Ending weeks of speculation regarding the massive fraud in Afghanistan’s August presidential election, the Obama Administration has formally decided that incumbent President Hamid Karzai will get a second five year term, no matter what the investigations determine.
Reider Braun, Foreign Policy In Focus, Sep 18, 2009
On September 4, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force conducted an airstrike on a fuel tank hijacked by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. The attack killed dozens of people including civilians, according to NATO sources. However the German Minister of Defense, Franz Josef Jung, has stubbornly denied that the attack harmed civilians, insisting instead that “only Taliban were killed.” Jung even verbally attacked NATO and EU statements on the topic, saying that “other countries should not interfere.”
Because of this unjustifiable military strike German citizens, who have never forgotten the two world wars, have finally begun to realize that Germany is at war. A majority continues to demand the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, a demand that has only become amplified by the obvious fraud in the recent Afghan elections. According to a September 12 poll, 59% of the Germans were in favor of a withdrawal. Although Germans have rejected their government’s rhetoric and policies toward Afghanistan the resistance is largely passive, with no massive uproar on the streets.
This latest attack has revealed the reality of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan. It is not a “stabilization effort” (as the speaker of the Minister of Defense called it on September 4). Nor is the German Bundeswehr providing “development aid.” Germany is engaged in an authentic military action that has led to many civilian deaths.
World War II lasted less than six years. The war of the West in Afghanistan, however, has been going on for eight years as of this October. In this war, 40 nations have provided soldiers and modern military gear. But despite this large-scale effort, NATO has been unable to defeat the Taliban, eradicate drug cultivation or rebuild the economy in apparently calm areas. The toll on the Afghan population, especially in light of the previous two decades of war, has been immense.
Minister of Defense Jung and the German government should stop pretending that Germany is involved in a humanitarian operation. There can be no development assistance as long as foreign soldiers occupy the country. For years humanitarian aid organizations such as Caritas, Welthungerhilfe, Medico, and Kinderhilfe Afghanistan have complained that “civil-military co-operation” undermines civil aid to the point that it becomes useless. Echoing these criticisms, the organization Developing Politics of German Non-Government Organizations has demanded a strict separation of military actions and humanitarian aid.
For Germany to play a true humanitarian role in Afghanistan, it must withdraw German troops from the country. Supporters of Germany’s military involvement argue that chaos will reign after the military troops withdraw and the Taliban will take over power. But the Taliban enjoy greater support now because it is fighting against foreign occupation. Remove the foreign occupiers and Taliban support will dwindle.
The Germany peace movement is currently conducting many actions to end the war in Afghanistan, most recently several regional public meetings on September 9. It will continue these actions even after the presidential elections on September 27. Die Linke, the only party in Germany that supports immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, has seen its support rise from 10% to 14% in the wake of the bombing. It is time for Germany to withdraw its troops and for the minister of defense to step down.
Reiner Braun is the executive director of the German International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, program director for International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.
By Killid Correspondents, Inter Press Service News, Sep 19, 2009
KABUL, Sep 19 (IPS) – For many Afghans, slain Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi has become a symbol for all that is wrong with the United States-led war in Afghanistan.
One thousand and thirteen Afghan civilians died due to the conflict in the first six months of this year, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, a 24 percent increase over the same period in 2008, when 818 civilians were killed.
By Pilger, John, ZNet, Sep 18, 2009
John Pilger’s ZSpace Page
On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his “major policy speech” on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. “At least” 90 were killed, although Nato prefers not to count its civilian enemy. “It was a scene from hell,” said Mohammed Daud, a witness. “Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere.” No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.
Peace and Justice Post 
Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan
October 2, 2009by Norman Solomon, CommonDreams.org, Oct 1, 2009
October 2009 has begun with the New York Times reporting that “the president, vice president and an array of cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, generals, diplomats and advisers gathered in a windowless basement room of the White House for three hours on Wednesday to chart a new course in Afghanistan.”
As this month begins the ninth year of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, “windowless” seems to be an apt metaphor. The structure of thought and the range of options being debated in Washington’s high places are notably insular. The “new course” will be a permutation of the present course.
While certainty is lacking, steely resolve is evident. An unspoken mantra remains in effect: When in doubt, keep killing. The knotty question is: Exactly who and how?
News accounts are filled with stories about options that mix “counterinsurgency” with “counterterrorism.” The thicker the jargon in Washington, the louder the erudite tunes from the latest best and brightest — whistling past graveyards, to be filled by people far away.
In the White House, there’s no indication of a pane that’s facing the pain in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, where the U.S. government continues to bring gifts: a dollar’s worth of warfare for a dime’s worth of everything else.
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The letter was neatly printed with a blue pen. “I’ve been fed up and damaged,” it said. “My hope is that from you and all entrepreneurs and all who have compassion, I respectfully ask you to help me for God’s sake. I’m downtrodden. I hope you understand my situation.”
The situation, living in a squalid camp for refugees in Kabul, was desperate. “I am Sayed Ali — from Geresh district of Helmand province.”
Moments after handing me the letter, he grabbed it out of my hands. A controlled rage flooded his voice. Pashto words cascaded, and a translator tried to keep up.
Sayed Ali said that he’d given other letters to officials and nothing changed. Month after month in this forsaken camp, little more than ditches and improvised tents.
Two weeks later, in mid-September, I met with a few staffers and members of Congress; some of the most progressive on Capitol Hill. But when I talked about the refugees I saw in Kabul — many of them homeless because of U.S. bombing in southern Afghanistan — the discussion couldn’t seem to get anywhere.
In the air was an unspoken message: Desperate refugees are routine in war. That’s the way it is.
Washington doesn’t recognize Sayed Ali, with his suffering and his smoldering rage, or other Afghans in similar predicaments. An unspoken calculus in Washington figures that we owe them next to nothing. It’s a matter of priorities, you know.
Yes, there are plenty of photo ops and news reports on U.S. aid projects, happening in tandem with Army and Marines military maneuvers. But what’s budgeted to help rebuild Afghanistan is paltry compared to what’s spent on making war there.
“We proclaim moral principles when justifying our actions, but we wreak havoc and destruction on a backward, ancient world we do not understand,” retired U.S. Army colonel and author Douglas Macgregor wrote in Defense News on September 28. He added: “Our troops are not anthropologists or sociologists, they are soldiers and Marines who have been sent to impose America’s will on backward societies. The result is mutual hatred — not everywhere, but in enough places to feed what American military leaders like to call an ‘insurgency’ . . .”
U.S. media and politics are now awash in talk about getting smarter and shrewder in Afghanistan. The idea of setting a country right while waging war is a popular Washington fantasy. What it has to do with reality is another matter.
“I don’t want any foreigners building roads or big buildings for me when I am cleaning blood from my home,” a shopkeeper in Helmand province, Haji Dawood Khan, told a Financial Times reporter in late September. The newspaper quoted a businessman from Kandahar province, Mohammad Karigar, who said: “The more foreign troops there are, the more people will hate them.”
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In Washington, few politicians or journalists mention that 90 percent of the U.S. government’s current spending in Afghanistan is for military operations.
There was plenty of money to pay for bombing Sayed Ali’s neighborhood in Helmand province, but there’s no money to ease his current desperation.
Sayed Ali is speaking for countless other people: “I respectfully ask you to help me for God’s sake.”
More than eight months have passed since the inaugural speech when Barack Obama told foreign leaders: “Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” And so President Obama will be judged.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. For video of his recent appearances on “Democracy Now” and C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” go to: www.normansolomon.com
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