afghanistan focuses on the agenda of the minuscule urban elite - getting women into national government, liberating women from a dress code, ensuring their access to all professions, etc. - but what the relevance of this western agenda for rural women?18

The "other," the real economy – that in which the Afghan masses live and toil – comprises the multitudes creatively eking out a daily existence in the hustle-and-bustle of the vast informal economy.19 They are utterly irrelevant to the neo-colonial master interested in running an empty space at the least cost. The self-financing opium economy conveniently reduces such cost and thrives upon invisibility. The invisible multitudes represent a nuisance - much like Kabul's traffic - upon maintaining the empty space. Only the minimal amount of resources - whether of the carrot or stick type - will be devoted to preserving their invisibility. Many of those who returned after the overthrow of the Taliban are now seeking to emigrate abroad, thereby contributing to an emptying space.20

The means to maintain and police such an empty space are a particular spatial distribution of military projection by U.S. and increasingly NATO forces: twenty-four hour high-level aerial surveillance; a three-level aerial presence (low, medium, high altitude); pre-positioned fast-reaction, heavily-armed ground forces based at heavily fortified key nodal points; and the employ of local satraps' expendable forces. The aim of running the empty space at least cost is foundering upon a resurgent Taliban, who have developed their own very effective least cost insurgency weapons (e.g., improvised explosive devices and suicide bombings) and putting them to good use. In a propaganda coup, any armed opposition to a standing government is now labeled terrorist. By such criterion, of course, the American revolutionaries of the 1770's and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front soldiers of the 1960's were terrorists.

Unlike in the colonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where effort was made to develop economic activities – from plantations to mines, factories to infrastructure – in order to have a self-financing colony, in the neo-colony of Afghanistan no such efforts are warranted. Indeed, such efforts contravene the aim of running an empty space - a neo-colony - at least cost. In effect, Afghanistan today has reincarnated itself in its historic role as a buffer state (in twenty-first century clothing).

The concept of Afghanistan as an empty space also describes much of the past. During the post-Soviet half decade, the years of pre-9/11 Taliban rule, and the first three years after the overthrow of the Taliban, what was happening inside Afghanistan was of little interest to either the U.S. political, military or business elite. The perception of the country as "empty" was also compatible with it serving as a physical site for the much discussed gas pipeline. Afghanistan only became "un-empty" when the Soviets controlled it and in the couple months after 9/11 when the Bush regime propelled by revenge and exploiting the opportunity provided by 9/11 to march onwards towards Baghdad, decided to oust the Taliban who had served as host to Osama bin Laden.21 Empty space as invasion-on-the-cheap was also revealed in the minimal U.S ground force commitment during October 7 – December 2001. Only about 450 CIA and Special Forces troops were on the ground. I argue that in the initial U.S. Afghan war what happened on the battlefield namely dislodging the Taliban was of material interest. As we know this was quickly achieved by the cocktail of heavy bombing, small-scale highly mobile CIA and Special Forces teams, and renting local warlords with their militias.22 But soon after the "war" was won (i.e. the large cities taken), the "war" became mostly about image rather than substance, that is, it was about projecting an image of progress at minimal cost as is documented. Afghanistan returned to being an empty space.

The extraordinary asymmetry of the contending forces in Afghanistan after 9/11 implied that the struggle would be less militarized and more informational involving the deploying of information-based social technologies of power (or information-driven forms of social control) on the people of the pre-ordained military victor.23 Essential to implementing social control was the necessity of deterring cultural contact of viewers - war's consumers - with infectious real events, with life and death forces of world history itself (as opposed to sterilized violence and sanitized spectacles).24 The banning of any imagery portraying the human effects of smart "precision" bombing was an essential part of marketing war, matched only by the endless airing of images portraying every detail of the new kind of high-tech war without victims, that is, war won without unjust death. Informational hegemony preceded political hegemony. In effect, as in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom was less a contest between militarized adversaries - all the more so as the Taliban simply disbanded and blended into the countryside - and more one between the U.S.-led corporate-military-media elite and the West's voting general public. Real war (experienced there) was displaced by virtual war (consumed here). As in the Gulf War, hence, a central element was achieving "social control by collective stupefaction" through the manufacturing and scripting of an endless stream of consumable spectacles made possible by the advanced telecommunication technologies of the late twentieth-century. My purpose in the book is to meticulously and empirically resuscitate the infectious - the pain, the real contact with the terrible, agonizing, brutal reality of everyday life in Afghanistan after the U.S invasion – and dissolve the scripted spectacles.25

The ferocity and barbarity of modernity's obsession to control is experienced daily by common Afghans, whereas here in the United States the U.S. invasion and war is consumed as spectacle, a conflation of image and reality, that is, as the Baudrillardian hyper-reality where image no longer represents reality. Here, the war is consumed as an electronic, pre-programmed one, fought on the television screen. News media information is pre-meditated deception,

...to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. Abolish any intelligence of the event. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this delusion by images, they swallow the deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of...war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.26

Viewers consumed the highly edited, constructed images of the Gulf War as the real. Baudrillard also argued that the totally lopsided casualties revealed the U.S being engaged in a high-tech virtual war - causing widespread destruction and pain - while the Iraqis in 1991 tried to fight a 'traditional' one with its attendant risks.27 The two efforts never connected. I have argued elsewhere that the U.S. bombing, invasion, and occupation of Afghanistan represents a repeat media spectacle.28 Such disconnect between real and image also characterizes how Afghanistan's reconstruction is represented - also my concern herein - when in fact the place's primary function is as an empty space.

I realize that my argument will be deeply offensive to many – from the U.S and Spanish militaries' Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), to the United Nations development establishment (UNAMA) cheerleaders, to the community of NGOs, to the sundry do-gooders and to the 'Cruise Missile Left' (the humanitarian interventionists so well-represented in Kabul29 ). The beauty of the argument is that it explains so much - presenting a coherent whole - of what we have seen and continue to observe in Afghanistan. Laments and mea culpas about U.S. "nation-building on the cheap" or about the U.S. "forgetting Afghanistan" by late 2002 entirely miss the entire point – empty space on the cheap...let poppies bloom and find other (gullible) nations to do the heavy lifting and dig a few wells while getting shot at by the Taliban. My argument is constructed and based upon revealed outcomes – or circumstantial evidence – as nowhere would any of the powerful decision-makers or their lackeys in media and academe publicly admit that Afghanistan is to be an empty space.

In effect, the sole value of Afghanistan is its space, pure and simple. Since only an empty space is involved, the implication is that such will be policed and maintained at least cost. Unlike in the colonies of the nineteenth century or the newly independent Third World nations after World War II, little will be done to develop economic activity or infrastructure, a reality compounded insofar as Afghanistan offers neither resources nor a market. But the country does offer a pure space from which to project power and influence. In that sense, at a time when First World country finances are strained, the country represents the ideal neo-colony of the twenty-first century: an empty space to be operated at least cost.

Least-cost considerations by the US and NATO militaries directly translates into tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties. How? During the initial phases of the U.S. bombing campaign but still today, U.S. warplanes dropped powerful bombs in civilian-rich areas with little concern for Afghan civilians. The killing of civilians by the United States has long been excused away as "tragic errors." The U.S/NATO war managers dredge out the tired old "intent" argument. As Edward Herman noted,

...it is claimed by the war managers that these deaths and injuries are not deliberate, but are only "collateral" to another end, they are treated by the mainstream media, NGOs, new humanitarians, and others as a lesser evil than cases where civilians are openly targeted. But this differential treatment is a fraud, even if we accept the sometimes disputable claim of inadvertence (occasionally even acknowledged by officials to be false, as described below). Even if not the explicit target, if collateral civilian deaths are highly probable and statistically predictable they are clearly acceptable and intentional. If in 500 raids on Afghan villages alleged to harbor al Qaeda cadres it is likely that civilians will die in 450 of them, those deaths are an integral component of the plan and the clear responsibility of the planners and executioners. As law professor Michael Tonry has said, "In the criminal law, purpose and knowledge are equally culpable states of mind."30



As of 2003, another explanatory factor entered: by relying upon flawed "actionable ground intelligence" and imprecise aerial mapping – necessary given the lack of intelligence gathering capabilities on the ground - the violent US/NATO occupation forces have shown their utter disregard for the lives of the Afghan people (note the language I am employing is precisely the mantra of the US/NATO military propagandists when speaking about the Taliban – namely, "By hiding among innocent civilians, by waging a battle among women and children, the violent extremists have shown their utter disregard for the lives of the Afghan people," spoken recently by U.S. Army spokesman major Chris Belcher).31

Aerial bombing in the name of liberating Afghans will continue with little regard for Afghan civilians who for the Western politico-military elites remain simply invisible in the empty space which is Afghanistan.32 The compliant mainstream media perpetuates the myth by serving as stenographer of the Pentagon's virtual reality. When details of Afghan civilian deaths leak through the US/NATO news management efforts, a Lt. Colonel offers "sincere regrets" or the promise of an investigation and by tomorrow all is forgotten. They are, after all, just Afghans. Theirs are bad bodies, not good bodies like ours. But for now six years, I have striven to exhume these bodies of innocent Afghans and today the constantly updated, The Afghan Victim Memorial Project, tells their stories.33

Conclusion

While some debate might exist as to whether NATO and the U.S. are "loosing" the war in Afghanistan, what is beyond doubt is that the U.S/NATO attempt to maintain Afghanistan as an "empty space" at least cost, has utterly failed. But, in the absence of an equivalent to the Stinger missile, today's Afghan resistance can at best reach the current military stalemate.34 The Soviets did not lose the Afghan war militarily but rather because of domestic politics resulting from the decade-long stalemate.35

Afghanistan's space is increasingly filled with "insurgents", poppies, criminality, mercenaries, state executions, warlords instead of theocrats, soaring corruption and violence, a revitalized resistance, and spiraling cost of the U.S occupation in monetary (over $100 million a day or $ 46,400 per minute during fiscal year 200736 ) and body terms.37 The prospect of NATO's demise looms as member nations differ over what is to be done in Afghanistan.38 Noted historian of modern wars, Gwynne Dyer is more emphatic: "Afghanistan – A War Won and Lost."39 Michael Scheuer, author of the acclaimed book, Imperial Hubris, noted "History Overtakes Optimism in Afghanistan."40 If this is a success story, one wonders what failure might look like.

Let me close with the words of two persons: those of a major architect of U.S. interventions abroad during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Henry Kissinger, who famously said

The conventional army loses if it does not win,
the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

And those of a Taliban commander interviewed in the border region of Afghanistan- Pakistan by a British journalist. No doubt, the Talib had in mind both the 120,000 Soviet troops bogged-down in the Afghan stalemate during the 1980's and the legendary patience of the Pashtuns. He looked down at the impressive icon of modernity, a Rolex watch worn by the Englishman and said

You have the watches, but we have the time.41

Al-Qaeda aims for a long war according to veteran CIA analyst Mike Scheuer.42 What use are the "watches" of the Spanish Legion in the Afghan swamp of faraway Badghis where time is pre-modern, non-linear? In a place far away from our television liquid plasma screens where the war has already been lost?

Footnotes

1. Further details may be found in "American Journalists War Correspondents in the War in Spain." A journalist and author in civilian life, Edmond Taylor served in India as the chief American representative on P Division before becoming Detachment 404 Intelligence Officer in 1945. (Source: US National Archives). Taylor who became a major figure in the amateur spy organization which straddled the world during the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been memorialized at length in the book by R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (University of California Press, 1972).

2. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution first called Karzai "the mayor of Kabul during daylight hours" in October 2002.

3. See my "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting," ZNet (December 2001).

4. In his "Checking on Civilian Casualties," Washington Post (April 9, 2002) cited in Edward S. Herman, "'Tragic Errors' in U.S. Military Policy. Targeting the civilian population," Z Magazine 15, 8 (September 2002).

5. Jim Michaels, "U.S. Pulls Plug on 6 Al-Qaeda Media Outlets," USA Today (October 6, 2007).

6. "NATO handicapped by its "stone age" media skills in Afghanistan," Deutsche Press Agentur (October 8, 2007).

7. See the chapter in the book, "Grab News Headlines, Isolate Bombed Area and Stonewall: U.S. Military's Virtual Reality about Afghan Civilian Casualties: A Case Study of the U.S. Assault upon Hajiyan."

8. "Hosseini Condemns Arrest of Press TV Reporter in Afghanistan," IRNA News (October 9, 2007).

9. Justin Raimundo, "Delusions of Empire. The epistemology of imperialism – the problem with you peaceniks is that you're too 'reality-based'!" Antiwar.com (October 20, 2004).

10. Hani Shukrallah, "Operation Enduring Madness," Al-Ahram Weekly Online [11 - 17 October 2001].

11. The Qala-e-Naw PRT is run by a brigade of the Spanish Legion. Its facilities are also home to a Spanish Air Force Immediate Reaction Force and paratroopers. The on-site airfield can land C-130 Hercules and service Cougar and Chinook helicopters. The Qala-e-Naw PRT has contributed a number of projects to the district including an access bridge into the district capital, construction of water mains and potable water infrastructure, partial electrification, and a 54km-long road connecting Qala and Herat via the Sabsak pass.

12. "Spain's Military Presence in Afghanistan Increased."

13. Nick Meo, "A Frontier Too Far," The Independent (July 27, 2004).

14. David Rohde, "New Tactic in Afghanistan has Old Ring," International Herald Tribune (March 31, 2004).

15. John Chuckman, "The Nonsense of Nation-Building in Afghanistan: the Parable of the Hatchet or the Nonsense of Nation-Building in Afghanistan," Scoop.co.nz (March 10, 2006).

16. Naturally in the midst of this, a few organizations (and individuals) genuinely try and do succeed in making life better for the common people - for example, the hospital run by the Italian N.G.O., Emergency in Kabul comes to mind, the wonderful work on de-mining carried out by a number of NGO's, the vaccination campaigns administered by the United Nations, the emergency food supplies of the World Food Program, the projects of Oxfam, BRAC, DACCAR, and RAWA, etc.

17. Katherine Viner, "Feminism as Imperialism. George Bush is not the first empire-builder to wage war in the name of women," The Guardian (September 21, 2002).

18. Tamim Ansary, "Leaping to Conclusions. Well-meaning observers are making dangerous assumptions about Afghan women and their goals for the future," Salon.com (December 17, 2001).

19. For an interesting, balanced, first-hand description see Pankaj Mishra, "The Real Afghanistan," The New York Review of Books 52, 4 (March 10, 2005).

20. Admirably put by Dan McDougall, "'The new Afghanistan is a myth. It's time to go get a job abroad'," The Observer (February 5, 2006).

21. Dick Bernard, "9-11 Was Excuse To Go To 'War'," Minneapolis Star-Tribune (April 20, 2002).

22. Well analyzed in Stephen D. Biddle, "Allies, Airpower, and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan and Iraq," International Security 30, 3 (Winter 2005-6): 161-176, Richard B. Andres, "Winning with Allies" The Strategic Value of the Afghan Model," International Security 30, 3 (Winter 2005-6): 124-160, and in Max Boot, "Special Forces and Horses," Armed Forces Journal(November 2006).

23. Elaborated upon and critiqued in Philip Hammond, "Postmodernity Goes to War Contemporary Warfare is more about Images and Effects than Bombs and Battles," Spiked Essays (June 1, 2004).

24. Stephen Pohl, "Review of The Gulf War did not take Place," Contemporary Sociology 26, 2 (March 1997): 139.

25. As a footnote, of course, one should hardly be surprised that the anti-virtual, live-reporting from Afghanistan during the initial U.S. bombing assault by Al Jazeera's correspondents – foremost by Taysir Alluni – provoked rage in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the complicit mainstream corporate media.

26. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). See also his "Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism," Le Monde (November 2, 2001), and Binoy Kampmark, "Wars that Never Take Place: Non-events, 9/11 and Wars on Terrorism," Australian Humanities Review (May 2003).

27. Baudrillard (1995), op. cit.: 69.

28. In numerous essays upon Afghanistan, collected in "Archivistan" at Cursor.org. See also Pepe Escobar, "Power, Counter-Power, Part 2: The Fractal War," Asia Times (February 7, 2002), and my "War as an 'Edsel': The Marketing and Consumption of Modern American Wars" (Durham: keynote address at conference 'Teaching Peace,' April 1, 2005).

29. After the failed hunt to capture bin Laden "dead or alive," the United States fell back upon justifying the bombing and intervention in Afghanistan upon "humanitarian grounds," namely deposing the repressive Taliban. Many NGOs – including liberal organizations quickly came to support the U.S. intervention (see Walden Bello, "Humanitarian Intervention: Evolution of a Dangerous Doctrine," Focus on the Global South (January 19, 2006). On the Cruise Missile Left, see Edward S. Herman, "The Cruise Missile Left. Aligning with Power," Z Magazine (November 2002).

30. See Herman (2002), op. cit.

31. "Afghan Civilians Killed in Fresh Fighting," Reuters 8:25 AM EDT, October 5, 2007.

32. Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt, "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation," Antiwar.com (December 14, 2005).

33. See the memorial here.

34. David Rohde, "Bloody Stalemate over south Afghanistan," New York Times (September 2, 2007) and Andrew C. Schneider, "Afghanistan Stalemate," Kiplinger Business Resource Center (October 5, 2007).

35. As argued by Cold War scholar, Mark Kramer, "Surprise! The Soviets Nearly Won the Afghan War," Los Angeles Times (December 26, 2004).

36. Based upon Congressional Research Service data reported in Winslow T. Wheeler, "The Costs of the Afghanistan War," Counterpunch (August 29, 2007).

37. Superbly summarized by Seumas Milne, "How can this bloody failure be regarded as a good war? The western occupation of Afghanistan has brought neither peace nor development – and it fuels the terror threat," The Guardian (August 23, 2007),and in John Ward Anderson, "Emboldened Taliban Reflected in More Attacks, Greater Reach," Washingtonpost.com (September 25, 2007), p. A11.

38. A perusal of recent newspaper articles tells the story: James G. Neuger, "NASTO Staggers in Afghanistan as Some Can't Fight On," Bloomberg.com (October 8, 2007) from New York City; and Tom Coughlan, "Afghanistan 'Putting NATO's Future in Peril'," The Independent (October 8, 2007) from London.

39. Gwynne Dyer, "Afghanistan – A War Won and Lost," New Zealand Herald (October 12, 2007).

40. In Terrorism Focus (Jamestown Foundation) 3, 6 (February 14, 2006).

41.H.D.S. Greenway, "In Mideast, Time is not on America's Side," Boston Globe (February 27, 2004), from my essay, "The Taliban's Second Coming," Cursor.org (February 29, 2004). In a book examining the U.S. pacification campaign – winning hearts and minds - in Vietnam, Richard Hunt argued that pacification slowly succeeded in rooting out the Viet Cong, but it had taken too long and cost too much for the American public (Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).

42.Michael Scheuer, "Al-Qaeda's Insurgency Doctrine: Aiming for a 'Long War'," Terrorism in Focus 3, 8 (February 28, 2006).

http://cursor.org/stories/emptyspacetalk.html

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... or-in.html

The Political Economy of Taliban Terror in Swat Valley


Fury amongst Pakistan's citizens erupted after a human rights' group surfaced a video April 3 showing the flogging of a 17-year-old girl in Swat Valley.

The vile display was carried out by thugs allied with Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Dawn reports that the video, apparently shot by a mobile phone "shows the girl, wearing a blue burqa, lying on the ground face down. Her legs, hands and head are held by two men and a third, bearded man wearing a turban is shown whipping her repeatedly."

The hideous scene continues for several minutes until the girl, allegedly "guilty" of the "crime" of adultery is dragged off by armed fighters. Dawn avers:

After the first couple of lashes, the girl starts to scream loudly, but no one moves to help her. "Please, please," she shouts in Pushto. "Stop it, please. For God's sake, stop it, I am dying."

A man off-camera is giving orders to his companions. "Hold her feet tightly. Lift her burqa a bit." ("Flogging in Swat outrages nation," Dawn, April 4, 2009)

In February, the "secular" Awami National Party (ANP) that controls the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) government, signed a peace deal pledging to impose Sharia law on Swat residents.

The pact, which halted murderous and largely ineffective artillery barrages on residents by the Army, was negotiated by ANP leaders and Maulana Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the Tehrik-Nifaz-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, TNSM) in NWFP's Malakand district where Swat is located.

The Guardian reported April 3 Sufi Mohammed, "In a rare interview with any media outlet, domestic or foreign...told the Guardian that the new courts would formalise penalties including flogging, chopping off hands and stoning to death."

TTP "emir" Maulana Fazlullah, the sociopathic son-in-law of Sufi Mohammed has promised to expand the Taliban's writ throughout Pakistan. Indeed Muslim Khan, a key commander and spokesperson for the group told The Guardian by telephone that sharia would be implemented "whether the government likes it or not."

Aftab Alam, president of the Swat Lawyers Association, said that the creaking colonial-era legal system needed to be speeded up, not replaced.

"They [the Taliban] want to establish a complete autonomous state, that's the real agenda," said Alam. "A utopian empire, a Taliban empire. Sometimes utopias become real." ...

Khan added: "Swat is a test case. After this, it [sharia] should be brought in in the whole of Pakistan. How can we have British law here? It is the task of the Taliban to make them agree. It is our right, 95% of the population is Muslim." (Saeed Shah, "Pakistan region in grip of fear as leader begins to implement sharia law," The Guardian, April 3, 2009)

And if the Taliban's pornographic display in Swat is any indication of the future direction affairs might take, the prospects for tackling Pakistan's overwhelming poverty, endemic corruption by capitalist elites and military repressors are indeed grim.

As if to drive home the point, Reuters reported that "two female Pakistani teachers, a female aid worker and their driver were found shot dead on Monday, police and a doctor said, in an area where Islamists have attacked aid groups."

The attack took place about 40 miles north of the capital, Islamabad. The bodies had been dumped in a heavily forested area.

When the agreement was signed in mid-February, it was condemned by human rights' and left-wing groups as a capitulation by the state to jihadi terrorists and their friends in the Army and Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

As outrage over the girls' flogging spread, human rights' and leftist groups staged protests Sunday. In Lahore, a coalition of women's organizations, socialist parties and trade unions organized a 2,000 strong march denouncing the state's sell-out to the Taliban. The Labour Party Pakistan reported on their website Monday that,

Speakers condemned the flogging of women in Swat and acts of terrorism by religious fundamentalists. They also condemned the Drone attacks by Americans as well. They announced the launch of a national movement against Talbanisation of the society. Taliban are not anti-imperialist, they are neo-fascist and forces of suppression, we have to fight them. Terrorism can not be defeated by more terrorism. "We have to mobilize people to fight them both" was the main theme of the speakers. ("Lahore Rally Against Talibanisation and Terrorism," Labour Party Pakistan, April 6, 2009)

In a further sign that strains between America and Pakistan threaten to derail the Obama administration's plan to expand CIA drone attacks, The New York Times reported that "two senior American officials came under withering public criticism from Pakistan on Tuesday, with the Pakistani foreign minister saying that 'trust' between the countries was in question, particularly over the issue of American missile attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas."

During meetings in Islamabad, the Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the Times he informed Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Obama's regional envoy Richard Holbrooke, "there is a gap between us" regarding the issue of drone attacks.

There are indications that gap has widened into a chasm. ISI director, Lt. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, refused to meet separately with Holbrooke and Mullen who had requested a private meeting. Pasha is apparently miffed over reports that elements within ISI continue to provide logistical and material aid to the Taliban even as the imperialists shower "carpets of bombs" as well as a "carpet of gold" on the Army.

Meanwhile, Daily Times reported in Thursday's edition that "Al Qaeda, Taliban and other militants have been relocating from the Tribal Areas to Pakistan's overcrowded and impoverished cities, which is likely to make it harder to find and stop them from staging terrorist attacks, officials say."

Cynically, an unnamed "senior U.S. defence official" told the Lahore-based newspaper, "putting these guys on the run forces a lot of good things to happen. It gives you more targeting opportunities."

"Opportunities" in the form of dead civilians caught in the cross hairs of a Hellfire missile blast. "The downside," the official continues, "is that you get a much more dispersed target set and they go to places where we are not operating." As the World Socialist Web Site reported April 8,

Since 2004, the Pakistani military has repeatedly mounted anti-insurgency operations in the historically autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), suffering some 1,500 fatalities, provoking widespread popular anger over its wanton indifference to civilian casualties, and triggering a growing humanitarian crisis. More than half a million FATA residents have been rendered refugees. (Keith Jones, "U.S. expands war into Pakistan," World Socialist Web Site, April 8, 2009)

Even as the TTP and their allies threaten to mount two suicide bombings a week until the Americans cease their drone attacks, the U.S. response--other than rank indifference to the suffering of the Pakistani people--is to demand more, in the form of total capitulation to the Global Godfather by Pakistan's mercenary elite.

Flogging Video: "It's all a Conspiracy"

In the wake of the incident for which TTP spokesperson Muslim Khan claimed responsibility, The News reports that NWFP's Minister for Information, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, called the video release by electronic and print media "a conspiracy against the peace deal in Malakand."

While Hussain insisted that the outrage occurred before the Taliban's deal with the provincial government, the man who actually shot the video told Dawn that the girls' humiliating torture took place two weeks ago, and not in January as ANP and TTP leaders allege.

Rejecting the mendacious fairy-tale concocted by the Taliban and NWFP's "secular" government, the girl was mercilessly beaten not for some presumed "immoral" breech, but because she had rejected the marriage proposal made by a local Taliban thug, allegedly the son of none other than Muslim Khan himself!

Implying the monstrous punishment was actually "merciful," Khan told Dawn "the girl should have been stoned to death, but the Taliban had only flogged her because qazi courts had not been set up at the time."

Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, denounced the incident and accused the federal and provincial governments of giving the neofascists "a free hand to attack people and disgrace women." Jahangir told Dawn,

"The government has handed over Swat to those who have played with the lives of people. If they are really popular, why this was not reflected in the last general elections?" she wondered.

Ms Jahangir criticised the leaders who were claiming that peace had been restored in Swat. "Why don't they take their families there and stay just for one week?" In reply to a question about recent terrorist attacks, she said cricket players and police had nothing to with drone attacks. ("Flogging in Swat outrages nation," Dawn, April 4, 2009)

On Monday, Pakistan's Supreme Court Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, assailed the government for "not taking up the case until it became a national scandal" The New York Times reports.

The head of the Peshawar Bar Association, Abdul Latif Afridi, told the High Court, "the most fundamental rights are violated every second of every day. People are being ejected from their houses, courts are closed, 300 schools have been demolished."

After listening to Afridi's grim assessment, Chaudhry demanded to know what the attorney general was doing about it. Apparently, not much.

And when a Musharraf-appointed secretary of the Interior Ministry, Kemal Shah, refused to answer the chief justice when he demanded to know why the official had not been to Swat, Chaudhry ordered: "You go to Swat yourself. You must be very bright. You go yourself. We command you do it and report to us what is happening."

While embarrassing the pack of thieves who rule the roost is well and good as far as it goes, might there be other, less seemly motives, behind the reign of terror in Swat Valley? Let's take a look.

Looting Swat's Resources

As is so often the case, religion serves as the handmaid of organized crime. This observation is no different in Pakistan than it is the U.S. heimat, or for that matter, aboard America's stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East, Israel, where the dispossession of the Palestinian people by a coterie of settler loons similarly, is backed-up by the armed fist of the capitalist state.

While proclaiming the purest motives for their crimes, TTP "emirs" are enriching themselves on various illegal schemes to loot the region's natural resources.

Toss in narcotrafficking, kidnapping and extortion and these self-proclaimed "saviors of the Nation" bear a striking resemblance to their erstwhile "adversaries," America's own gang of murderous Tony Sopranos. In this context, the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, The National, revealed April 3 that,

Militants are funding a campaign of violence with profits made from the illegal mining of emeralds and felling of timber in the volatile valley of Swat in northern Pakistan.

Swat, which holds one of Asia's two largest known deposits of high-quality emeralds, has been brought under the control of militants following a peace deal struck between the Pakistani Taliban and the government last month. (Ashfaq Yusufzai and Isambard Wilkinson, "Militants stripping Swat of resources," The National, April 3, 2009)

According to investigative reporters on the ground in Mingora, Swat's largest city, "the gemstones are sold as quickly as possible at rates sometimes as low as US$50 (Dh184) per carat, far below their market price."

Citing anonymous officials too terrified to speak publicly, after looting the collective wealth of Swat's citizens, the gems "are then smuggled to Jaipur, India, before being transported to Bangkok, Switzerland and Israel."

As we have seen, Muslim Khan, who believes that flogging a 17-year-old girl is "merciful" told The National, "We know that all the minerals have been created by Allah, the Mighty, and the Merciful for the benefit of his creatures. We should avail the opportunity."

While the newspaper claims that the government has not challenged "the Taliban's control of the valuable emerald mines," more likely bigwigs in Peshawar and Islamabad are sharing the "opportunity" afforded by their so-called "peace" by profiting handsomely from the cosy arrangement to despoil Swat of its mineral wealth.

But wait, there's more!

Another lucrative source of income for the bandits are "Swat's once thick forests, which are already on the verge of extinction."

Abdul Jamil, a local timber trader who can expect swift punishment for spilling the beans, told The National: "The Taliban are mercilessly cutting the forest, applying the same [primitive] mechanisms as they do in the case of emeralds."

One government official speaking anonymously said that "the losses suffered by forests in the last one year were more than the losses of the last two decades."

Who, pray tell, would have the "means, motive and opportunity" to assist the TTP's smuggling precious gems to India and Israel? Why, none other than ISI asset and organized crime kingpin, Dawood Ibrahim that's who!

The mafia don, whose D-Company reportedly assisted Lashkar-e-Toiba's terrorist siege in Mumbai last November, has for decades run sophisticated smuggling operations that traffic in everything from gold, nuclear materials, arms and drugs. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny points out, Ibrahim,

took the obvious plunge and started trafficking in drugs, chiefly in heroin bound for the European market and mandrax for South Africa. And in Dawood's part of the world, if you want to guarantee the success of a narcotics business, there is only one organization you need to cozy up to--the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Pakistan's secret service. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 135)

With extensive smuggling networks operating across South Asia and into the Gulf states, D-Company operatives would be the perfect facilitators for the illicit and very profitable trade in blood emeralds. Needless to say, the illegal trade in gemstones would prove a boon not only for unscrupulous local officials and gangsters but as an additional source of black funds for enterprising intelligence agencies and their terrorist proxies.

Is this one reason why, as Daily Times reported April 5, that despite the flogging outrage and murder of citizens "the government freed three more Taliban from Mingora on Saturday, as part of its peace accord with Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi. The total number of released Taliban has reached 47."

While the United States plans new atrocities in Central and South Asia, and as the imperialists search for "moderate Taliban" with whom they can share the spoils, it would do us well to heed the impassioned words of Pakistani writer Shandana Minhas:

From an extremist movement behind heinous attacks and punishments against anyone and everyone--suicide bombings, burning music and books, banning education, impeding access to healthcare, flogging women for leaving their homes, throwing acid on girls faces, public executions without trial, archive footage of most of which exists in digital libraries across the country--an effort has been made to market it as a romanticized movement of idealistic men with guns who fight injustice when the state doesn't and really just want to bring the world closer to God you know? ("Lashes to lashes, dust to dust," The News, April 5, 2009)

As is so often the case, the "enemy of my enemy" more often than not is still an enemy.

[JackRiddler]

US drone attack on funeral kills 80 people:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=24335

[JackRiddler]

.

There is no one thread on Afpak as we have on a lot of other subjects, so I'm picking this one quasi at random and what can ya do?

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick12082010.html

December 8, 2010
US Now in Afghanistan Longer Than Soviets
The Russians Did Better ... So Why Did They Lose?

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Kabul.

US forces have now stayed longer in Afghanistan than the Soviet army during Moscow’s ill-fated intervention. The US military late last month exceeded the nine years and 50 days that Soviet troops were stationed in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The event provoked queries about similarities between the American and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan, but US foreign policy experts irritably slapped down the idea that there could be any comparison between the two.

The presence of two powerful foreign armies in the same country within twelve years of each other, both fighting an Islamic fundamentalist-led insurgency, might be expected to produce some points in common. But members of the US-led coalition, the UN, and the western media, have gone out of their way to distinguish between the two episodes. They firmly label the first period as ‘Soviet occupation’, while the presence of 130,000 American and coalition troopskeeping the Taliban at bay today is a ‘peace-keeping’ or ‘stabilisation’ mission. Coincidentally, the Soviet Union had almost the same number of soldiers in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.

At first sight the distinction between the two interventions appears reasonable. The first began suddenly on 27 December 1979 when 80,000 Soviet troops poured across the border and Soviet and Afghan soldiers burst into the presidential palace in Kabul to kill the Communist president Hafizullah Amin. American intervention started less visibly on 7 October 2001 when the US air strikes and Special Forces backed the opposition Northern Alliance to begin a campaign to drive the Taliban from power.

“When the Soviets came in everybody wanted to fight against them,” admits General Nur-al-Haq Ulumi, a powerful leader under the Communist regime, who was military commander for the whole of southern Afghanistan. He adds that, in complete contrast, “when the Americans arrived in 2001, everybody supported them and nobody wanted to fight them.”

The popularity of the Americans and their foreign allies has not lasted. They are increasingly blamed by Afghans for the continued violence and as sponsors and protectors of a deeply unpopular government. As US, Britain and almost 50 other states enter their tenth year of military action in Afghanistan, the dilemmas facing them resemble the problems that the Soviet army wrestled with a quarter of a century ago.

The Soviet Union and the US both proved unable to break a military stalemate in which they occupied the cities and towns, but were unable to crush an Islamic and nationalist rebellion in the countryside where three-quarters of Afghans still live. Geography has not changed. Today, as in the 1980s, the guerrillas cannot be conclusively defeated so long they can move backwards and forwards across the 2,500-kilometre border with Pakistan and enjoy the support (open in the case of the Soviets; covert in the case of the Americans) of the Pakistani army.

Moscow and Washington each poured in troops, money, weapons and advisers to create an Afghan state that could stand on its own. The Soviets succeeded here better than the Americans, because the Communist regime survived for three years after the departure of the last Soviet troops on 16 February 1989. Few believe that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government could exist for anything like as long after the exit of foreign forces.

It is important not to draw too close an analogy between Soviet and American actions and intentions in two different eras. Soviet military ambitions were more limited than the US. Their priority was to hold 25 cities including Kabul and the main roads linking them. They largely left the countryside to Mojahideen, as the resistance fighters were known, though their shelling and bombing of villages drove four million Afghans into Pakistan. Even the most hawkish Soviet generals saw they could not hope to win without closing the Pakistan border, a mammoth task for which they never had enough soldiers.

American aims in the war are much more far reaching. The US commander Gen David Petraeus is this year trying to inflict a significant military defeat on the Taliban in their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Heavy hints are dropped to foreign governments and media that the tide is turning. The 30,000 US troop reinforcements, bringing American troops levels up to 100,000, are assaulting Taliban base areas while US Special Forces claim successes in killing Taliban mid-level commanders.

These tactical gains have some significance, but perhaps less on the battlefield than as part of a propaganda effort by the US armed forces to persuade a dubious American public, and even more skeptical foreign allies, that the war is winnable. These apparent counter-insurgency successes may not mean very much, say experienced observers. The influential Brussels-based International Crisis Group pours scorn on them in a recently published report saying that ‘contrary to the US rhetoric about the momentum shifting [against the Taliban], dozens of districts are now under Taliban control.’

The focus of outsiders judging winners and losers in Afghanistan is too narrowly military. The Taliban have been able to expand their influence so rapidly across the country since 2006 not only through their military prowess and ferocity, but because they are punching into a vacuum. They are fighting an Afghan government which is seen as discredited and illegitimate by Afghans.

It was not always so. The great majority of Afghans were happy when the Taliban fell nine years ago. They believed a nightmare period in their history was over. The first elections for president and parliament were more or less honestly conducted, but since then each poll has been more crooked than the last. The re-election last year of President Hamid Karzai, once genuinely liked and trusted, was openly fraudulent. The parliamentary election this year, results of which have just been announced, was even worse. The next parliament will be less representative than its predecessor. “I was interested to see that all the women in a Taliban controlled district voted 100 per cent against me,” said one defeated candidate with a cynical smile.

It is difficult to find anybody in Kabul these days who has a good word to say for Karzai or his government. In the eyes of Afghans the US, Britain and other foreign forces are keeping in power a political elite made up of racketeers and warlords. The coalition is losing the legitimacy it could claim when it supported a democratically elected government making it look more and more like an occupation force.

The Taliban’s military strength is limited and there are less of them than the Mojahideen fighting the Soviet-backed Communist government in the 1980s. “There are between 12,000 and 20,000 full time fighters today, while in the 1980s there were 75,000 Mojahideen in Afghanistan and another 25,000 in eight training camps in Pakistan,” says Said Mohammad Gulabzoy, Interior Minister between 1980 and 1989.

“The Taliban is weak but the government is weaker,” says Daoud Sultanzoi, until recently a member of parliament for Ghazni. “It is the unpopularity of the government that gives the Taliban the oxygen to breath.” Karzai does not have a core of supporters, but exists at the centre of a web of self-interested groups whose needs he tries to balance. Disillusionment is almost complete. It is a measure of the appalling leadership of Afghanistan since the fall of the Communists in 1992 that one now frequently hears Afghans say that the last Communist President, Mohammad Najibullah, tortured and hanged by the Taliban in 1996, was their best of their recent leaders.

Are there lessons to be learned and mistakes which can be avoided by comparing Soviet and American actions in Afghanistan? Why have these been ignored so far?

The SU and US Interventions Compared

Almost every aspect of Afghan life has been studied by foreign experts in recent years, but with one surprising exception. ‘It is rather astonishing,’ says the German diplomat and Afghan expert Martin Kipping, writing in a private capacity for the highly regarded Afghan Analysts Network, ‘to see that so far no systematic comparison has been drawn between the current US-led intervention and the previous external intervention aimed at strengthening and transforming the Afghan state: The Soviet intervention between 1979 and 1989.’ His own study seeks to remedy this.

The Soviet experience was ignored because it was seen as illegitimate compared to subsequent US action supported by the UN and NATO and by a popularly elected Afghan government.

A further reason for disregarding the lessons of the Soviet era in Afghanistan was the conviction that the Soviet army had been defeated by heroic mojahideen armed with Stinger missiles by the CIA. This is the theme of several movies and has become a fixed belief of the American right.

This picture is mostly Cold War mythology. The Soviet army retreated from Afghanistan in 1989 under a diplomatic agreement and without suffering a military defeat. There was no Dien Bien Phu. Soviet and Afghan troops had stabilised the military situation on the ground in 1983-4. The Stinger missiles made little difference. The Communist government of President Najibullah held onto power, to the surprise of US intelligence, for three years after the departure of the last Soviet soldier. However, the regime still needed money, weapons and fuel from Moscow and when these were cut off in 1992 after the break up of the Soviet Union, the Najibullah government collapsed.

At no time did the Soviet army look like losing, but it also never came close to eliminating the Afghan resistance. It lost 13,310 soldiers and airmen killed over nine years with the biggest losses in 1984 when 2,343 died according to post war statistics. Casualties were low compared to every other war fought by the Red Army in the twentieth century.

The real disaster for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was political and not military. By sending in its army to fight a popular revolt it isolated itself internationally and was portrayed as a predatory imperial power. All the obloquy which had been loaded on the US over the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s was now directed at the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Seeking better relations with the West, the Kremlin intended to bring its troops home but without allowing the Communist government in Kabul go down to defeat.

This it largely succeeded in doing and here lie some lessons for the US. The Soviet Union took the decision to invade without reckoning on the international consequences. The Communists had seized power in a military coup in Kabul in 1978. They imposed their rule by savage repression while their leaders divided into factions and engaged in murderous feuds. The Soviet invasion turned a sporadic guerrilla war into a mass uprising, in which the government permanently lost control of the countryside to the Mojahideen.

Former political and military leaders of the Afghan Communist government speak of important differences between now and then. Gen Ulumi, the all-powerful ruler of the southern provinces, says that the insurgents against Communist rule had the support of all the world, but the Taliban only enjoy secret backing from Pakistan.

He argues that, unlike the Karzai government, the Communists had a solid core of support in the cities and there were 200,000 members of the Communist Party. “I doubt if there are more than 40 people really loyal to Karzai,” he says. “He does not even have the full support of his own cabinet. There is no united team at the top.” The Communists cultivated the urban population through providing jobs, housing and subsidies for food and essential goods.

In combating the Mojahideen Gen Ulumi says he found political infiltration more effective than armed assault. Agreements were signed with insurgent commanders in which they promised not to fight or allow other anti-government fighters to pass through their districts. In return they received money and arms.

He says the Stingers “did not make much difference except to raise the morale of the Mojahideen temporarily and forced our helicopters to fly low. We had plenty of tanks and artillery.”

American intelligence imagined the Najibullah regime would collapse as soon as Soviet troops withdrew, but this did not happen. The insurgents launched a mass assault on Jalalabad in 1989, but failed to capture the city. By 1992 three-quarters of the mojahideen has signed neutrality agreements with the government.

The weakness of the Communists was that they had stabilized their rule through two ‘quick-fixes’, the development of militias (the Uzbek militia of General Abdul-Rashid Dostum had 40,000 men) and the fragile ceasefire agreements with local Mojahideen commanders. The support of both groups could only be secured by a continued supply of money and weapons from Moscow. When this failed Gen Dostum and other commanders switched sides and the regime fell apart in April 1992.

The Kremlin in the 1980s always had a weaker hand to play than the US twenty years later, but after the initial disastrous decision to invade the Soviet leaders played it skilfully. They forced out the ineffective President Babrak Karmal in 1986 and replaced him with the more effective Najibullah, the former intelligence chief. Two years later, under the Geneva Agreement, they got their own troops out without giving up their local proxy.

The lesson here for the US may be that it made a crucial error in not forcing the replacement of Karzai after, or even before, the largely fraudulent election of 2009. As the batch of cables from the US embassy in Kabul leaked by Wikileaks last week show, American diplomats see Karzai’s administration as saturated by corruption. They portray it as a money making machine for its members who, despite paltry salaries, buy multimillion dollar mansions in Dubai.

By installing Najibullah as president in 1986, the Soviets ensured that their client regime had able and determined leadership. In sticking with a discredited Karzai a quarter of a century later, the US and its allies landed themselves with an ineffective Afghan partner without a political base.

Can the US win the war by military force alone? This is the current strategy in south Afghanistan, though the Taliban are making inroads in the north and east. Small tactical successes are trumpeted, but are outweighed by the growing disaffection of Afghans against their own government. Gulabzoy says: “People may not join the Taliban, but they will not support the government.”

What should be dismaying for the US-led coalition is that it is not just former Communist leaders who express loathing for the government, but businessmen and professional people of all sorts in Kabul. “People are so angry that there will be a revolution,” said one estate agent in the capital. US ‘quick-fixes’, such as setting up their own militias and pumping in aid, are not working and may be destabilizing the situation further.

Some US officials wonder if they might not learn something from Soviet failures and successes. One tells of how a visiting delegation from Central Asia, which included a former Soviet general, visited a US base in east Afghanistan. Enthusiastic American officers explained the different ways they were trying to fight the insurgents and win the loyalty of the people. Eventually the general cut them off and said wearily: “We tried all that when we were here and it didn’t work then, so why should it work now.”

Patrick Cockburn is the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."

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[JackRiddler]

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/w ... 703670.htm

Massive tribesmen march in Pakistan, demanding halt to U.S. drone attacks

English.news.cn 2011-01-23 18:28:57


PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- A large number of tribesmen Sunday marched in a main city in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region and demanded a halt to U.S. drone strikes in the area.

The demonstration in the town of Mir Ali was the second in the region in three days after over 2,000 demonstrated in Miranshah, the agency's headquarters, on Friday.

The Sunday's rally coincided with two strikes by the U.S. drone aircraft in Datta Khel area of North Waziristan, which killed seven people.

Two missiles were fired on a vehicle, carrying suspected militants, as they arrived at a house at Doga Madakhel village, said official sources in the region. The house and vehicle were destroyed, tribesmen said.

Three persons were killed in the second strike in the area when the missiles hit a motorcycle, witnesses said.

There was no report about the identity of those killed. A tribesman in Miranshah said over phone that he had seen six pilotless drones before and after the strikes.

A tribesman said over phone that the tribesmen in Mir Ali closed all markets and transports were off the road as a protest against the strikes.

They marched for a kilometer in the town and chanted anti-U.S. slogans and were demanding an immediate halt to the drone strikes.

Speakers including religious clerics, tribal elders, traders and student leaders condemned the drone strikes and said that innocent people are targeted in the attacks.

President of the Traders Action Committee of Mir Ali Bazar, Abdul Hakim, told the rally that the U.S. drone strikes have made the people physiologically sick as everyone is in a state of fear when the drones started flying over the area.

American pilotless aircraft regularly fire rockets in Waziristan as the U.S. officials say the area is the launching pad for cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. Tribesmen say that innocent people are targeted by the U.S. aircraft.

Chief of the Students Council Abul Rauf said that the people could go to mosques and funerals fearing strikes as "the Americans do not spare public places."

The speakers also lashed out at the government for what they called its weaknesses to adopt a firm stand on the issue.

The CIA considers Waziristan as the home of Taliban leaders Hakimullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Mulla Nazir, who are fighting against U.S. and NATO forces across the borer in Afghanistan.

The Taliban-linked Haqqani network, fighting against U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is also thought to be active in the region, U.S. officials say.

Among a number of high-profile militant leaders, Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a drone attack in August 2009.

Pakistan publicly criticizes drone attacks, saying they violate its sovereignty and fuel more anti-Americanism among the people, but observers widely believe that Pakistan shares intelligence with the U.S. on drone strikes.Editor: Wang Guanqun


Related News

[JackRiddler]

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage ... 64130.aspx

Marc Grossman to replace the late Holbrooke. Among many other things, the central figure of the Sibel Edmonds allegations!

How can they always be so wrong? I think insistence on re-appointing the most exposed and symbolic government criminals and only very rarely ever allowing someone new to the high-level posts regardless of administration changes is part of the rule book. Any shock value to the practice -- OMG, they brought back Poindexter, we are all shocked and awed! -- went away long ago, however. I think the key function is to provide reassurance to all the other criminals in government that there is a sense of loyalty to made men, that taking heat or the very occasional fall will be rewarded. There's no other explanation for the career of Larry Summers, a resume consisting of a series of always extremely high-level posts in which he did whatever history would judge to be wrong and then left in disgrace after some new disaster.

Surely there is a place in the present government for strategic minds of the caliber of Douglas Feith or Richard Perle or, well, why not Wolfowitz?

Anyway...

Yashwant Raj
Washington, February 19, 2011
First Published: 00:53 IST(19/2/2011)
Last Updated: 01:43 IST(19/2/2011)
Clinton names Marc Grossman as new envoy to Afghanistan, Pak

Former diplomat Marc Grossman was on Friday named to succeed Richard Holbrooke as US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The appointment was announced by Secretary of state Hillary Clinton in a speech on Afghanistan and Pakistan in New York.

India would be watching Grossman for the missteps that made Holbrooke unpopular in New Delhi.

But Indian officials have said they are "comfortable" with the appointment.

They added they know Grossman, have dealt with him and found him to be a consummate diplomat.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage ... 64130.aspx

© Copyright 2010 Hindustan Times

World of diplomacy!

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[JackRiddler]

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The fake Talkiban story, from November 2010.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30280

Adding to help consolidate Afpak war threads.

This is too much. The media have been yakking for months about how the NATO negotiations with (fake) Mansour indicate the Taliban are tired from the Westerners' many successes and want amnesty to give up.

Pair this with the other news item about how 92 percent of Afghans in the province with the most fighting never heard of 9/11. They have the excellent excuse that the median age is 18, they've grown up in a war zone, they're dirt poor, don't have schools, and may have rarely even seen a television. And yet this finding is probably a mirror image of how much the imperialist bozos with their university educations and high-res satellite images actually know about Afghanistan.

What difference does it make? I mean, for 10 years they've claimed to be chasing the phantom of a dead man who cranks out laughably fake videos, right?

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world ... nted=print
Quoted here with original link as fair use for strictly non-commercial purposes of education and discussion.

November 22, 2010

Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor

By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

The episode underscores the uncertain and even bizarre nature of the atmosphere in which Afghan and American leaders search for ways to bring the nine-year-old American-led war to an end. The leaders of the Taliban are believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with the assistance of the Pakistani government, which receives billions of dollars in American aid.

Many in the Taliban leadership, which is largely made up of barely literate clerics from the countryside, had not been seen in person by American, NATO or Afghan officials.

American officials say they were skeptical from the start about the identity of the man who claimed to be Mullah Mansour — who by some accounts is the second-ranking official in the Taliban, behind only the founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Serious doubts arose after the third meeting with Afghan officials, held in the southern city of Kandahar. A man who had known Mr. Mansour years ago told Afghan officials that the man at the table did not resemble him. “He said he didn’t recognize him,” said an Afghan leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Western diplomat said the Afghan man was initially given a sizable sum of money to take part in the talks — and to help persuade him to return.

While the Afghan official said he still harbored hopes that the man would return for another round of talks, American and other Western officials said they had concluded that the man in question was not Mr. Mansour. Just how the Americans reached such a definitive conclusion — whether, for instance, they were able to positively establish his identity through fingerprints or some other means — is unknown.

As recently as last month, American and Afghan officials held high hopes for the talks. Senior American officials, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the talks indicated that Taliban leaders, whose rank-and-file fighters are under extraordinary pressure from the American-led offensive, were at least willing to discuss an end to the war.

The American officials said they and officials of other NATO governments were helping to facilitate the discussions, by providing air transport and securing roadways for Taliban leaders coming from Pakistan.

Last month, White House officials asked The New York Times to withhold Mr. Mansour’s name from an article about the peace talks, expressing concern that the talks would be jeopardized — and Mr. Mansour’s life put at risk — if his involvement were publicized. The Times agreed to withhold Mr. Mansour’s name, along with the names of two other Taliban leaders said to be involved in the discussions. The status of the other two Taliban leaders said to be involved is not clear.

Since the last round of discussions, which took place within the past few weeks, Afghan and American officials have been puzzling over who the man was. Some officials say the man may simply have been a freelance fraud, posing as a Taliban leader in order to enrich himself.

Others say the man may have been a Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. “They are playing games.”

Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a “double-game” in Afghanistan, reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents.

Publicly, the Taliban leadership is sticking to the line that there are no talks at all. In a recent message to his followers, Mullah Omar denied that there were any talks unfolding at any level.

“The cunning enemy which has occupied our country, is trying, on the one hand, to expand its military operations on the basis of its double-standard policy and, on the other hand, wants to throw dust into the eyes of the people by spreading the rumors of negotiation,” his message said.

Despite such statements, some senior leaders of the Taliban did show a willingness to talk peace with representatives of the Afghan government as recently as January.

At that time, Abdul Ghani Baradar, then the deputy commander of the Taliban, was arrested in a joint C.I.A.-ISI raid in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Although officials from both countries hailed the arrest as a hallmark of American-Pakistani cooperation, Pakistani officials have since indicated that they orchestrated Mr. Baradar’s arrest because he was engaging in peace discussions without the ISI’s permission.

Afghan leaders have confirmed this account.

Neither American nor Afghan leaders confronted the fake Mullah Mansour with their doubts. Indeed, some Afghan leaders are still holding out hopes that the man really is or at least represents Mr. Mansour — and that he will come back soon.

“Questions have been raised about him, but it’s still possible that it’s him,” said the Afghan leader who declined to be identified.

The Afghan leader said negotiators had urged the man claiming to be Mr. Mansour to return with colleagues, including other Taliban leaders whose identities they might also be able to verify.

The meetings were arranged by an Afghan with ties to both the Afghan government and the Taliban, officials said.

The Afghan leader said both the Americans and the Afghan leadership were initially cautious of the Afghan man’s identity and motives. But after the first meeting, both were reasonably satisfied that the man they were talking to was Mr. Mansour. Several steps were taken to establish the man’s real identity; after the first meeting, photos of him were shown to Taliban detainees who were believed to know Mr. Mansour. They signed off, the Afghan leader said.

Whatever the Afghan man’s identity, the talks that unfolded between the Americans and the man claiming to be Mr. Mansour seemed substantive, the Afghan leader said. The man claiming to be representing the Taliban laid down several surprisingly moderate conditions for a peace settlement: that the Taliban leadership be allowed to safely return to Afghanistan, that Taliban soldiers be offered jobs, and that prisoners be released.

The Afghan man did not demand, as the Taliban have in the past, a withdrawal of foreign forces or a Taliban share of the government.

Sayed Amir Muhammad Agha, a onetime Taliban commander who says he has left the Taliban but who acted as a go-between with the movement in the past, said in an interview that he did not know the tale of the impostor.

But he said the Taliban leadership had given no indications of a willingness to enter talks.

“Someone like me could come forward and say, ‘I am a Talib and a powerful person,’ ” he said. “But I can tell you, nothing is going on.”

“Whenever I talk to the Taliban, they never accept peace and they want to keep on fighting,” he said. “They are not tired.”

Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/23/fake-taliban-dupes-nato-negotiators

From the Guardian


Fake Taliban leader 'dupes Nato negotiators'

Impostor claiming to be Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour has tricked Afghan and Nato officials



The Afghan government and its Nato allies were duped into holding peace talks with a man posing as one of the most senior members of the Taliban leadership, it was revealed today.

According to Afghan and US sources quoted by the New York Times, authorities held face-to-face talks with the man who claimed to be Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the second highest official in the Taliban movement.

Western sources quoted by the New York Times also confirmed a Guardian report that the man was paid a large sum of money in the hope that he would remain engaged in negotiations.

But foreign and Afghan sources believe the man was lying about his identity after an Afghan official involved in one of the clandestine talks – who had previously met the Taliban chief – said he did not recognise the man posing as Mansour.

The revelation is a potential humiliation for Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president who has increasingly put his hopes in a peace deal with insurgents.

A western official in Kabul confirmed the thrust of the New York Times story and said the Americans had been aware of the blunder for some time, but refused to go into details. The US embassy referred all enquiries to the Afghan government.

No officials from Karzai's office were immediately available, but one Afghan with knowledge of the negotiations also confirmed the story.

In a press conference in Kabul called to mark Karzai's return from the Nato conference in Portugal, the Afghan president denied some of the key claims of report, including that he had ever met the man in his palace.

He also denied the senior Taliban leader travelled from Pakistan to Kabul. Officials say that on occasions Nato airplanes were used to transport the Taliban representatives. General David Petraeus, the US commander of Nato forces, confirmed that foreign forces have given safe passage to Taliban envoys involved in peace talks.

Karzai dismissed the recent press reports as "propaganda".

"Do not accept foreign media reports about meetings with Taliban leaders. Most of these reports are propaganda and lies," he said.

There has long been scepticism among foreign diplomats in Kabul about the seriousness of the talks, with most assuming the two sides were a long way from any sort of breakthrough. Concerns had also been raised about the payment of money to Taliban representatives, which suggested Karzai was more interested in buying off the insurgents rather than trying to engage with them.

But no one predicted the main interlocutor would be an impostor and possibly even, as the Washington Post reported, a humble shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Close colleagues of Karzai said the Afghan president increasingly sees peace talks as the only way to end the conflict, while the president's critics accuse him of being too keen to compromise with the Pakistani intelligence agency which is believed to play a critical role in supporting insurgents.

The Taliban maintain their firm public line that they are not taking part in talks and will not consider negotiations until foreign troops leave Afghanistan. In a recent statement, the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar said reports of peace talks were "misleading rumours".

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FOXNEWS rides to rescue Petraeus!

There are also claims coming in that Fake Mansour wasn't paid, from Karzai that he never met him, and from others that they suspected he was a fake.

The official line will soon be: "Everyone could have imagined!"

From http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11 ... ator-fake/
Article reproduced here with original link as fair-use for strictly non-commercial purposes of education, discussion, and exposing the lies and propaganda of Rupert Murdoch's Attack On America, a.k.a. FOXNEWS.

Petraeus Suggests U.S. Suspected 'All Along' Taliban Negotiator Was a Fake

Published November 23, 2010 | FoxNews.com


The top commander in Afghanistan suggested Tuesday that the United States suspected all along that a man leading peace talks on behalf of the Taliban was an impostor, even though the bogus militant was allegedly receiving payments from the West while he was duping them.

Gen. David Petraeus, speaking in Berlin, seemed to confirm newspaper reports that said the man claiming to be senior Taliban commander Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour during negotiations was an impersonator. The general described the Taliban outreach over the past six-to-eight months as "preliminary," saying some of the senior Taliban leaders "have been recognized as being legitimate" -- but not all.

"There has been skepticism about one of these all along and it might well be that that skepticism was well founded," Petraeus said.

The acknowledgement came after other U.S. officials refused to comment on the claim -- first reported in The New York Times and Washington Post -- that Western officials were dealing in high-level discussions with a fake.

White House spokesman Bill Burton earlier referred all questions to the Afghan government. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said he did not have "a lot of information" about the issue, but noted that the reports underscore the reality that "intelligence is a difficult ... thing" in these circumstances.

The Times reported that the man claiming to be Mansour was flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. According to the report, he was given money to participate in the talks, though Burton said "U.S. money" did not go to him.

Karzai vigorously disputed the reports, saying he never met with anybody by that name and calling the claims "propaganda" during a press conference in Kabul.

"Don't listen to the international media regarding news about the Taliban. Don't listen to them. Most of it is propaganda. Don't trust the New York Times. The rest of the media may be fine but don't trust the New York Times," he said.

The real Mansour, a former civil aviation minister during Taliban rule, is a senior member of the Taliban's ruling council in the Pakistani city of Quetta. That council, or shura, is run by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

If true, the claims that he was not really involved would be a blow to the Afghan government's push to find a political resolution to the nine-year-old war. It also raised questions about the credibility of some NATO officials who have said they facilitated contacts between Taliban figures and Afghan officials.

According to the reports, the impostor met with Afghan and NATO officials three times -- including once with Karzai -- before they discovered he was not Mansour.

Mansour was a well-known Taliban leader and had a high profile job in the movement's Cabinet.

It is not clear why officials would have had such a difficult time identifying him. There are a number of former Taliban in parliament and in the 70-member High Peace Council recently formed by Karzai to find a political solution to the insurgency. It was reported that the man was believed to be a shopkeeper in Quetta.

Although quite senior in the Quetta Shura, Mansour was not promoted to second-in-command of the Quetta shura following last February's arrest in Pakistan of Abdul Ghani Baradar. The Afghan Taliban's No. 2 leader was arrested in a joint raid with the CIA.

Mansour was passed over in favor for Maulvi Zakir Qayyum -- a former Guantanamo detainee. Released into Afghan custody in 2007, Qayyum was freed four months later and rejoined the Taliban.

In Pakistan last week President Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, played down reports about that senior Taliban leaders were holding talks with the Afghan government.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11 ... ator-fake/

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November 25, 2010

One Conman Falls for Another

Why Gen. Petraeus was Snookered by the "Taliban" Imposter

By GARETH PORTER

The revelation that the man presumed to be a high-ranking Taliban leader who had met with top Afghan officials was an impostor sheds light on Gen. David Petraeus's aggressive propaganda about the supposed Taliban approach to the Hamid Karzai regime.

Ever since August, Petraeus had been playing up the Taliban's supposed willingness to talk peace with Karzai as a development that paralleled the success he had claimed in splitting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq in 2007.

It is now clear, however, that Petraeus was deceiving himself as well as the news media in accepting the man claiming to be the second-ranking Taliban commander Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as genuine, despite a number of indications to the contrary.

Petraeus's failure to heed those signals was certainly driven by his strong desire to contrive yet another saga emphasizing his brilliance as a war strategist, judging from his public statements prior to the revelation of the fraud.

The tale of self-deception began a few months ago when a man claiming to be Mullah Mansour somehow persuaded U.S. officials, including Petraeus, to help him go to Kabul to talk with Karzai. Mansour had been named, along with Abdul Qayum Zakir, to replace Mullah Baradar last March after Baradar was detained by Pakistani intelligence, according to a Taliban spokesman quoted in Newsweek.

The first warning signal that the man was an impostor was that he gave Karzai regime officials terms for peace that bore no resemblance to the public posture of the Taliban.

He suggested that the Taliban merely wanted to be allowed to return safely to Afghanistan, along with promises of jobs and the release of prisoners, according to the Times account. There were no demands for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces or for a change to the constitutional system.

Both those demands had been fundamental to the Taliban position, both in public statements and in communications to ex-Taliban intermediaries between Karzai and the Taliban leadership.

But instead of finding the sudden lack of interest in bargaining over those demands suspicious, Petraeus apparently approved giving the man a considerable amount of money to continue the talks, according to reports by the New York Times and Washington Post.

That decision was evidently influenced by Petraeus's strong desire to believe that the vast increase in targeted raids aimed at killing or capturing suspected Taliban officials that had begun in March had caused top Taliban officials to give up their fundamental peace demands – and that he was now on his way to repeating what was believed to be his success in Iraq.

Petraeus began to hint at such a repeat performance in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News Aug. 20, when he presented the supposed Taliban approach to Karzai as another case of splitting the insurgency.

Couric asked, "So you think they'd be receptive to reconciliation?" to which Petraeus replied, "Some. Again, I don't there's an expectation that [Taliban spiritual leader] Mullah Omar is going to charter a plane any time soon to sit down and discuss the Taliban laying down weapons en masse. However, there are certainly leaders out there who we believe are willing to do that."

In fact, the impostor had said nothing to indicate to U.S. and Afghan officials that he was speaking on behalf of the entire Quetta Shura, including Mullah Omar himself, according to one U.S. official familiar with the episode. The official, who insisted on anonymity, told me the hope was that the man presumed to be Mansour was authorized by the leadership to speak for them.

Nevertheless, Petraeus returned to the same theme in late September, hinting at a divided Taliban leadership and again drew a parallel between peace talks in Afghanistan and what happened in Iraq.

"There are some high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government, and they have done that," Petraeus told reporters on Sep. 27.

The United States supported Karzai's conditions for the talks, he said, likening them to U.S. support for similar conditions for negotiations with Sunnis in Iraq. Then he added, "This is the way you end insurgencies."

The New York Times reported that senior U.S. officials, including Petraeus himself, were saying in October that "the talks indicated that Taliban leaders, whose rank-and-file fighters are under extraordinary pressure from the American-led offensive, were at least willing to discuss an end to the war."

Through the late summer and early autumn, Petraeus was continuing to ignore other warning signals that the Taliban’s willingness to give up the demand for U.S. withdrawal was too good to be true.

But throughout the entire period of U.S. and Afghan contacts with the impostor, the Taliban leadership was firmly denying that they were negotiating with the Afghan government. During the three-day Muslim holiday that began Sep. 9, Mullah Omar had said the Taliban would "never accept" the current government.

On Sep. 29, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Majahid said Petraeus's claim that the Taliban were negotiating with the Afghan government was "completely baseless", and that the Taliban would not negotiate with "foreign invaders or their puppet government".

Even more important, Taliban officials were telling Pakistani intelligence officers seeking clarification on the Taliban position on peace over the summer that the U.S. and NATO forces would have to be withdrawn before any settlement with Karzai, as reported by Syed Saleem Shahzad in the Asia Times.

But Petraeus evidently believed that he was now in a position to be able to repeat in Afghanistan the strategy that had worked in Iraq.

He had talked about negotiations with a segment of the Taliban leadership as the key to reducing the insurgency in Afghanistan even before he had taken over as chief of CENTCOM in October 2008. At a talk at the Heritage Foundation Oct. 8, 2008, Petraeus had said the key in Afghanistan was negotiations with those insurgents willing to reconcile while isolating the irreconcilables.

Petraeus has been able to reap the political benefit from the fact that most journalists and the U.S. political elite believe that it was Petraeus's maneuvering, combined with the surge, that produced the Sunni turn towards cooperation against al Qaeda.

That version of Petraeus-driven success is largely mythical, however. In fact, the Sunni shift toward joining local anti-al Qaeda militia units was already well underway before Petraeus took command in February 2007.

When Petraeus's U.S.-NATO command, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), finally consulted someone who had actually known Mullah Mansour in late October or early November, they were told the man they had been dealing with was an impostor.

Neither ISAF nor the Karzai government, however, have been able establish the identity of the impostor.

.

If elected civilian leadership of the military-industrial complex existed, by the end of this week Petraeus would be busted and his successor would be directing the NATO withdrawal.

.

Oh, and about the Petraeus "surges." Since Iraq was actually a developed nation before they destroyed it, it was possible there to figure out whom to bribe for an illusory period of peace. This does not seem to be possible in Afghanistan.

..................................

Karzai aide blames British for Taliban impostor

President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff has said British authorities brought a fake Taliban commander into sensitive meetings with the Afghan government.

The British embassy refused to confirm or deny the remarks, made in an interview with the Washington Post.

A man described as Mullah Mansour, a senior Taliban commander, was flown to Kabul for a meeting with President Karzai.

Now it is claimed he was really a Pakistani shopkeeper.

The impersonator reportedly met officials three times and was even flown on a Nato aircraft to Kabul.

Mystery man

But doubts arose after an Afghan who knew Mullah Mansour said he did not recognise the man.

The faker then vanished, but not before he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to reports.

Mr Karzai's chief of staff, Mohammad Umer Daudzai, told the Washington Post that British diplomats had brought the impostor to meet Mr Karzai in July or August.

"The last lesson we draw from this: International partners should not get excited so quickly with those kind of things," Mr Daudzai told the newspaper.

He added: "Afghans know this business, how to handle it. We handle it with care, we handle it with a result-based approach, with very less damage to all the other processes."

UK government officials said on Friday that the money given to the impostor came from Afghan government coffers, not from British taxpayers.

The unnamed officials also told BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner that the payment had been a fraction of the sums reported.

The BBC's Paul Wood in Kabul says if there was indeed British involvement, the question is whether this was logistical support or something more active.

He says full negotiations to end this conflict still seem a long way off - and the case of the Taliban impostor will not have helped matters.

Unnamed senior US officials told the Washington Post that the Mansour impersonator was "the Brits' guy".

They said the Americans had "healthy scepticism" from the start because their intelligence had suggested Mullah Mansour would be a few inches taller than the man claiming to be the Taliban commander.

The UK's Times newspaper reports that the impostor was promoted by British overseas intelligence agency MI6, which was convinced it had achieved a major breakthrough.

The real identity of the faker remains a mystery.

Some reports suggest he was a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

It is still not clear whether he had any links to the Taliban or if he was simply a conman.

Another theory is he could have been a Pakistani intelligence agent.

Western diplomats have previously conceded that some of those claiming to represent the Taliban have turned out to be frauds.

The real Mr Mansour was civil aviation minister during Taliban rule and is now said to be in charge of weapons procurement for the insurgents.

The Afghan government's meetings with the Taliban - fake or otherwise - have been described as contacts rather than negotiations.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11845217

Heh, notice how every BBC paragraph fits on a single line here?

(Presuming you have widescreen).

[JackRiddler]

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Drew the Just started a new one for this but seems to fit perfectly here:

:shock2:
“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”

February 24, 2011
U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to War
By C. J. CHIVERS, ALISSA J. RUBIN and WESLEY MORGAN

This article is by C. J. Chivers, Alissa J. Rubin and Wesley Morgan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness.

While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.

And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely.

Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.”

The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and American withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley, runs the risk of providing the Taliban with an opportunity to claim success and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the war.

American officials say their logic is simple and compelling: the valley consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; those forces could be deployed in other areas; and there are not enough troops to win decisively in the Pech Valley in any case.

“If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will you be a year from now?” General Campbell said. “I would tell you that there are places where we’ll continue to build up security and it leads to development and better governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for that, and I’ve got to use the forces where they can do the most good.”

President Obama’s Afghan troop buildup is now fully in place, and the United States military has its largest-ever contingent in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama’s reinforced campaign has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan’s south, and to building up Afghan security forces.

The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to insurgents, blocking infiltration routes from Pakistan and trying to fight away from populated areas, where NATO’s superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with less risk to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone of this thinking.

The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of earlier decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former NATO commander, overhauled the Afghan strategy two years ago, his staff designated 80 “key terrain districts” to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them.

Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place.

“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”

Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, a former commander of the region’s Afghan Border Police, agreed with some of this assessment. He said that residents of the Pech Valley bristled at the American presence but might tolerate Afghan units. “Many times they promised us that if we could tell the Americans to pull out of the area, they wouldn’t fight the Afghan forces,” he said.

It is impossible to know whether such pledges will hold. Some veterans worry that the withdrawal will create an ideal sanctuary for insurgent activity — an area under titular government influence where fighters or terrorists will shelter or prepare attacks elsewhere.

While it is possible that the insurgents will concentrate in the mountain valleys, General Campbell said his goal was to arrange forces to keep insurgents from Kabul, the country’s capital.

“There are thousands of isolated mountainous valleys throughout Afghanistan, and we cannot be in all of them,” he said.

The American military plans to withdraw from most of the four principal American positions in the valley. For security reasons, General Campbell declined to discuss which might retain an American presence, and exactly how the Americans would operate with Afghans in the area in the future.

As the pullback begins, the switch in thinking has fueled worries among those who say the United States is ceding some of Afghanistan’s most difficult terrain to the insurgency and putting residents who have supported the government at risk of retaliation.

“There is no house in the area that does not have a government employee in it,” said Col. Gul Rahman, the Afghan police chief in the Manogai District, where the Americans’ largest base in the valley, Forward Operating Base Blessing, is located. “Some work with the Afghan National Army, some work with the Afghan National Police, or they are a teacher or governmental employee. I think it is not wise to ignore and leave behind all these people, with the danger posed to their lives.”

Some Afghan military officials have also expressed pointed misgivings about the prospects for Afghan units left behind.

“According to my experience in the military and knowledge of the area, it’s absolutely impractical for the Afghan National Army to protect the area without the Americans,” said Major Turab, the former second-in-command of an Afghan battalion in the valley, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “It will be a suicidal mission.”

The pullback has international implications as well. Senior Pakistani commanders have complained since last summer that as American troops withdraw from Kunar Province, fighters and some commanders from the Haqqani network and other militant groups have crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan to create a “reverse safe haven” from which to carry out attacks against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas.

The Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups are all but certain to label the withdrawal a victory in the Pech Valley, where they could point to the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from the same area in 1988. Many Afghans remember that withdrawal as a symbolic moment when the Kremlin’s military campaign began to visibly fall apart.

Within six months, the Soviet-backed Afghan Army of the time ceded the territory to mujahedeen groups, according to Afghan military officials.

The unease, both with the historical precedent and with the price paid in American blood in the valley, has ignited a sometimes painful debate among Americans veterans and active-duty troops. The Pech Valley had long been a hub of American military operations in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces.

American forces first came to the valley in force in 2003, following the trail of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami group, who, like other prominent insurgent leaders, has been said at different times to hide in Kunar. They did not find him, though Hezb-i-Islami is active in the valley.

Since then, one American infantry battalion after another has fought there, trying to establish security in villages while weathering roadside bombs and often vicious fights.

Along with other slotlike canyons that the United States has already largely abandoned — including the Korangal Valley, the Waygal Valley (where the battle of Wanat was fought in 2008), the Shuryak Valley and the Nuristan River corridor (where Combat Outpost Keating was nearly overrun in 2009) — the Pech Valley was a region rivaled only by Helmand Province as the deadliest Afghan acreage for American troops.

On one operation alone in 2005, 19 service members, including 11 members of the Navy Seals, died.

As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for many soldiers a status as hallowed ground. “I can think of very few places over the past 10 years with as high and as sustained a level of violence,” said Col. James W. Bierman, who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006 and helped establish the American presence in the Korangal Valley.

In the months after American units left the Korangal last year, insurgent attacks from that valley into the Pech Valley increased sharply, prompting the current American battalion in the area, First Battalion, 327th Infantry, and Special Operations units to carry out raids into places that American troops once patrolled regularly.

Last August, an infantry company raided the village of Omar, which the American military said had become a base for attacks into the Pech Valley, but which earlier units had viewed as mostly calm. Another American operation last November, in the nearby Watapor Valley, led to fighting that left seven American soldiers dead.

[JackRiddler]

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US gunships massacre 9 boys in Kunar

Signs that COIN has failed, surge is over?

Video at Democracy Now! link.

From http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/3/us ... people_for

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Afghanistan, where NATO helicopter gunships killed nine young boys on Tuesday while they were collecting firewood near their home in the northeastern province of Kunar. The boys were all between the ages of nine and 15. The dead included two sets of brothers.

The one survivor of the attack was an 11-year-old boy named Hemad. He told the New York Times, quote, "The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting." The boy went on to say the helicopter gunships "shot the boys one after another."

It was at least the third instance in two weeks in which the Afghan government accused NATO forces of killing large numbers of civilians in air strikes. An Afghan government panel is still investigating claims some 65 people, including 40 children, were killed in a U.S.-led attack last week.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, top NATO commander, General David Petraeus, issued an unusual apology for the attack on the nine boys. In a written statement, Petraeus said, "We are deeply sorry for this tragedy and apologize to the members of the Afghan government, the people of Afghanistan and most importantly, the surviving family members of those killed by our actions."

But Petreaus has refused to apologize for other apparent NATO attacks on civilians. Last month, Petraeus shocked his Afghan counterparts when he suggested in a closed meeting that pro-Taliban Afghans might be burning their own children or inventing stories to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties.

To talk more about Afghanistan, we’re with Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films, independent journalist who’s been to Afghanistan a number of times, only recently returned.

This latest attack and the apology, Rick?

RICK ROWLEY: Well, I mean, I think the apology is clearly happening because of the outrageous comments that Petraeus is reported of making to Karzai, that Afghan parents are burning their children in order to get the few thousand dollars in money that the U.S. military gives out in condolence payments.

But really, what this string of attacks shows—of air attacks shows is that the strategy on which the surge was built, and billed, is over and has failed, that this—you remember, one year ago, when the surge was launched, I mean, this was—the people were the prize. We were going to end air strikes. We were going to move in, and at great personal risk to our own soldiers, we were going to prove that we were there to protect the population and slowly build our counterinsurgency around that. It was called "population-centric counterinsurgency," or COIN. And I mean, I made three trips to Afghanistan last year: once at the very beginning of the surge; mid-surge, I was with the Marines in Marjah; and then in September and October. And by the end, Afghans were just—Afghan villagers were coming up and asking us why the air strikes started again. I mean, they were noticing this sort of uptick before it was even reported in the press. So, what happened was, after the surge was bogged down and COIN was failing in both Marjah and Kandahar, the U.S. has turned to a firepower-intensive kind of combat, where—you know, I mean, every metric is trending against the Americans now. By every measurable means, the U.S. is losing the war there now. And so, now we’ve moved to a tactic that doesn’t have a strategy behind it. I mean, the theory behind COIN in the beginning was, you know, that you’ll slowly win hearts and minds by going in and protecting the population. You know, the Marines are bringing tanks into Marjah. They’re resorting to air strikes. Night raids have risen to an astronomical level where there’s a thousand raids a month happening, up from 30 raids a month in 2008. I mean, after—decades after Vietnam, one decade into this war, we’ve gone back to body counts as our only way of measuring any kind of progress in the war. So, I mean, what these attacks show is that the strategy that the surge was built around is over.

Or else the true strategy is being made plain. The talk of winning hearts and minds by dropping "government in a box" turns out to be about as honest (or as self-delusive) as the yellow food packets dropped from cargo planes at the beginning of the Afghanistan crusade in October 2001 (for the benefit of the TV cameras on board) along with the bombs (some of which looked like yellow food packets).

The Afghan "surge" or rather the US offensive of 2009-11 turns out to be the latest version of the Phoenix mass-murder operation from Vietnam. Free-fire terror, bodycounts, assassinations, disappearances and killings of captured "civilian infrastructure" in interrogation. Meanwhile there is no changing that the "enemy" is being by taking from the fractious "allies" and financed by shaking down the "coalition" contractors with tolls and working with covert operators to get opium to market. Phoenix killed tens of thousands but "failed" in Vietnam. That means it didn't end the insurgency against US occupation, though as a scorched-earth quasi-random bloodletting it was all too effective. The PR says the strategy "worked" in Iraq, and now it's failing in Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Gates made a very unusual comment, the Secretary of Defense, about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what he told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday.

DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined, as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

He "so delicately put it" to Kennedy a couple of years before the Vietnam intervention (since the early 1950s) turned into an invasion under Johnson. After that invasion was finally repelled and Americans soured on wars for empire, Gates's colleagues identified this as a "Vietnam Syndrome" that had to be overcome so that the US could again act as world police. Gates's role is described by Robert Parry:

The Reagan administration’s chief technique for reprogramming the American people was to scare them about foreign threats – like pretending the Soviet Union was on the rise and on the march toward world conquest – when CIA analysts were actually detecting signs of Moscow’s rapid decline.

The Reagan administration’s solution to the problem of those pesky CIA analysts was to politicize the agency, push aside the professionals and put in place opportunists who would go along with the ideological agenda of hyping the Soviet threat.

The key players in that gambit were CIA Director William Casey, a Cold War hardliner, and an ambitious careerist who was put in charge of the analytical division, Robert Gates (today’s Defense Secretary). [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth” or Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

From http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/022811.html

These machinations fed the Reagan war buildup through a series of escalating interventions in the 1980s and led to the Iraq war of 1991 and the revival of American dreams of global military dominance, finally to the present generation of disasters.

Gates is a happy propaganda tool, a liar: he was the one who appeared to oppose escalation in Iraq (as a co-author of the Baker-Hamilton report) and then implemented the Iraqi escalation soon as he was called on to replace Rumsfeld after the 2006 election rejected the Iraq war. He stuck around as the permanent government under Obama and has overseen the now-failed Afghan escalation. The air is full of the human ashes that Gates and his friends made. He wants to dust off his hands.

Perhaps in a few years a new "Afghanistan syndrome" will be discovered, a new reluctance to wage war that is an obstacle to "our" interests. The only reason it won't be "overcome" this time will be that the empire is over. The power has bankrupted itself. Or maybe because we finally wake up enough to just cut off the money-spigots to the beast? Is that possible when people can really be sold on the lie that it was their profligate pensions that bankrupted the country, not the bottomless gullet of empire?

AMY GOODMAN: "Should have his head examined." This is the Secretary of Defense when we’re in the midst of two wars.

RICK ROWLEY: I mean, certainly that shows the sea change that is happening inside the military establishment itself. I mean, there’s been no public announcement about this change in strategy. I mean, as far as the Obama administration’s public pronouncements about what’s going on there, you know, it’s still the surge, still population-centric COIN, still the same hearts and minds campaign. But it is clear from the way the military is operating on the ground in Afghanistan that that strategy is over.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And isn’t this an implicit recognition that the Obama strategy—that the surge will happen for a short period of time, and then the withdrawal will begin—that it has basically fallen apart?

RICK ROWLEY: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that started to become clear over the summer, when the time lines kept being rolled back for both Marjah and Kandahar, and had become completely clear, now that—now that we’re striking from the sky again, we’re bringing in tanks. And they’re doing—I mean, there have been a whole series of other really startling reports that came out late last year, like in December, they were—it came to light that in Kandahar, in the Arghandab Valley, the U.S. military was routinely leveling villages that it can’t clear. There was a village called Tarok Kolache, or Kolache, where—I mean, there’s aerial photographs of the village before and after. They dropped 20,000 pounds of munitions and erased this village off the map, because it was so strong with IEDs, they claim, that they couldn’t clear it. And that, apparently, is not an isolated incident. They develop new weapons around this. They have a directional charge that blows, you know, a 300-600-meter trench that’s the width of a tank or an MRAP, so that they can just blow a path through a field instead of driving through it. I mean, that is not a hearts and minds campaign. That is not a population-centric campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Rick, I want to turn for a moment to a recent piece you did for Al Jazeera, the segment which includes interviews with Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Hoh, one of the highest-level embassy people to quit over the war in Afghanistan. He was serving in Afghanistan. They discuss recent changes in U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and the reasons for the increase in civilian casualties.

MATTHEW HOH: The philosophy at this time was supposed to be a population-centric campaign. That quickly morphed and much more dependent on Special Operations raids, much more dependent upon targeted assassinations. So I think you’ve seen that shift, which is, you know, borne of desperation.

RICK ROWLEY: Publicly, the military clams that its counterinsurgency strategy remains unchanged, and embedded journalists are still presented with small-scale development projects, as if they were America’s core military mission. But outside of camera range, the U.S. as ratcheting up a covert campaign of night raids and air strikes.

JEREMY SCAHILL: It’s been a very effective campaign. A tremendous number of Taliban commanders and Haqqani Network leaders have been killed by the United States. At the same time, a dramatic number of civilians have also been killed. This killing campaign has had a ricochet effect that actually undermines the entire notion that the U.S. is in Afghanistan to actually engage in any nation building.

RICK ROWLEY: Jeremy Scahill is The Nation magazine’s national security correspondent and has reported extensively on the rapid expansion of the role of U.S. Special Operation Forces worldwide. Special Operations Forces raids in Afghanistan have risen from 30 a month in 2009 to around 1,000 a month by the end of 2010. Scahill argues that while the raids may be successful in killing Taliban leadership, they represent a shift away from a nation-building and counterinsurgency strategy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: You can’t overstate the impact that these night raids have in undermining the stated U.S. goal of counterinsurgency or winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan. They’re taking people that may have been inclined to be against the Taliban and flipping them immediately against the U.S. It’s actually increasing the ranks of the Taliban, and it’s growing the indigenous support for insurgency, in general.

NIGHT RAID SURVIVOR: [translated] We thought thieves had come from the desert. We went outside to see what was happening, and the Americans were on top of the walls. They killed five of us. When I saw my daughter wounded, all I could think about was putting on a suicide jacket.

JEREMY SCAHILL: The endgame of a targeting killing campaign is just that you’re going to keep having to kill, because you’re not building any stability. And with every insurgent leader that you kill, the collateral damage, so to speak, from those attacks, the innocent people that are killed, creates a whole new generation of people that are going to fight you. There is no endgame.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Jeremy Scahill and, before that, Matt Hoh, as well as Afghan civilians. A final comment, Rick Rowley?

RICK ROWLEY: Well, I mean, we’ve reached a moment where, I think, as you see in those last sort of comments there, that the covert, dark war has eclipsed completely the conventional war right now, that special forces is now killing and capturing, in completely covert, untransparent operations, more Taliban and Afghans than the entire conventional NATO force. And what it means is that we know almost nothing about what actually goes on, that it’s a—journalists are not allowed to embed on those missions. They are classified. And even internally, ISAF and NATO doesn’t know what is going on there. So, we’re entering a very dark phase in the war right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Rick Rowley, thanks so much for your work and for coming in. Rick Rowley, independent journalist with Big Noise Films.

.

[crikkett]

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/664130.aspx

Marc Grossman to replace the late Holbrooke. Among many other things, the central figure of the Sibel Edmonds allegations!

How can they always be so wrong? I think insistence on re-appointing the most exposed and symbolic government criminals and only very rarely ever allowing someone new to the high-level posts regardless of administration changes is part of the rule book. Any shock value to the practice -- OMG, they brought back Poindexter, we are all shocked and awed! -- went away long ago, however. I think the key function is to provide reassurance to all the other criminals in government that there is a sense of loyalty to made men, that taking heat or the very occasional fall will be rewarded. There's no other explanation for the career of Larry Summers, a resume consisting of a series of always extremely high-level posts in which he did whatever history would judge to be wrong and then left in disgrace after some new disaster.

Surely there is a place in the present government for strategic minds of the caliber of Douglas Feith or Richard Perle or, well, why not Wolfowitz?

Anyway...

Does keeping the same criminals around in govt appointments have something to do with the confirmation process? I wonder.

The one survivor of the attack was an 11-year-old boy named Hemad. He told the New York Times, quote, "The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting." The boy went on to say the helicopter gunships "shot the boys one after another."

It was at least the third instance in two weeks in which the Afghan government accused NATO forces of killing large numbers of civilians in air strikes. An Afghan government panel is still investigating claims some 65 people, including 40 children, were killed in a U.S.-led attack last week.

/so tired of reading about my country killing children.

[JackRiddler]

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Pick-up thanks to seemslikeadream.

Published on Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Inter Press Service
U.N. Reported Only a Fraction of Civilian Deaths from U.S. Raids
by Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON/KABUL - The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.


The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed. (AFP/Shah Marai)
The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for Taliban assassinations.

The Mar. 9 report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of 80 civilians were killed in "search and seizure operations" by "Pro-Government Forces" in 2010.

But AIHRC Commissioner Nader Nadery told IPS the figure represented only the number of civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents involving SOF units that the Commission had been able to investigate thoroughly.

Nadery said the AIHRC had received complaints from local people alleging civilian casualties in 60 additional incidents involving raids and other activities by Special Forces. "We did not include them in the report, because we were unable to collect the exact figures for casualties, which takes time," Nadery said.

The AIHRC is continuing to investigate those 60 events, according to Nadery, and will report on the results in the future.

The Mar. 9 report refers to "60 incidents of night raids that caused civilian casualties", but does not inform the reader that only a fraction of the total casualties alleged in those incidents were counted in the total.

At least one of the 13 incidents investigated by the AIHRC was an air strike called by an SOF unit. The 80 deaths from at most 12 incidents or less would suggest an average of at least seven civilians killed per incident. If the sample of night raids investigated is representative of the total of 60 incidents of SOF night raids about which civilian casualty complaints were generated, the total number of civilians killed would be around 420.

The UNAMA-AIHRC report shows a total 406 assassinations of civilians by "Anti-Government Elements" reported for 2010.

But the UNAMA-AIHRC report uses a strict humanitarian law definition of "civilian" in regard to victims of assassination by "Anti-Government Elements" which was not applied to victims of U.S. night raids. "If Afghan soldiers travelling from one place to another, on holiday, with no weapon and no uniform, are killed, we count them as civilians, and the same with policemen," Nadery told IPS.

Mayors and district chiefs, who participate in military planning with NATO military commanders, were also considered as civilian victims of assassination, according to Nadery.

A large proportion of those killed as "Taliban" in SOF night raids, however, would also qualify as civilians under this definition.

Matthew Hoh, formerly the senior U.S. foreign service officer in Zabul province before his 2009 resignation, was familiar with the target list for SOF kill or capture raids. He told IPS the list included Afghans holding every kind of non-combat function in the Taliban network, including propagandists and workers who make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

UNAMA team leader Denise Lifton conceded that the report had made no effort to ascertain what positions had been occupied by those who had been killed in U.S. raids. "We have not looked at the functions, per se, of those [who are] accused of being Taliban and are killed," she said in an e-mail to IPS.

Night raids generally kill Taliban personnel in their own homes, and thus outside the context of a military operation. If the same humanitarian law criterion used in counting victims of Taliban assassinations were applied to the alleged Taliban targeted in SOF night raids, the victims of killings during those raids would have to be considered as civilian casualties.

U.S. Special Operations Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian casualties, including killed and wounded, as a result of night raids, as reported by Reuters Feb. 24.

Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), insisted in an e-mail to IPS that such raids are "intelligence driven", and that "there is a rigorous process involved in identifying targets".

But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS last September that the total of 1,355 insurgents "captured" in the raids from May through July 2010 included "suspected insurgents", she was unable to provide any figures on how many of those 1,355 had later been released.

Belinsky did not respond directly to a request from IPS this week for the information on what proportion of insurgents captured in 2010 had turned out not to be insurgents. The continued refusal of ISAF, under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, to release that information suggests that it would reveal a very high proportion of the several thousand Afghans killed last year as "Taliban" were simply civilian supporters or victims of misidentification or a malicious intelligence tip.

The remarkably sharp rise in the number night raids carried out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ISAF commander until June 2010 - and the even more spectacular increase in the raids under Petraeus - in 2010 raises serious questions about how the U.S. military could avoid a massive increase in the killing of individuals with non-military functions in the Taliban as well as people with only tangential or no connection to the insurgency.

According to a document from the Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks last July, In October 2009, the target list for SOF night raids, called the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058 names. That list provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 raids per month in late 2009 – a huge increase from the 20 per month just six months earlier.

Significantly, at that moment, Gen. Petraeus was warning the White House against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids and a smaller conventional force footprint. "There's just a limit to how many precise targets you have at any one time…," Petraeus said, according to the account in Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars".

But from May through July 2010, according to ISAF figures, SOF units launched 3,000 night raids – a 50-fold increase over the rate of only a year earlier – in which they reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban "leaders" and "rank and file".

A 10-fold increase in raids, which implied a similar increase in the size of the target list, could not have been carried out without a dramatic relaxation of the already very loose criteria for including someone on the JPEL, according to Matthew Hoh.

"Commanders are under pressure to find targets for these raids, because it has become a metric of success," Hoh told IPS. He likened that broadening of the targeting criteria to the CIA's getting much greater latitude on targeting of drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008, expanding the target list from a handful of al Qaeda leaders to virtually anyone tangentially associated with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Hoh said one result of the frantic effort to expand the target list is bound to be an increased use of intelligence tips from individuals or tribal enemies.

That appears to have been a factor in the killing of President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad Karzai, in a night raid in the Karzai ancestral home in Kandahar province, Mar. 9. The raiders also took his son away with a black bag over his head.

Yar Mohmmad Karzai had told relatives repeatedly over the years that he feared that another cousin of the president's, Hashmat Karzai, who had headed a large security firm for years and then ran unsuccessfully for parliament, would seek to arrange for a U.S. attack against him by planting false information with the Americans.

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