Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

What are U.S. goals in Afghanistan?

March 14, 2009

Helen Thomas | The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is making a big mistake in escalating U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan where he already has acknowledged he doesn’t believe victory is possible.

We should ask: What are we doing there seven years after the 9/11 attacks by the al-Qaida network? Historically, the country has lacked a strong central government and has been governed by locally strong tribal leaders and warlords.

Al-Qaida was able to take advantage of this loose structure and turn Afghanistan into the plotting ground for the terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.

But what are our goals there in 2009?

While the U.S. is supposed to wind down its presence in Iraq in 19 months (rather than the 16 months promised by Obama on the campaign trail), the president has ordered a military buildup in Afghanistan to more than 50,000 troops, both from the U.S. and other NATO members.

He would leave 50,000 Americans in Iraq to cope with the resistance there. Such was the folly of President George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq after his hawkish neoconservative advisers told him we would triumph in a few weeks.

To this day none of Bush’s reasons for attacking Iraq have held up to examination. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no Iraqi ties to al-Qaida and no threat to the United States.

There have been no apologies from Bush or his cohorts.

When Obama visited Afghanistan last summer as a presidential candidate, he joined several other senators in a get-tough statement that said: “We need a great sense of urgency because the threat from the Taliban and al-Qaida is growing and we must act. We need determination because it will take time to prevail. But with the right strategy and the resources to back it up, we will get the job done.”

What exactly is the job that he says needs to get done? What is the U.S. exit strategy? Does anyone in power remember the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Vietnam?

Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires” because of the repeated failure of invaders over the centuries to achieve their goals in that rugged country.

U.S. prowling around in Afghanistan hasn’t aroused anti-war protests as did the March 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. I am puzzled about this. It seems to me we are leaping out of the frying pan into the fire!

American public aversion to our military adventures in Afghanistan has been fueled by our shock at the toll that U.S. planes and aerial drones have inflicted on Afghan civilians.

There have been indications that Obama may start diplomatic overtures to the Taliban at a time when the human and financial costs of the two wars are wearing down the U.S. as it struggles with an economic depression that has no end in sight.

According to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, the president is evaluating the situation in Afghanistan.

Obama would do well to study the trajectory that took us into the Vietnam War and the terrible price we paid there. We lost the war and fled by helicopters from Saigon.

Both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought that they could win in Vietnam, but they were brought down as much by the American people — who rebelled against the war — as they were by the North Vietnamese.

Obama could go deeper in history and check out President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s career for a lesson on how to end a war.

When running for the White House in 1952, when the American public was growing frustrated about the long U.S. involvement in the Korean War, Eisenhower told voters: “I shall go to Korea.”

And he did. The Korean War ended in a standoff in 1953 — much to the relief of the American people.

Despite some ensuing skirmishes in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, a truce has endured ever since.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama indicated that he was willing to speak to all parties in the military or diplomatic disputes we were involved in. He was criticized for his plan for outreach to the militants in Afghanistan.

But there is no alternative.

Sooner or later American presidents should learn that people will always fight for their country against a foreign invader. And peace should be the only goal.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2009 Hearst Newspapers.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, imperialism, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

Can Congress Save Obama from Afghan Quagmire?

March 11, 2009

by Robert Naiman | CommonDreams.org, March 10, 2009

A progressive Presidency is a terrible thing to waste. It only comes around once every so often. Wouldn’t it be a shame if Americans’ hopes for the Obama Administration were squandered in Afghanistan?

Members of Congress who want the Obama Administration to succeed won’t do it any favors by keeping silent about the proposed military escalation in Afghanistan. The actions of the Obama Administration so far clearly indicate that they can move in response to pressure: both good pressure and bad pressure. If there is only bad pressure, it’s more than likely that policy will move in a bad direction. In announcing an increase in U.S. troops before his Afghanistan review was complete, Obama partially acceded to pressure from the military. If we don’t want the military to have carte blanche, there needs to be counterpressure.

Some Members of Congress are starting to speak up. Rep. Murtha recently said he’s uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to increase the number of troops in the country by 17,000 before a goal was clearly defined, AP reports. Sen. Nelson is calling for clear benchmarks to measure progress in Afghanistan, and said he may try to add benchmarks to the upcoming war supplemental bill this spring, CQ Today reports.

But these individual expressions of discomfort will likely not be enough to stop the slide towards greater and greater military escalation.

Eight Members of Congress (Walter Jones, Neil Abercrombie, Roscoe Bartlett, Steve Kagen, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Ed Whitfield, and Lynn Woolsey) have initiated a letter to President Obama urging him to reconsider his support for military escalation. The letter argues that military escalation may well be counterproductive towards the goal of creating a stable government that can control Afghanistan, noting that a recent Carnegie Endowment study concluded that “the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.” [You can find the letter – and ask your Representative to sign it – here.]

There is political space for challenging the logic of escalation.

Forty-two percent of Americans think troops in Afghanistan should be increased, up from 34 percent in January, CBS News reports, no doubt reflecting the largely uncritical press treatment that the proposal for military escalation has received. But the same CBS News/New York Times poll still found that more people thought that U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan should be decreased (24%) or kept the same (23%) – i.e. 47% thought troop levels should be decreased or stay the same, rather than increased.

If we want the US government to seriously pursue diplomacy, there must be serious counterpressure against sending more troops without end. If you want recycling, you have to discourage the establishment of new landfills. If you want economic development and human rights to be at the center of trade policy, you have to jam up corporate trade deals. If you want diplomacy, there has to be a significant political pushback to military escalation.

Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst at Just Foreign Policy.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Commentary, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »

America wants Nato boost in Afghanistan

March 11, 2009
Al Jazeera, March 10, 2009

Western powers are increasingly concerned
by the Taliban’s growing influence[EPA]

Joe Biden, the US vice- president, has appealed to Nato to help Washington tackle worsening security in Afghanistan, saying the alliance was struggling to deal with a threat to the West as a whole.

Addressing representatives of the military alliance in Brussels on Tuesday, Biden said: “The deteriorating situation in the region poses a security threat not just to the United States but to every single nation round this table.

“We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost.”

Biden also said talking with Taliban moderates in Afghanistan was a tactic “worth exploring”.

Taliban advances

Western powers are increasingly concerned not only by the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan but also by its growing influence in Pakistan, where Muslim fighters have disrupted Nato’s supply convoys to Afghanistan and are securing concessions from the government in Islamabad.

Biden said Barack Obama, the US president, wanted to consult with allies on a strategy review for the region and that Washington would “expect everyone to keep whatever commitments were made in arriving at that joint strategy”.

The vice-president said the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US and the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 were planned “from the very same mountains” along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

He said: “This is not a US-centric view. A terrorist attack in Europe is viewed as an attack on us.”

Regarding discussions with Taliban moderates, Biden said: “It’s worth exploring. The idea of what concessions would be made is well beyond the scope of my being able to answer.

“I do think it’s worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Biden held talks with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato secretary- general.

De Hoop Scheffer, calling on Nato to boost efforts before Afghan elections due in August, said: “It is important that this alliance delivers in the short-term.”

Obama announcement

Last month, Obama approved the deployment of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan as Washington and other Nato nations try to stabilise the country.

There are currently about 70,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US supplies 38,000.

Obama has said he will make announcements about US policy on Afghanistan before a Nato summit in France in April.

The policy review is expected to stress the need for better co-ordination of the international effort and enhanced efforts in areas like police training, governance and development as well as a regional approach involving Afghanistan’s neighbours.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, imperialism, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Amnesty International calls for transparency on Bagram detentions

March 10, 2009

Amnesty International USA, March 9, 2009

A US federal judge considering whether detainees held by the USA in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan may challenge their detention before courts in the USA has ordered the administration of President Barack Obama to provide him with updated information on the Bagram detainees, by 11 March.

Amnesty International has written to the US administration urging it to inject some much needed transparency into the Bagram detention regime, including by making fully available to the public the information requested by District Court Judge John Bates.

When the Bush administration was asked by Judge Bates in January 2009 to disclose the number of people being held in Bagram, how many of them were taken into custody outside of Afghanistan, and how many of them were Afghan nationals, it responded by classifying as secret the key details and redacted them from the unclassified version of the filing.

Judge Bates has now asked the Obama administration the same questions, noting that the details supplied to him by the government in January may be out of date. Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor’s use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, “transparency promotes accountability”.

Figures released in late February by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only organization with access to Bagram detainees, indicate that there were then about 550 detainees in the airbase. This was down from the figure of “about 615” provided by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Senate Armed Services Committee a month earlier.

New detentions by US and allied forces in Afghanistan continue. According to reports by the American Forces Press Service, at least 120 “militants” were taken into custody during January and February 2009. It is not known how many, if any, have been or will be transferred to Bagram. The US authorities should provide regular public information on the numbers and nationalities of those held in US custody in Bagram and elsewhere in Afghanistan, and where, when, and in what circumstances they were taken into detention.

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later. Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA’s transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

On 7 March, President Obama said in an interview with the New York Times that “we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges”. However, presidential aides later said that he had not meant to suggest that everybody held in US custody would be able to challenge their detention in court.1

Two weeks earlier, on 20 February, responding to an invitation from Judge Bates to tell him whether it would take “a different approach” to its predecessor on the Bagram detainees, the Justice Department responded simply that “having considered the matter, the Government adheres to its previously articulated position”, that is, the position argued by the Bush administration. The latter had argued that the Bagram detainees could not challenge the lawfulness or conditions of their detention, that they had no rights under the US Constitution and no rights under international law enforceable in the US courts. Amnesty International regrets the new administration’s response to Judge Bates and hopes that it represents a very temporary stance taken as the government tackles the detention legacy it has inherited. The USA must swiftly bring all US detentions anywhere into compliance with international law.

The right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before a court is so fundamental that it cannot be diminished, even in situations of public emergency up to and including armed conflict. Judicial review is a basic safeguard against abuse of executive powers and a fundamental safeguard against arbitrary and secret detention, torture and other ill-treatment and unlawful transfers from one country or government to another. In the absence of judicial oversight, detainees in Bagram, as at Guantánamo, have been subjected to just such abuses.

Even children have not been spared. With this in mind, Amnesty International is calling on the US government to reveal, in addition to its responses to the questions posed by Judge Bates, how many of the detainees currently in Bagram were taken into custody when they were under 18 years old. A year ago, there were at least 10 children being held in the base.

In an executive order signed on 22 January 2009, President Barack Obama ordered the establishment of an interagency task force to review the “lawful options” available to the US government with respect to the “apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts or counterterrorism operations”. In February, Amnesty International sent a briefing on the Bagram detentions to officials overseeing this review.2Last week it sent them an update to this report.3

1 Obama ponders outreach to elements of the Taliban, The New York Times, 8 March 2009.

2 See USA: Out of sight, out of mind, out of court? The right of Bagram detainees to judicial review, 18 February 2009, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/021/2009/en.

3 See USA: Urgent need for transparency on Bagram detentions, 6 March 2009, at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/031/2009/en.

AI Index: AMR 51/033/2009 Amnesty International 09 March 2009

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Human rights, imperialism, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Demonstrators condemn killing civilians by troops in E Afghanistan

March 8, 2009

China View, March 7, 2008

KABUL, March 7 (Xinhua)– Hundreds of Afghans came to the street in Khost, the capital of Khost province in east Afghanistan on Saturday to protest against what they called arbitrary killing of civilians by international troops.

The protesters who brought four bodies to the street said that the troops at mid night entered two houses outside the Khost city and killed four persons and took away five others.

“The U.S. soldiers entered two houses in Shiga village outside the Khost city at 3 a.m. today and after killing four innocent people arrested five others,” Talawat Khan, owner of the raided house told Xinhua.

Meantime, an official with the press department of the international troops in east Afghanistan denied killing the civilians but confirmed the operation in a village saying the troops returned fire after coming under attacks.

Harming civilians during operations against Taliban insurgents has strained the relations between Kabul and Washington and President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called on the troops to coordinate operation with Afghan troops in order to avoid civilian casualties.

Editor: Yao

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Uncategorized, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Top U.N. Official Accuses U.S. of Inhuman ‘Atrocities’ in Iraq, Afghanistan

March 7, 2009

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

AP

FILE: U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann accused the U.S. of committing inhuman “atrocities” in a fiery speech before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva Wednesday.

A top U.N. official accused the United States of committing inhuman “atrocities” in Iraq and Afghanistan during a speech Wednesday to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“The aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupations constitute atrocities that must be condemned and repudiated by all who believe in the rule of law in international relations,” said U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann.

• Click here to see the speech.

D’Escoto claimed that U.S. actions have directly led to more than a million Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003, a vastly inflated figure that does not correspond with the U.N.’s own estimates.

The U.N.’s health and medical agency, the World Health Organization, says 151,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion. IraqBodyCount.org puts the death toll between 90,000- 99,245.

D’Escoto’s fiery speech came on the day the Obama administration decided to take up observer status on the Human Rights Council, which the Bush administration had boycotted because it was unable to crack down on despots and human rights abuses.

D’Escoto urged the Council to put the human rights situation in Iraq on its agenda, accusing the U.S. of war crimes and a series of human rights violations. “These must be addressed to bring an end to the scandalous present impunity,” he said.

He also called on the U.S. to free five Cuban nationals being held in U.S. prisons. The group was convicted in a Miami court in 2001 on a range of charges including lying about their identities, trying to obtain U.S. military secrets and spying on Cuban exile groups.

D’Escoto, once the foreign minister for the Communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua, called the five “heroes” being held in “preposterous conditions.”

D’Escoto said he was hopeful that the Obama administration would address his concerns and bring change to American policies concerning the imprisoned Cubans.

“The immediate ex-incarceration of the five Cuban heroes would help strengthen our confidence that the promised change is for real,” he said.

FOX News’ Ben Evansky contributed to this report.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Human rights, Iraq, US policy, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »

Obama’s Coalition of the Unwilling

March 5, 2009

by Amy Goodman | TruthDig.com, March 3, 2009

President Barack Obama met recently with the prime ministers of Canada and Britain. This week’s meeting with Britain’s Gordon Brown, who was pitching a “global New Deal,” created a minor flap when the White House downsized a full news conference to an Oval Office question-and-answer session, viewed by some in Britain as a snub. The change was attributed to the weather, with the Rose Garden covered with snow.It might have actually related not to snow cover, but to a snow job, covering up the growing divide between Afghanistan policies.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan includes a troop surge, already under way, and continued bombing in Pakistan using unmanned drones. Escalating civilian deaths are a certainty. The United Nations estimates that more than 2,100 civilians died in 2008, a 40 percent jump over 2007.

The occupation of Afghanistan is in its eighth year, and public support in many NATO countries is eroding. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, told me: “The move into Afghanistan is going to be very expensive. … Our European NATO partners are getting disillusioned with the war. I talked to a lot of the people in Europe, and they really feel this is a quagmire.”

Forty-one nations contribute to NATO’s 56,000-troop presence in Afghanistan. More than half of the troops are from the U.S. The United Kingdom has 8,300 troops, Canada just under 3,000. Maintaining troops is costly, but the human toll is greater. Canada, with 108 deaths, has suffered the highest per capita death rate for foreign armies in Afghanistan, since its forces are based in the south around Kandahar, where the Taliban is strong.

Last Sunday on CNN, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “We’re not going to win this war just by staying … we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency.” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine: “The United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory.” Yet it’s Canada that has set a deadline for troop withdrawal at the end of 2011. The U.S. is talking escalation.

Anand Gopal, Afghanistan correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, described the situation on the ground: “A lot of Afghans that I speak to in these southern areas where the fighting has been happening say that to bring more troops, that’s going to mean more civilian casualties. It’ll mean more of these night raids, which have been deeply unpopular amongst Afghans. … Whenever American soldiers go into a village and then leave, the Taliban comes and attacks the village.” Afghan Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, a woman, told Gopal: “Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops-it will just bring more violence.”

Women in Afghanistan play a key role in winning the peace. A photographer wrote me: “There will be various celebrations across Afghanistan to honor International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8. In Kandahar there will be an event with hundreds of women gathering to pray for peace, which is especially poignant in a part of Afghanistan that is so volatile.” After returning from an international women’s gathering in Moscow, feminist writer Gloria Steinem noted that the discussion centered around getting the media to hire peace correspondents to balance the war correspondents. Voices of civil society would be amplified, giving emphasis to those who wage peace. In the U.S. media, there is an equating of fighting the war with fighting terrorism. Yet on the ground, civilian casualties lead to tremendous hostility. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, recently told me: “I’ve been saddened and shocked by virulent anti-American responses to those wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. They’re seen as occupations. … I think it’s very important we learn from mistakes of sounding war drums.” She added, “There’s such a connection from the Middle East to Afghanistan to Pakistan which builds on strengths of working with neighbors.”

Barack Obama was swept through the primaries and into the presidency on the basis of his anti-war message. Prime ministers like Brown and Harper are bending to growing public demand for an end to war. Yet in the U.S., there is scant debate about sending more troops to Afghanistan, and about the spillover of the war into Pakistan.

© 2009 TruthDig.com


Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Peace Movement, US policy | Leave a Comment »

If this becomes Obama’s war, it will poison his presidency

March 5, 2009

Pakistan is being ripped apart by the fallout from the Afghan occupation. If the US escalates, the impact will be devastating

The armed assault on Sri Lanka’s cricket team in Lahore has been a brutal demonstration, if any more were needed, that the war on terror is devouring itself and the states that have been sucked into its slipstream. Pakistan is both victim and protagonist of the conflict in Afghanistan, its western and northern fringes devastated by a US-driven counter-insurgency campaign, its heartlands wracked by growing violence and deepening poverty. The country now shows every sign of slipping out of the control of its dysfunctional civilian government – and even the military that has held it together for 60 years.

Presumably, that was part of the intended message of the group that carried out Tuesday’s terror spectacle. But the outrage also fits into a well-established pattern of attacks carried out in revenge for the army’s devastation of the tribal areas on the Afghan border, where thousands have been killed and up to half a million people forced to flee from the fighting with the Pakistani Taliban. Hostility to this onslaught has been inflamed by the recent revelation that US aerial drone attacks on supposed terrorist hideouts have in fact been launched from a base in Pakistan itself, with the secret connivance of president Asif Zardari, as well as across the border from occupied Afghanistan.

Attempts to paint Pakistan’s convulsions as a conflict between moderates and extremists obscure the reality that elements of the Pakistani state are operating on both sides, whatever their nominal allegiance. Now that Pakistan faces its own blowback from the Afghan war and the Taliban it helped create, its military intelligence is trying to redirect its wayward offspring back to fight what are supposed to be Pakistan’s own US and British allies in Afghanistan on the other side of the border. The Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s call on his Pakistani followers this week to stop attacks on the Pakistani army and join the battle to “liberate Afghanistan from occupation forces” reflects that pressure.

On the face of it, the situation could hardly be more bizarre. But it is only one byproduct of the systematically counterproductive nature of western policy across the wider region since 2001. After seven years of lawless invasion and occupation, the war on terror is everywhere in ruins. The limits of American military power have been laid bare in the killing fields of Iraq; Iran has been transformed into the pre-eminent regional power; Hezbollah and Hamas have become the most important forces in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories; a resurgent Taliban is leading an increasingly effective guerrilla war in Afghanistan; and far from crushing terror networks, the US and its allies have spread them to Pakistan.

Barack Obama’s rise to power is a product of that record of failure: without his opposition to the Iraq war he would not be president. And since his inauguration, he has signalled potentially important shifts in US foreign policy, while ditching the rhetoric of the war on terror. Obama’s moves to open a dialogue with Syria and Iran, his apparent willingness to trade missile defence in eastern Europe for Russian support on Iran’s nuclear programme and his statement about “how the war in Iraq will end” all suggest real movement.

But although the belligerent language has gone, what is striking is the continuity, rather than the breach, with the main elements of George Bush’s war on terror. Obama’s timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq mirrors last November’s status of forces agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, including in his stated “intention” to pull out all troops by the end of 2011. And, as after last year’s deal, that was quickly qualified by the continuity US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who said he would like to see a “modest” US military presence stay on thereafter – if the Iraqi government requested it, of course.

Mercifully, Obama’s announcement that the occupation of Iraq would continue for at least three more years was accompanied by none of the attempts to whitewash the war offered by Britain’s Lieutenant-General John Cooper, who told the Guardian that UK troops would leave Iraq this year “in a better position” – after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and four million made refugees. But in the crucible of conflict in the Middle East, between Israel and the Palestinians, there is also little sign as yet of any substantive change in US policy: whether on lifting the continuing siege of Gaza or talking to the Palestinians’ elected representatives, let alone using US leverage to bring an end to illegal Israel colonisation of the West Bank or end its occupation.

However, it is in Afghanistan that the new US administration is on the point of compounding, rather than reversing, the failures of the war on terror. Obama has already committed himself to sending 17,000 more US troops, an increase of almost 50%, with the prospect of a similar number again later in the year. He did at least promise escalation in his election campaign, which is more than can be said for British ministers when they despatched thousands of extra troops to Helmand in 2006.

But there is not the remotest prospect that a “surge” of this scale – aimed at propping up a corrupt Afghan administration the US and its allies openly despise – can pacify the country or crush Taliban-led Pashtun resistance – though it will surely boost the civilian death toll, running at more than 2,000 last year. It’s also not what Afghans or Americans want, according to opinion polls, and it will certainly increase the destabilisation of an already precarious Pakistan, which will be the sanctuary for even more Taliban fighters as they are harried by American occupation forces.

The grip of conservative Islamism on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is the legacy not just of George Bush, of course, but decades of US meddling in the region, and its sponsorship of the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s in particular. What Obama has inherited from Bush’s war on terror is an arc of US and western-backed occupation from Palestine to Pakistan. If the administ-ration’s current review of “Afpak” policy were to lead to the negotiations with the Taliban Obama has hinted at and a wind-down of the occupation, that would cut the ground from under Pakistan’s own insurgency. But if Afghanistan becomes Obama’s war, it risks poisoning his presidency – just as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson more than 40 years ago.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, USA | Leave a Comment »

NATO mosque attack sparks Afghan riot

February 28, 2009

Morning Star Online

(Friday 27 February 2009)
ENOUGH ALREADY: Afghan demonstrators shouting anti-US slogans during a demonstration against the alleged shooting.

ENOUGH ALREADY: Afghan demonstrators shouting anti-US slogans during a demonstration against the alleged shooting.

OVER 500 Afghan protesters blocked roads and fought police on Friday after NATO occupation forces fired gunshots in a village mosque.

In the latest in a series of outrages against the civilian population of the US and NATO-occupied country, Polish forces fired their guns in a mosque in the village of Dhi Khodaidad in Ghazni province.

The crowd threw stones at police and at least three demonstrators were wounded by gunfire before the violence subsided.

An eyewitness said that he had been in the mosque when the troops raided it. He said that the bullets had hit a wall but had not injured anyone.

Deputy Governor Kazim Allayar, who led a delegation that visited the mosque on Friday, said that at least two bullets had hit the door of the building. He added that government officials were due to meet Polish forces to find out if they were involved.

NATO forces said that an initial inquiry had failed to produce reports of troops in Dhi Khodaidad, but they were continuing their investigation.

“We don’t believe there were any forces in the area yesterday,” said a spokesman.

Polish Defence Ministry spokesman Robert Rochowicz claimed that he had “no information at all about any kind of incident concerning Polish troops in Afghanistan.”

He said that he would have been informed if anything had happened.

Amnesty International warned on Thursday that Afghanistan was at a “tipping point” as civilian deaths mount in the country.

A new report by the human rights organisation focused on the case of two brothers who were shot dead in a night-time raid by occupation forces in their home in Kandahar in January 2008.

Amnesty’s report stressed that their killing is a notable example of the lack of accountability of international forces.

The two men, Abdul Habib, a father of six, and Mohammed Ali, a father of five, were shot in their homes at point-blank range in front of their families by occupation forces in camouflage uniforms.

The men were both unarmed. More than a year later, no-one has admitted responsibility despite inquiries by Amnesty International, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Philip Alston.

NATO and the Romanian Defence Ministry announced the death on Thursday of a Romanian soldier in a roadside bomb in the southern province of Zabul.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, imperialism, Muslims, US policy | Leave a Comment »

Freeing Up Resources … for More War

February 27, 2009

By Norman Solomon | Truthout, Feb 27, 2009

Hours after President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, The New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw “American combat forces” from American combat forcesduring the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the pullout will include “relieving the strain on the armed forces and freeing up resources for Afghanistan.”


The president’s speech had little to say about the plans for escalation, but the few words will come back to haunt: “With our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Al Qaida and combat extremism, because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens halfway around the world. We will not allow it.”


Obama didn’t mention the additional number of US troops – 17,000 – that he has just ordered to Afghanistan. But his pledge that he “will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people” and his ringing declaration, “We will not allow it,” came just before this statement: “As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy.”


Get the message? In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world – in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan too – will make Americans safer. With drumrolls like that, the mission could outlive all of us.


And so, a colossal and fateful blunder, made by a very smart leader, arguably our best and brightest, is careening forward with the help of silence that defers all too readily to power. This is how the war in Vietnam escalated, while individuals and groups muted their voices. Many people will pay with their lives.

The reasons the war in Afghanistan cannot be won are directly connected to why the war is wrong. In essence, people do not like their country occupied for years on end, especially when the occupiers are routinely killing civilians (whatever the rationale). Monochrome words like Taliban and “terrorists” might seem tidy and clear enough as they appear in media coverage, or as they roll off a president’s tongue, but in the real Afghan world the opponents of the US war are diverse and wide-ranging. With every missile strike that incinerates a household or terrorizes a village, the truly implacable “extremists” can rejoice at Uncle Sam’s assistance to their recruiting efforts.


Those who are fond of talking and writing about President Obama’s admirable progressive values will, sooner or later, need to come to terms with the particulars of his actual policies. In foreign affairs, the realities now include the ominous pairing of his antiterrorism rhetoric and his avowed commitment to ratchet up the US war effort in Afghanistan.


I don’t often make predictions, but I’m confident about this one: Within a few years, some members of Congress, and leaders of some progressive groups with huge email lists, will look back with regret as they recall their failure to clearly and openly oppose the pivotal escalation of the Afghan war.

They could save themselves a lot of shame, and save others their lives, by speaking out sooner rather than later. In the process, they might help save the Obama presidency from running aground in Afghanistan.

——————————————————————————-

Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For video of his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to discuss Obama and the war in Afghanistan, click here: http://www.mediaed.org/wp/norman-solomon-on-c-span.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, US policy | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »