| Al Jazeera, Aug 29, 2008 |
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US-led coalition and Afghan forces have killed more than 100 Taliban in the southern Afghan province of Helmand during three days of fighting, the US military has said in a statement. The fighting began after patrols came under attack from small arms, rocket propelled grenades and mortars in the southwestern province, the US military said in a statement on Thursday. The patrols returned fire and called in close-air support, it said. “Heavy casualties were inflicted during fierce fighting between Afghan soldiers and insurgents, but the exact number of casualties is not known,” the Afghan defence ministry said. Violence has surged in Afghanistan with more than 2,500 people, including 1,000 civilians, killed in the conflict in the first six months of this year, according to aid agencies. Mainly British troops have been engaged in fighting with Taliban fighters in Helmand province for three years. Opium crop The province is home to two-thirds of Afghanistan’s opium crop, the raw ingredient of heroin, and the site of frequent clashes involving local Taliban fighters. In the southern province of Zabul a day earlier, 12 Taliban fighters were killed and six wounded by Afghan and US-led soldiers in clashes in the district of Arghandab, the Afghan defence ministry said in a statement. The ministry also said Afghan soldiers killed 10 Taliban fighters in Helmand’s Girishk district the same day. One Afghan soldier was killed and another wounded during the fighting, which was part of a larger operation aimed at finding drug traffickers in the area, officials said. One US-led coalition soldier was killed while on patrol on Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, the US military said in a statement. |
Archive for the ‘US policy’ Category
US: ‘100 Taliban killed’ in Helmand
August 29, 2008
Militarism and a Uni-polar World
August 28, 2008
By Lenora Foerstel | Global Research, August 27, 2008
The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller as an off-shoot of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). David Rockefeller was chairman of the CFR in 1970 and subsequently became the founding chairman of the Trilateral Commission. Soon the membership of the Commission had grown to 300 members, including prominent political figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski. Most members of the Trilateral Commission are bankers, media moguls, or corporate CEOs, primarily from North America, Europe and Japan, while all members of the CFR are U.S. Citizens.
The Commission seeks to extend its influence abroad and is careful to avoid the scrutiny of congressional investigations. The CFR on the other hand, focuses on the control of American media.
When American media discuss globalism, they rarely mention that the Trilateral Commission sets most global economic goals, primary among them being the creation of a one-world system of trade. It is basically a form of fascism in which global corporations and their elite CEOs determine the policies and direction of world governments. The creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank after World War II was intended to encourage Third World countries to borrow money from wealthy nations, so long as they agreed to the imposition of a wide range of “structural adjustment policies.” Any nation borrowing money from either organization would not be allowed to nationalize its natural resources and would be unable to prevent foreign corporations from buying or controlling those resources.
Shortly before World War II, Hjalmer Schacht, a German banker, toured the United States soliciting American corporate support for Hitler’s new fascist state. U.S. corporations not only agreed to support Germany against the socialist economic system of the Soviet Union, but also declared their opposition to the strong labor movement arising in the United States and Europe.
General Motors was prominent among the corporations that supported the Nazi government, investing $20 million in industries owned or controlled by Herman Goering and other Nazi officials. Other US multinational corporations that profited from and supported Hitler’s industrial war machine included General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, International Harvester, ITT and IBM. Today, Standard Oil of New York is unabashed in honoring its chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used by the Nazi gas chambers. (1)
Among the eminent business leaders backing these multinational corporations were the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush, father of George Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush. Prescott Bush worked with his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, in the family firm Union Banking Corporation to raise $50 million for the Nazi government by selling German bonds to American investors from 1924 to 1930.
Even though the United States helped to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II, many of the powerful elite families continued to support Hitler’s fascist ideology after the war. John Rockefeller III was an uncritical believer in the doctrine of Thomas Robert Malthus, who claimed that population always increased at a geometric rate while food supply increased at the slower arithmetic rate. Malthus therefore concluded that population growth had to be rigidly controlled. Today, his theory is widely criticized for failing to take into account the vast technological advances in agriculture and food production.
Rockefeller also accepted Hitler’s concept of an Aryan race, leading him to propose population control on the poor and people of color, whom he believed were producing children of inferior intelligence. In an effort to support such views, the Rockefeller family became involved with Eugenics, a fascist doctrine that advocated breeding a superior race by eliminating the mentally ill, physically handicapped, and racially inferior.
Final straw for Afghan leader after child death toll in air strike hits 60
August 27, 2008
· Karzai orders new rules for all foreign military activity
· 90 civilians killed in worst incident since 2001
Sixty children were killed in air strikes by US-led coalition warplanes in western Afghanistan last week, a UN investigation has found. UN investigators said they discovered “convincing evidence” that a total of 90 Afghan civilians died in the incident.
The toll, potentially the worst since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, could wreck relations between the Afghan government and the Nato-led coalition forces, which were already under severe strain over civilian casualties and strategy in the counter-insurgency against the Taliban.
The government of President Hamid Karzai has ordered that any military operation by foreign forces on its territory will be subject to a new set of rules enforceable under international law.
Kai Eide, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan who ordered the investigation, said the incident could undermine the faith of the Afghan people in international efforts to stabilise the country.
Military sources said the air strikes last Thursday on the Shindand district of Herat province were carried out not by the Nato force attempting to bolster Karzai’s government, but as part of a parallel US mission targeting al-Qaida and Taliban militants, called Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).
US officials initially said that the air strikes were aimed at a Taliban stronghold and had killed 30 jihadis. An OEF spokesman in Kabul said last night that an investigation into the incident had been launched last Saturday and was still under way.
In his report, Eide said investigators from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) found that up to eight houses in the village of Nawabad had been destroyed in the raids and many others damaged.
“Investigations by Unama found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men. Fifteen other villagers were wounded or otherwise injured,” Eide wrote.
“This is matter of grave concern to the United Nations, I have repeatedly made clear that the safety and welfare of civilians must be considered above all else during the planning and conduct of all military operations. The impact of such operations undermines the trust and confidence of the Afghan people in efforts to build a just, peaceful, and law-abiding state.”
Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesman for the Afghan president, said Karzai had ordered that all foreign military operations be governed by an internationally enforceable “status of forces agreement”.
“The patience of the Afghan people has run out. We no longer can afford to see the killing of our children,” Hamidzada said.
The incident comes at a fraught time for western forces in Afghanistan, after a week of high casualties and deep splits within Nato on sharing the burden of the Afghan conflict.
Eide was appointed to bring some coordination to the international community’s disparate efforts. But last night he warned that those efforts were in danger of being crippled by public mistrust.
In a harshly worded statement, he said: “I want to remind all parties engaged in the conflict that the protection of civilians must be their primary concern; they must respect their duties under international humanitarian and human rights law to protect the people we are here to serve.”
Iraq, U.S. clash over timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal
August 26, 2008By Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers Mon Aug 25, 3:17 PM ET
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki said Monday there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal— a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists that the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.
“No pact or an agreement should be set without being based on full sovereignty, national common interests, and no foreign soldier should remain on Iraqi land, and there should be a specific deadline and it should not be open,” Maliki told a meeting of tribal Sheikhs in Baghdad .
Maliki said that the United States and Iraq had agreed that all foreign troops would be off Iraqi soil by the end of 2011. “There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil,” Maliki said.
But the White House disputed Maliki’s statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal.
“Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq ,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Tex. , where President Bush is vacationing. “That has always been our position. It continues to be our position.”
Fratto denied Maliki’s assertion that an agreement has been reached mandating that all foreign forces be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
“An agreement has not been signed,” he said. “There is no agreement until there’s an agreement signed. There are discussions that continue in Baghdad .”
Maliki also said the dispute has not been resolved over immunity for U.S. troops and contractors when they are off their bases. He said this was one of the most divisive issues under negotiation.
“We can’t neglect our sons by giving an open immunity for anyone whether he is Iraqi or a foreigner,” he said
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to Baghdad last week in an effort to push the process forward. Her long meeting with Maliki ended with no concrete solution, his advisor told McClatchy .
Jonathan S. Landay contributed from Washington
The antiwar movement and the “good war”
August 26, 2008argues that the antiwar movement needs to respond clearly to the growing focus of U.S. military might on Afghanistan.
Socialist Worker, August 22, 2008
U.S. paratrooper on patrol in Afghanistan’s Paktika province (SoldiersMedia)
ON ONE day in mid-August, Taliban forces in Afghanistan carried out their most serious attack in six years, mounting an all-night strike on a U.S. military base in the eastern province of Khost and a fierce assault on French forces east of the capital.
The Khost offensive targeted one of the largest foreign military bases in the country and was eventually repulsed, but the attack on French forces by 100 Taliban insurgents killed 10 French soldiers and wounded 21 more. Together, the attacks are the latest expression of the growing confidence and competence of the Taliban and the growing ferocity of the fighting in America’s “other war.”
Since the beginning of July, 70 coalition troops have been killed in Afghanistan, compared to just 31 U.S. troops killed in Iraq during the same period. Already this year, 192 NATO troops have been killed in Afghanistan, compared to 232 killed in all of last year, which itself was the deadliest for NATO troops since the war began in 2001.
At the same time, other developments in and around the region–the resignation of Pakistan’s ex-president Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Russian thrashing of Georgia’s U.S.-backed military–have illustrated starkly that a new balance of power is taking shape, dealing a setback to U.S. ambitions.
This makes the stakes for the U.S. in Afghanistan higher than ever–and simultaneously places new demands on the U.S. antiwar movement.
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SINCE 2003, the antiwar movement has anchored itself in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq, which was generally understood as a “war of choice” undertaken by the Bush administration. But the movement has been at best muted in its criticism–and at worst actually supportive–of the U.S. war on Afghanistan as a “legitimate” targeting of al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden following the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But in fact, the U.S. didn’t invade Afghanistan to “bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice” or to “liberate Afghan women from the Taliban.”
In truth, the U.S. had long sought an accommodation with the Taliban. As one U.S. diplomat put it in 1997, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the oil consortium], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”
From the time that it took office, the Bush administration had been negotiating with the Taliban to enlist it as a regime friendly to U.S. interests and able to provide a bulwark against Russian and Chinese influence. At one point in negotiations, U.S. representatives tired of the slow pace and threatened Taliban officials, saying “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,” according to a book by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie.
When the 9/11 attacks happened, it became the perfect rationale for imperial aggression that the U.S. had already contemplated.
The material and geopolitical interests that underpinned the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan are the subject of increasingly blunt discussions within the foreign policy establishment.
As Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001, wrote in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs:
As the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time–longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam. Success will require new policies with regard to four major problem areas: the tribal areas in Pakistan, the drug lords who dominate the Afghan system, the national police, and the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government.
An August 21 New York Times editorial makes the case even more plainly:
More American ground troops will have to be sent to Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s over-reliance on air strikes– which have led to high levels of civilian casualties–has dangerously antagonized the Afghan population. This may require an accelerated timetable for shifting American forces from Iraq, where the security situation has grown somewhat less desperate.
NATO also needs to step up its military effort. With Russia threatening to redraw the post-Soviet map of Europe, this is not time for NATO to forfeit its military credibility by losing a war. Europe does not have a lot of available ground troops either. But it needs to send its best ones to Afghanistan and let them fight.
Afghanistan’s war is not a sideshow…Washington, NATO and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan must stop fighting it like a holding action and develop a strategy to win. Otherwise, we will all lose.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama is already promising to implement precisely this plan, calling himself a “strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan” and pledging to withdraw forces from Iraq in order to send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan Anti-US demonstrations in Afghanistan
August 25, 2008Euronews, 24/08 09:33 CET
Angry protests have broken out in Afghanistan following the deaths of scores of civilians in an air attack by US-led coalition forces on Friday. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has condemned the air strike.
The father of some victims said the coalition forces should come and see that all those killed were children and not Taliban.
The US military said only armed Taliban militants were killed in Friday’s attack in Shindand district of Herat province. Province police official, Ekramuddin Yawar put the number of dead following the coalition operation at 76.
Hundreds of angry villagers have reportedly attacked Afghan soldiers with stones who were bringing aid to the families of those killed in the attack.The United Nations says nearly 700 civilians were killed in the first six months of this year, the majority of them by Taliban militants.
Karzai condemns US Strike That Killed 95 Civilians
August 24, 2008Following up on a previous story, hundreds of angry residents took to the streets of Azizabad, the small village in Herat province that was the site of what appears to be the largest incident of US-inflicted civilian casualties since the 2001 invasion, pelting Afghan troops with stones and destroying a police car and checkpoint. Shots were fired to disperse the crowd, and four people were reportedly wounded.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement strongly condemning the airstrike, whose toll government officials reported has risen to 95. President Karzai reportedly called the strikes careless and uncoordinated, while another anonymous official is quoted as saying “it provides propaganda to the Taliban if they don’t take responsibility.”
On that front, the United States military has announced an investigation into the matter, though they claim to remain “very confident” that only 30 people had been killed, and all of them militants. This however contradicts a statement by NATO spokesman Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, who said investigators had already verified that at least five civilians, three women and two children, were killed in the bombing.
compiled by Jason Ditz
Foreign Policy Guru and Adviser to John McCain: Who is Randy Scheunemann?
August 24, 2008By Patrick J. Buchanan
He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.
What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.
Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.
U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?
Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.
That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality — namely, that Russia’s control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.
If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.
Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.
The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the “near abroad” when the Soviet Union broke apart.
Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.
This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.
Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp.
The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … a free people ought to be constantly awake,” Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.
American Jews and the Palestinians
August 24, 2008The Long Silence
By HOWARD LISNOFF | Counterpunch, August 24, 2008
For many years, now decades, I have been silent as a Jew about Israel’s relationship to, and treatment of, the Palestinian people and my place as an American Jew in that equation. Recently, I looked back at the Jews who I have known personally, as friends and acquaintances, and examined how their views about Palestinians and Israel have affected me and deepened my silence.
Following the lightning-fast victory of Israel over Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the resulting improvement in relations between Egypt and Israel after the Camp David Accords in 1978, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appeared solidified. The seeming invincibility of Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars led, I believe, to a false perception of invincibility and self-righteousness among many Jews took hold. No longer would Jews be victims, as during the Holocaust, but they would meet any challenge and react with force whenever and wherever a threat appeared. It portrayed Jews as strong as reflected in Israel’s treatment of its neighboring states, and in particular in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The government of Israel was showing the world how rapid and lethal a response could be to attacks, such as suicide bombings, against the people of Israel. Jews would never again be viewed as weak and subject to vicious mass attacks and attempted genocide as symbolized by the Holocaust. The stereotype of Jews as weak would be destroyed forever! The development of a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons is perhaps a reflection of the interplay between these historic and psychological factors. Who is more impervious to an outside threat than a state that possesses the ultimate power of weapons of mass destruction?
Jews in the U.S. were expected to accept their roles as supporters of whatever policy Israel adopted. Those Jews who wavered would be open to the most vicious attacks. Perhaps no one better typifies this phenomenon than Professor Norman G. Finkelstein, who lost his bid for tenure at DePaul University in May 2008, after a campaign of vicious attacks aimed at silencing his scholarly criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and the industry that had grown up, primarily in the U.S., to profit from the horror of the Holocaust. His books, among them The Holocaust Industry (2000) and Beyond Chutzpah (2005) have drawn stinging attacks. Among his most vehement detractors is Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard.
The power of the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is partially explained by studying the monetary might behind that influence. The most powerful of these organizations is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in the 2004 alone had a $33 million budget with a staff of 140.
James David reports in his article “A Passionate Attachment to Israel,” that the Israel lobby had contributed $41 million to congressional and presidential candidates over the past 54 years (2002). University of San Francisco Professor Stephen Zunes states, in the article “The Strategic Functions of U.S. Aid to Israel,” that “more than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds…go to Israel annually.”
Peace and Justice Post 
Why was Cheney’s guy in Georgia before the war?
August 29, 2008By James Gerstenzang | Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2008
Cheney aide was in Georgia before war began. What was a top national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney doing in Georgia shortly before Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s troops engaged in what became a disastrous fight with South Ossetian rebels — and then Russian troops?
Not, according to the vice president’s office, what you might think — if your thinking takes you into the realm of Cheney giving his blessing to the Georgian’s military operation.
To be sure, Cheney has been a leader of the hardliners in the administration when it comes to standing up to Russia — to the point that the man who ran the Pentagon as the Cold War came to an end during the administration of the first President Bush has been seen as ready to renew that face-off with Moscow.
It was Cheney who visited the Georgian embassy in Washington last week to sign a remembrance book as a demonstration of the administration’s support.
And yes, Joseph R. Wood, Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia shortly before the war began.
But, the vice president’s office says, he was there as part of a team setting up the vice president’s just-announced visit to Georgia. (It is common for the White House to send security, policy, communications and press aides to each site the president and vice president will visit ahead of the trip, to begin making arrangements and planning the agenda.)
The White House disclosed on Monday that Cheney would hurry over to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy next week, almost immediately after addressing the Republican National Convention on Labor Day.
And so it was that a team from the vice president’s office, U.S. security officials and others were in Georgia several days before the war began.
It had nothing to do, the vice president’s office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War.
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