By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch.com, April 19, 2010
The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category
Taliban call for peace talks
April 19, 2010Morning Star Online, April 18, 2010
by Tom Mellen
DESTRUCTION: An Afghan police man stands guard outside the damaged wall of the police headquarters in Kandahar south of Kabul. The Taliban has said it wants to hold peace talks.
Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar has said that he and his followers are willing to hold “sincere and honest” peace talks with Western political leaders.
In an interview with the Sunday Times conducted deep inside territory held by Afghan resistance forces, two men whom the newspaper identified as members of the Taliban’s ruling council said that Mr Omar was not vying to rule Afghanistan.
The Quetta shura scholars said that the Islamist umbrella group was fighting for three objectives – the expulsion of foreign military forces, the restoration of Islamic law and security for the Afghan people.
The men said that Mr Omar was prepared to engage in “sincere and honest” talks to realise this.
One man who introduced himself as Mullah Abdul Rashid declared that the Taliban’s supreme leader was “no longer interested in being involved in politics or government.
“All the holy warriors seek is to expel the foreigners, these invaders, from our country and then to repair the country’s constitution,” he said.
“We are not interested in running the country as long as these things are achieved.”
Reviewing the five years in which the Taliban governed Afghanistan before it was ousted by a US-led invasion force in 2001 the men declared that it had been a mistake for the Islamist movement to immerse itself in politics.
Mr Rashid said: “We didn’t have the capability to govern the country and we were surprised by how things went – we lacked people with either experience or technical expertise in government.
“Now all we’re doing is driving the invader out,” he said.
Mr Rashid vowed to “leave politics to civil society and return to our religious schools” when this had been achieved.
Last week a resistance faction led by former Afghan prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar sent a three-member team to Kabul for talks with the Karzai regime, Afghan MPs and Nato officials.
The Hizb-e-Islami delegation declared that it was fighting to expel foreign troops and was not seeking government positions after the war.
US President Barack Obama’s administration is currently considering whether to drop its opposition to direct talks with the Taliban.
Two Dutch soldiers were killed on Saturday by a roadside bomb in Uruzgan province, where the Netherlands has deployed some 1,800 soldiers and support staff.
The troops are due to pull out in August.
US Foreign Policy: Sixty Years of Disaster
April 16, 2010by: Michael Gass, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis, April 15, 2010
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: GrungeTextures, Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock / U.S. Army)
On August 19, 1953, pro-Shah supporters in Iran staged a coup on the Iranian government that was planned, organized and supported by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British Intelligence. Iranians lived under the brutal rule of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi for the next 25 years until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Though the CIA-led coup in Iran was the first time the agency overthrew a democratically elected government, it wasn’t to be the last. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala. In 1963, the CIA orchestrated the coup in Iraq that eventually brought Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist Party to power. In 1973, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected leader of Chile. In every case, those who were helped into power instituted regimes of terror and violence. These regimes prompted bloody revolutions, or worse, US-led invasions. Either way, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed due to US foreign policy.
Contractor Deaths Accelerating in Afghanistan as They Outnumber Soldiers
April 15, 2010by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica – April 14, 2010
In this photograph taken Jan. 31, 2007, Afghan men are trained by U.S. military contractors during a exercise in the southern town of Qalat, the capital of Zabul province. A new government report shows the number of contractor deaths in Afghanistan has increased in recent months. (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)
A recent Congressional Research Service analysis [1] obtained by ProPublica looked at the number of civilian contractors killed in Afghanistan in recent months. It’s not pretty.
Of the 289 civilians killed since the war began more than eight years ago, 100 have died in just the last six months. That’s a reflection of both growing violence and the importance of the civilians flooding into the country along with troops in response to President Obama’s decision to boost the American presence in Afghanistan.
The latest U.S. Department of Defense numbers show there are actually more civilian contractors on the ground in Afghanistan than there are soldiers. The Pentagon reported [2] 107,292 U.S.-hired civilian workers in Afghanistan as of February 2010, when there were about 78,000 soldiers. This is apparently the first time that contractors have exceeded soldiers by such a large margin.
Using civilian contractors to haul food, prepare meals and act as bodyguards has kept the Pentagon’s official casualty figures lower than they would have been in past conflicts, where contractors were not as heavily used.
Contractor casualties are, by and large, invisible to the public, disguising the full human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are not reported in totals given by the government. If they were, the death toll in Afghanistan would have surpassed 1,000 — 848 soldiers, 289 civilian contractors — from 2001 to 2009, a milestone that has gone entirely unmarked.
The number of contractor dead are released only through the Labor Department, which keeps count as part of an insurance program for contractors known as the Defense Base Act. And these numbers, agency officials have admitted and our reporting has shown, undercount fatalities. As David Isenberg [3] pointed out in the Huffington Post recently, a new database designed, in part, to track contractor deaths is still not being used to do so.
Staff researcher Lisa Schwartz contributed to this report.
War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan
April 14, 2010Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, April 13, 2010
War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, “collateral murder,” are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
The release last week of the Wikileaks video, thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007 — including two Reuters newsmen — puts it into focus not because it shows us something we didn’t know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire.
The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.
Behind the Afghan Fraud
April 11, 2010By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy In Focus, April 8, 2010
All frauds have a purpose, mostly to relieve the unwary of their wealth, though occasionally to launch some foreign adventure. The 1965 Tonkin Gulf hoax that escalated the Vietnam War comes to mind.
So, what was the design behind “Operation Moshtarak,” or the “Battle of Marjah,” in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, the largest U.S. and NATO military operation in Afghanistan since the 2003 invasion?
Marjah was billed as a “fortress,” a “city of 80,000” and the Taliban’s “stronghold,” packed with as many as 1,000 “hard-core fighters.” But as Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service revealed, Marjah isn’t even a city, but a district of scattered villages. As the days went by — and civilian deaths passed military casualties — the number of “hard-core fighters” declined. In the end, the “battle” turned into a skirmish. “Hardly a single gun was captured by NATO forces,” tribal elder and former police chief Abdul Rahman Jan told Time.
Dealing with Drugs
Marjah was also billed as the linchpin of the militants’ logistical and opium-smuggling network, and the area indeed has significant poppy cultivation. But according to Julian Mercille of University College Dublin, an expert on U.S. foreign policy, the Taliban get only 4 percent of the trade. Local farmers reap about 21 percent of the $3.4 billion yearly commerce, according to Mercille, while 75 percent of the trade is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional brokers, and traffickers. In short, our allies get the lion’s share of profits from the drug trade.
In any case, the word “linchpin” soon dropped off the radar screen. It soon became obvious that Operation Moshtarak would not touch the drug trade because it would alienate local farmers, thus sabotaging the goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of residents.
In some ways, the most interesting part of the Marjah operation was a gathering that took place shortly after the “fighting” was over. President Barack Obama called a meeting March 12 in the White House to ask his senior staff and advisors if the “success” of Moshtarak would allow the United States to open negotiations with the Taliban. According to Porter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates opposed talks until after a similar operation, aimed at Kandahar, is completed this summer.
The Kandahar offensive is being pumped up as a “blow at the Taliban’s heartland” and the “fulcrum” of the Afghan war. Kandahar is where the Taliban got its start and, at 600,000, is Afghanistan’s second-largest city. Whether a military operation will have any more impact than the attack on Marjah is highly unlikely. As in Marjah, the Taliban will simply decamp to another area of the country or blend in with the local population.
However, the White House gathering suggests that the administration may be searching for a way out before the 2012 elections. With the economic crisis at home continuing, and the bill for the war passing $200 billion, Afghanistan is looking more and more like a long tunnel with no light at the end.
Certainly our allies seem to have concluded that the Americans are on an exit path.
Talking with the Taliban
The Hamid Karzai government and the United Nations have opened talks with some of the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamic Party. Pakistan —correctly concluding it was being cut out of the peace talks — swept up 14 senior Taliban officials, including the organization’s number-two man, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The Pakistanis claim they’re simply aiding the U.S. war effort. But the former head of the UN mission to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, bitterly denounced the arrests as nothing more than effort to derail the ongoing negotiations.
If Islamabad has a say, the Taliban will have a presence in whatever peace agreement emerges, a fact that has distressed India. Not only is it likely that India will lose much of its influence with the Karzai government — and see more than a billion dollars in aid spent for naught — but its traditional enemy, Pakistan, will almost certainly regain much of its former influence with Kabul.
The push by the United States to find a political solution is partly driven by the rapidly eroding NATO presence. The Canadians are sticking by their pledge to be out by 2011, and when the Netherlands tried to raise the possibility of Dutch troops remaining, the Dutch elected a new government. The British Labor Party, behind in the polls but catching up to the Tories, wants to rid itself of the Afghan albatross before upcoming elections.
The United States is also discovering that the Afghanis play a mean game of chess.
Geopolitical Chessboard
The Obama administration recently demanded that the Karzai government reinstate an independent electoral commission and end corruption — in particular, by dumping the president’s larcenous half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who runs Kandahar like a feudal fiefdom. Karzai responded by flying off to Tehran to embrace the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and meet with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Given that the United States is trying to isolate Iran in the region, Karzai’s Iran visit wasn’t a happy moment for those on the Potomac.
Yet Iran has influence over the Northern Alliance, which will need persuading to accept the Taliban into a coalition. Rather than isolating Iran, Karzai has made it central to the peace agreement that the United States and NATO want.
For the past five years, the United States has been wooing India as a bulwark against China. But because Washington needs Islamabad to broker a peace, the Americans agreed to send it F-16 fighter-bombers, helicopter gun ships, and reconnaissance drones. A better-armed Pakistan, however, hardly goes down well in New Delhi, particularly because the Indians see their former influence in Kabul on the wane.
As a result, India promptly went off and met with the Russians. Ever sympathetic, Moscow offered New Delhi a bargain-basement price on an aircraft carrier and threw in a passel of MIG-29s. That dealt a blow to another aim of U.S. diplomacy: keeping Russia out of South Asia.
The same week as Pakistan’s foreign minister was in Washington asking for a laundry list of goodies in exchange for “helping out” in Afghanistan, Karzai jetted off to Beijing to talk about aid and investments. So much for the plan to keep China out of Central Asia.
This is beginning to look like checker-players in Washington versus the chess masters in Kabul.
Finessing Withdrawal
There seems to be a developing consensus, both inside and outside Afghanistan, that the war must wind down. If this consensus becomes firmer, then the Karzai government’s upcoming peace jirga, set for late April or early May, takes on greater importance.
While Washington appears to be divided over how, when, and with whom to negotiate, “withdrawing” doesn’t mean that the United States won’t leave bases behind or end its efforts to penetrate Central Asia. The White House recently announced an agreement with Kyrgyzstan to set up a U.S. “counter-terrorism center” near the Chinese border.
The danger at this juncture is seeing the outcome as a zero-sum game: If Pakistan gains, India loses; if the United States withdraws, the Taliban win; if Iran is helpful it will encourage nuclear proliferation.
Ultimately, Afghans must decide the future of Afghanistan. What they want and how they get it isn’t the business of Washington, Brussels, New Delhi, Tehran, or Islamabad. The current war, the latest endeavor in the “graveyard of empires,” has claimed far more Afghan lives than those of the invaders. As U.S. Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal told The New York Times, “We have shot an astounding number of people.”
Indeed, we have.
Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.
Mercenary Soldiers on Sale… Who’s In Charge of These Hired Killers?
March 23, 2010Eric S. Margolis, Khaleej Times Online, March 22, 2010
A fascinating scandal has erupted in Washington over the use of mercenaries (‘private contractors’ in US terminology) that is exposing the dark underbelly of America’s foreign wars. It has been that the Pentagon and other US intelligence agencies secretly fielded mercenaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan (aka “Af-Pak”), and Iraq to assassinate tribal militants.
US law forbids murder or using mercenaries. But, as the Roman jurist Cicero said, “laws are silent in times of war.”
A former senior Pentagon official specialising in clandestine operations, Mike Furlong, set up a shell company, International Media Ventures (IMV), to supposedly provide the US military with “cultural information” about Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. Two obscure Pentagon outfits, the “Cultural Engineering Group” in Florida, and “Counter-Narco-terrorism Technology Programme” of Virginia funded Furlong with $24.6 million. Furlong hired a bunch of former Special Forces types and assorted thugs. These rent-a-Rambos’s real mission was to assassinate Pashtun leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and target tribal compounds for strikes by US Predator drones. Welcome to the modern version of the Mafia’s infamous contract killers, “Murder Inc.”
Thickening this plot, retired CIA types, including the flamboyant Dewey Clarridge, whom I well recall from the 1980’s Afghan war, were involved. So were other would-be bounty-hunters, eager to cash in one the Pentagon’s cash bonanza. It is uncertain if Furlong’s Murder Inc had time to go operational. But its exposure is causing uproar. In best US government tradition, the Pentagon denied backing Furlong and cut him adrift. He is now under criminal investigation. Shades of former CIA agent Edwin Wilson, whose frightful case I long followed. Wilson was set up as a deniable “independent” by CIA to supply arms and explosives to Libya and Angola in the 1980’s. When this intrigue blew wide open, Wilson was kidnapped by US agents and buried alive in federal prison for 27 years.
The Furlong scandal comes at a time of growing criticism of the US government’s use of over 275,000 mercenaries in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. These hired gunmen and logistics personnel operate without any accountability, legal structure, or oversight. Lack of command and control of such free-lancers infuriates traditional military men, who detest US Special Forces and these hired gunmen as ‘cowboys.’
It certainly is no way to win over Muslim hearts and minds.
Private mercenary firms like Xe (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp have raked in fortunes running private armies for the US. They are major donors to the far right of the Republican Party. Deeply worried civil libertarians call these private armies potential Brownshirts, after the Nazi Party’s private army in the late 1920’s.
Amazingly, US Special Forces in Af-Pak have not until this month been under the control of supreme commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. They apparently reported to his rival, Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus in Tampa, Florida.
To the Pentagons’s anger, CIA runs its own killer paramilitary units and drone assassination operations, 90 per cent of whose victims are civilians, according to Pakistani media investigations. CIA’s paramilitaries report only to HQ in Langley —which does not talk to the Pentagon. Pakistan’s feeble government is not even informed in advance of Predator strikes and assassinations on its own territory. How many of the 15 other US intelligence agencies and NATO forces are running their own little illegal private armies? US mercenaries are responsible for a growing number of civilian deaths. It’s only a matter of time before all these cowboys begin shooting at one another. Reliable sources in Pakistan report that US-paid mercenaries are staging bombings there and in Afghanistan in an attempt to incite popular anger against Islamic or tribal militants, and draw Pakistan’s army deep into the fray.
Washington brands all Al Qaeda and Taleban “illegal combatants,” denying them due process of law and the Geneva Convention’s prisoner protections. Murdering or torturing such “terrorists,” says Washington, is lawful. So what about all the US mercenary Rambos running amok, who wear no uniform, kill at will, and have no legal oversight and, as we saw in Iraq, get away with murder?
Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist who reported from the Middle East and Asia for nearly two decades
Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney’s Torture and Lies
March 22, 2010Andy Worthington, The Huffington Post, March 21, 2010
Friday marked the seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, but by now, it seems, the American people have become used to living in a state of perpetual war, even though that war was based on torture and lies. Protestors rallied across the country on Saturday, but the anti-war impetus of the Bush years has not been regained, as I discovered to my sorrow during a brief U.S. tour in November, when I showed the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself) in New York, Washington D.C., and the Bay Area.
Peace and Justice Post 
Ninety-Four Percent of Kandaharis Want Peace Talks, Not War
April 20, 2010An opinion survey of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers”.
The survey, conducted by a private U.S. contractor last December, covered Kandahar City and other districts in the province into which Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to introduce more troops in the biggest operation of the entire war. Those districts include Arghandab, Zhari, rural Kandahar and Panjwayi.
Afghan interviewers conducted the survey only in areas which were not under Taliban control.
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Tags:Afghanistan, Gareth Porter, Kandahar province, U.S. military offensive
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