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Big Bunny
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|  | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #135 on Sept 29, 2011, 10:54am » | |
Not A Single Afghan Battalion Fights Without U.S. Help
* By Spencer Ackerman
* September 26, 2011
![[image]](http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/7387/5405756196bf4116e02bz01.jpg "[image]")
Ten years of war. Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.
That was the assessment made by the officer responsible for training those Afghan soldiers, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell. Out of approximately 180 Afghan National Army battalions, only two operate “independently.” Except that “independently,” in Caldwell’s National Training Mission-Afghanistan command, means something different than “independently” does in the States.
Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” Caldwell admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning.
“Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said.
Building up foreign armies isn’t easy. During 2008’s battle for Basra, Iraqi forces relied heavily on U.S. and British support — and still saw more than a thousand desertions. That was four years after then Maj. Gen. David Petraeus took over the training of the Iraqi military.
For the past two years, Caldwell’s overseen a big push to expand, professionalize and train Afghan soldiers and cops. Caldwell has gotten bodies into uniforms: the Afghan army and police total 305,516 today, up from 196,508 last December, and they’re “on track,” Caldwell says, to reach 352,000 by November 2012.
Caldwell praised Afghan police officers during the Taliban’s audacious attack on Kabul earlier this month. Two separate cops “literally did a bear hug” on separate suicide bombers in different places around the city, sacrificing themselves in the process. “Policemen were doing heroic deeds,” Caldwell said.
But most of Afghanistan’s men in uniform can’t read at a kindergarten level, much less understand the instrument panels on a helicopter or the serial numbers on their rifles.
That’s one reason why it’ll be years before the U.S. takes its training wheels off the Afghan soldiers’ bikes. Although the Obama administration plans to turn the war over to forces Caldwell trains by 2014, Caldwell told Danger Room in June that the Afghans will need U.S. training until as late as 2017.
That is, if attrition doesn’t get in the way. Caldwell expressed alarm that 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, saying that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.” Yet last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified that attrition rates are “as much as three percent per month.
Asked by Danger Room about the increase, Caldwell simply said that the “goal we’ve set” is a 1.4 monthly attrition level across both forces. In the Afghan National Army, attrition “has been steady over the last year. We have not seen the decline,” Caldwell said.
Then there’s the nagging issue of human rights. “U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that newly-installed Kandahar police chief [Brigadier General Abdul] Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians,” writes Matthieu Aikins, in a gut-wrenching new expose for The Atlantic. Yet Raziq has been showered with cash and official praises from the highest level of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan.
Caldwell has instituted an additional 18 hours of training on respecting Afghans’ rights into the eight-week course that the typical would-be Afghan cop takes. But Caldwell doesn’t train every Afghan cop. Members of a program called the Afghan Local Police — founded in 2010 by Petraeus to recruit auxiliaries against the Taliban — has been implicated in “killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups,” according to a Human Rights Watch report issued this month.
Special Operations Forces are responsible for turning these groups into respectable units. When Danger Room asked if it was time for Caldwell to take over that training, Caldwell said, “We’ve not been asked to at this point… If there is a request for us to help and become engaged in that, we obviously would. But at this point, I think the special forces element that has the responsibility for that clearly sees and understands what that report says. We all take that very seriously.”
With insurgents assassinating the man in charge of negotiating a peace deal, the Afghan security forces are the backbone of the U.S.’ long-term plan for Afghan security. During his Senate testimony on Thursday, Panetta called their development “one of the most notable successes” of the war.
Yet not only can no Afghan army battalion operate without U.S. aid, the U.S. has been purchasing them a lot of creature comforts. Caldwell said that his command recently stopped buying air conditioning units for Afghan barracks, replacing them with fans instead — part of an effort to pare down the $6 billion that it costs to keep the Afghan security forces going. Caldwell said he expects that number to drop — in part because someday Afghanistan won’t be ravaged by insurgency (maybe, hopefully) — but he doesn’t know how much it’ll drop by, or by when.
“I’m still very realistic about the challenges out there,” Caldwell said.
Update: I misheard Caldwell during today’s Pentagon briefing when he discussed the goal he’s set for monthly attrition rates. Thanks to his public-affairs officer, Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, for alerting me to my mistake.
Photo: Flickr/DVIDSHUB
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/....thout-u-s-help/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #136 on Sept 29, 2011, 11:16am » | |
U.S. Establishes New Drone Bases for African Shadow Wars
* By David Axe
* September 21, 2011
![[image]](http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/4757/contractcrewandmq9reape.jpg "[image]")
Washington is quietly setting up at least two new East African drone bases, plus one on the Arabian Peninsula, to support the expanding U.S. shadow war against Islamic militants in Somalia and Yemen. An apparently new facility has been built in Ethiopia. In the island nation of Seychelles, a defunct airfield is being reactivated. A third base is being set up in or near Yemen.
The news, first reported by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, should come as no surprise to close observers of America’s shadow war on the borders of the Indian Ocean. But the base expansion could be met with outrage by the people most directly affected, especially Africans themselves. For years, Washington has insisted that it wouldn’t build new bases in Africa.
The new drone facilities are a small step for a Pentagon and CIA already heavily invested in the Indian Ocean region. While mercenaries and U.S. allies — “proxies” — do most of the fighting in Somalia and Yemen, American warships, aircraft and special operations forces also play an important role. U.S. Reaper or Predator drones have struck militants in Yemen at least six times total in 2010 and 2011. In Somalia, drones have attacked at least twice since 2007. U.S. forces have also hit Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamic group a total of six times, that we know of, using cruise missiles and Special Forces helicopters.
The American base in the tiny country of Djibouti, north of Somalia, provides food and fuel to the warships and serves as a launching pad for the unmanned vehicles and choppers. The Djibouti base has been around since 2001. U.S. Special Forces operated from a small base in Kenya beginning “a few years” prior to 2007, according to military consultant Tom Barnett. American commandos also launched attacks from an unspecified Ethiopian location in early 2007. The Seychelles drone base was open for business in 2009 and 2010 before temporarily shutting down.
Amid all this activity, Washington insisted it had no plans for new African bases. “I want to dispel the notion that all of a sudden America is, you know, bringing all kinds of military to Africa. It’s just simply not true,” then-President George W. Bush told reporters in Ghana in 2008. Bush was trying to reassure African audiences that the new U.S. Africa Command would not mean an expanded U.S. military presence in Africa. Africa Command kept its headquarters in Germany, but the U.S. presence expanded anyways — though many of the forces operate outside of Africa Command’s purview.
For Washington, the rationale for new bases is clear. “We do not know enough about the leaders of the Al Qaeda affiliates in Africa,” a senior U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal. “Is there a guy out there saying, ‘I am the future of Al Qaeda’? Who is the next Osama bin Laden?” If finding and killing the next bin Laden means breaking a promise over African bases, the U.S. seems content with going back on its word.
Photo: David Axe
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/new-drone-bases/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
|
Big Bunny
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #137 on Oct 1, 2011, 6:01am » | |
Qaida’s YouTube Preacher Is Killed In Yemen
* By Spencer Ackerman
* September 30, 2011
![[image]](http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3034/awlaki315331257.png "[image]")
An American citizen responsible for taking al-Qaida’s message viral has been killed in Yemen, according to the Yemeni government. As a target, the Obama administration considered him second only to Osama bin Laden. But don’t expect al-Qaida’s surging Yemeni cell to grow much weaker as a result.
Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born extremist, was reportedly killed while traveling in southern Yemen, his base of operations for years. The Yemeni government made the announcement of Awlaki’s death on Friday, but left out the circumstances — notably, who killed Awlaki.
Agence France Presse reports that “tribal sources” said Awlaki was killed “in air strike that hit two vehicles in Marib province.” If true, that means the U.S. killed Awlaki. Not only does Yemen lack the capability for a precision air strike, but joint CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces teams have stepped up both intelligence and strike operations in the past year, including armed drone flights. Indeed, Rep. Peter King, the chairman of the House homeland-security committee, jumped the gun by praising President Obama and U.S. intelligence for Awlaki’s death.
It would also mean that the Obama administration assassinated an American citizen without due process of law. Ever since evidence emerged in late 2009 that Awlaki communicated with both Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the U.S. has launched numerous air strikes in the hope of killing him. A bevy of U.S. counterterrorism officials have testified that Awlaki plays an “operational” role in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. None have offered any evidence for that conclusion.
Whether or not Awlaki in fact had any operational role in al-Qaida, his influence over its propaganda operations is undisputed. For years, Awlaki has preached al-Qaida’s message in English on YouTube. It was a clear propaganda coup for the terrorist network: an American citizen, speaking English, constructed religious arguments for killing his fellow Americans. The administration prevailed on YouTube to take many of Awlaki’s videos down, out of the fear that YouTube trollers would heed the call, but keeping them down has been difficult. A YouTube search on Friday yields several of Awlaki’s conspiracy-soaked sermons.
Awlaki’s fingerprints are also all over Inspire, al-Qaida’s English-language online magazine, published from Yemen. Several issues have featured interviews with Awlaki or articles he penned. His message has stayed consistent: Muslims have an obligation to attack the perfidious United States. According to the terror-watching organization IntelCenter, Awlaki was working on yet another Inspire piece justifying the killing of innocents, titled “Targeting Populations of Countries at War with Muslims.” It may yet be released posthumously. But Awlaki’s most recent published piece attempted to co-opt the Arab Spring for the terrorist movement, cheering on Yemen’s ongoing revolt.
It’s true that al-Qaida has benefited significantly from Yemeni political turmoil. But very little of its growing strength is attributable to Awlaki.
The collapse of the Yemeni government has allowed al-Qaida to essentially run rampant in the southern governorates of Abyan and Shabwa. Police have been powerless to stop al-Qaida fighters from overrunning their headquarters — prompting U.S. drone strikes. “At the
moment, no entity in Yemen is speaking up in Arabic against [al-Qaida],” Yemen expert Gregory Johnson wrote in a Council on Foreign Relations policy paper this week, “which means that the organization is able to shape its public message uncontested.”
Except that messaging was Awlaki’s biggest known contribution to al-Qaida. Despite some speculation, he was never tapped to lead al-Qaida after Navy SEALs killed bin Laden. In Yemen, the local al-Qaida cell is believed to be headed by former Guantanamo detainee Othman al Ghamdi, a former member of the Saudi Arabian military, along with emir Nasir al-Wuhayshi. al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has tried and failed to pull off terrorist attacks against the U.S. mainland, but there is no clear evidence so far that Awlaki played a role in planning them.
In other words, Awlaki’s death means al-Qaida is likely to take a propaganda loss — its most prominent English speaker is an ex-metalhead — but not a substantive military one.
“The death of Anwar al-Awlaki is a significant blow to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It will especially impact the group’s ability to recruit, inspire and raise funds as al-Awlaki’s influence and ability to connect to a broad demographic of potential supporters was unprecedented,” IntelCenter assessed on Friday morning. “However, AQAP remains one of the most dangerous al-Qaeda regional arms both in its region and for the direct threat it poses to the US following three recent failed attacks. … AQAP leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who is responsible for expanding the group’s focus to conduct attacks on US soil, remains in charge of the group and further attempts to conduct attacks in the US are expected.”
Senior U.S. counterterrorism officials have spent the early morning vouching for Awlaki’s death. The big questions facing them now: will they release any evidence confirming Awlaki’s “operational” role in al-Qaida? And will they explain their legal rationale for killing a vile, noxious propagandist who was nevertheless an American citizen? When the ACLU — where, full disclosure, my wife works — sued to learn why targeting Awlaki is legal, the government shut the case down by arguing that very rationale was a state secret.
On the other hand, if the attribution of Awlaki’s death remains hazy — Rep. King aside — then the government will probably be able to dodge such inconvenient questions. Watch to see if the Obama team accepts responsibility for today’s successful attack.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/awlaki-dead-yemen/
AND:
Was Killing Al-Qaida’s YouTube Preacher Illegal?
* By Spencer Ackerman
* September 30, 2011
![[image]](http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/6810/59650142242e1c3d9598z53.jpg "[image]")
It’s still not confirmed that the U.S. killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who spread al-Qaida’s message on YouTube and who bit the dust on Friday in Yemen. But it’s more likely than not. And that raises the question of whether the Obama administration illegally assassinated an American citizen, taking his life without due process of law. Short answer, according to the nation’s leading experts on the law of war: It’s complicated.
Charlie Dunlap says that Awlaki’s American citizenship — he was actually a dual U.S.-Yemeni citizen — isn’t a shield against an attack. Dunlap comes with major credentials: Not only was he the Air Force’s top Judge Advocate General before retiring in 2010 as a two-star general, he coined the term “lawfare” to conceptualize the idea of viewing legal action on a continuum with war, not a departure from it.
“If a U.S. citizen overseas presents an imminent threat, or is a participant in an organized armed group engaged in armed conflict against the U.S. — as the administration seems to be alleging is the case with al-Awlaki — the mere fact that he may also be accused of criminal offenses does not necessarily give him sanctuary from being lawfully attacked overseas as any other enemy belligerent might be,” Dunlap, now a law professor at Duke University, tells Danger Room.
Dunlap’s friend Mary Ellen O’Connell disagrees. And her credentials are just as impressive: She’s the vice chairman of the prestigious American Society of International Law, as well as a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her argument doesn’t rely on Awlaki’s American citizenship.
“The United States is not involved in any armed conflict in Yemen,” O’Connell tells Danger Room, “so to use military force to carry out these killings violates international law.”
O’Connell’s argument turns on the question of whether the U.S. is legally at war in Yemen. And for the administration, that’s a dicey proposition. The Obama administration relies on the vague Authorization to Use Military Force, passed in the days after 9/11, to justify its Shadow Wars against terrorists. Under its broad definition, the Authorization’s writ makes Planet Earth a battlefield, legally speaking.
But the Authorization authorizes war against “nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It’s a stretch to apply that to al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate, which didn’t exist on 9/11. But when House Republicans tried to re-up the Authorization to explicitly bless the new contours of the war against al-Qaida, the Obama administration balked, fearing the GOP was actually tying its hands on the separate question of terrorist detentions.
“It is only during the intense fighting of an armed conflict that international law permits the taking of human life on a basis other than the immediate need to save life,” O’Connell continues. “In armed conflict, a privileged belligerent may use lethal force on the basis of reasonable necessity. Outside armed conflict, the relevant standard is absolute necessity.”
So did al-Awlaki represent an “absolute” danger to the United States? President Obama, in acknowledging Awlaki’s death on Friday morning, didn’t present any evidence that he did.
Still, Dunlap cites two legal precedents in defense of the government’s leeway to kill Awlaki. First is a 1942 Supreme Court case about Nazi saboteurs, known as Ex Parte Quirin.
In that case, the Court found that “U.S. citizenship of ‘an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences of a belligerency,’” Dunlap says. “In this instance, that ‘consequence’ is being targeted like any other enemy,” regardless of citizenship.
The other is far more recent. Last December, the D.C. federal district court dismissed a lawsuit brought by Awlaki’s father and the ACLU (where, full disclosure, my wife works) to get Awlaki removed from the CIA and the military’s terrorist targeting list. The lower court found that Awlaki did retain an option for due process of law: He could turn himself in and seek to adjudicate his fate at trial. But since Awlaki wasn’t availing himself of the courts, the government had exhausted its reasonable efforts to avoid killing him.
Plus, the court doubted its own ability to properly intervene.
“The court found that the ‘political question doctrine’ — in which the courts refuse to adjudicate certain kinds of issues — applies to al-Awlaki, even though he ‘happens to be a U.S. citizen,’” Dunlap explains. “The court explicitly found that ‘there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas is constitutionally committed to the political branches and judicially unreviewable.’”
But shouldn’t Awlaki’s American citizenship count for something? If nothing else, doesn’t it oblige the government to at least disclose why it asserts it can kill an American citizen?
“There may be a political argument for doing so, but it is not presently a legal requirement,” Dunlap says. “As the DC court lays out very well, judges do not see their role as adjudicating who should — or should not — be attacked in an armed conflict. Among other things, they do not see themselves as competent to make essentially military and political judgements of such things as to the adequacy of the supporting intelligence data, the wisdom of the timing of a particular strike, the risk to noncombatants, and so forth. Moreover, I think that no government would want disclose what may be very sensitive material as it might compromise sources and methods.”
Of course, that serves as a very convenient shield for the government.
None of it satisfies O’Connell. “If the U.S. is really in a worldwide armed conflict that began on 9/11, there is no need to defend the killing of individual combatants on the basis of self-defense,” she says, referring to the administration’s interpretation of the Authorization to Use Military Force. But some, including top Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, assert that the U.S. also retains the right to attack outside of a “hot battlefield” because of the United Nations Charter’s recognition of the right of self-defense.
Balderdash, says O’Connell. “That basis does not help either because the Charter permits self-defense against a state that has launched an armed attack on the U.S., and Yemen has not done this,” she says. Her bottom line: “Law enforcement methods are the lawful ones and ultimately the effective and moral methods.”
Photo: Flickr/Air Combat Command
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/awlaki-illegal-or-legal/
BUT:
Yemen Strike Leaves Misfit Metalhead as Al-Qaida’s Last American Voice
* By Adam Rawnsley
* September 30, 2011
If you’re looking to pitch Inspire magazine, al-Qaida’s English-language webzine, you should know there’s been a little bit of editorial turnover.
On Friday morning, Yemeni and U.S. officials announced that al-Qaida preacher Anwar al-Awalaki was killed while traveling through southern Yemen. He wasn’t the only one. The Yemeni government also claims that Samir Khan, the North Carolina man who fled to Yemen to edit Inspire, also died in the strike that killed Awlaki. It’s not exactly the greatest time for al-Qaida’s meager American contingent.
The death of Awlaki, a popular jihadi cleric and contributor to Inspire, alongside Khan deprives the jihadi world of its major English-speaking propagandists. Now the last terrorist left chatting in an American accent is a chubby former metalhead named Adam Gadahn.
For the longest time, if you wanted official al-Qaida propaganda in English, Gadahn’s videos from al-Qaida central in Pakistan were just about your only choice. That changed with the rollout of Inspire, a reworked version of Samir Khan’s former amateur terror fanzine Jihad Recollections put out by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In its last issue, the .pdf magazine already showed signs of decline, thinning its pages and relying on nostalgia for its content. With its chief editor and most popular contributor out of the picture, the magazine’s future looks bleak.
That leaves Gadahn again. It’s easy to overestimate Awlaki’s standing in the wider jihadi universe. But for the American and larger English language audience, he was kind of a big deal. Gadahn, however, is no Awlaki.
Awlaki wasn’t the “leader” of AQAP, as he was often mistakenly called. But he certainly had a personal charisma that earned him followers. In his pre-fugitive life, Awlaki’s speaking abilities landed him spots as an imam in Colorado, San Diego and northern Virginia and as a chaplain at George Washington University. His commentaries on the lives of the Prophet’s companions were also popular online, even among those who were unaware of or uninterested in his more radical treatises. All of this came despite Awlaki’s lack of particularly impressive formal training in Islam.
Gadahn’s background as a loner and misfit, by contrast, didn’t prepare him to be a particularly effective jihad-evangelist. He grew up isolated, home-schooled on his parents farm. Before he converted to Islam, he dabbled in the Southern California metal scene. Apparently unable to scrape enough friends together for a group, Gadahn formed a one-man metal band, Aphasia (named after a speech impediment). After his conversion, he ran into problems at his Orange County mosque, sleeping on his job as a security guard there and getting expelled after punching his Imam.
In 1998, Gadahn left the U.S. for Pakistan, eventually joining up with al-Qaida as a translator. He never quite racked up the same kind of fan club as Awlaki later did. A number of those recently arrested for terrorism offenses in the west have reached out to Awlaki for guidance at some point, including Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan and would-be Shabaab member Zachery Chesser. Others have cited his lectures and writing as inspiration following attacks, including Roshonara Choudhry and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.
But Gadahn’s been cranking out videos for seven years now. He’s even recently jumped on the bandwagon of encouraging lone-wolf attacks. And still he’s not the object of fanboy affection. Terrorists haven’t cited him as an ideological catalyst for an attack. Is this any way to treat an O.G.?
If al-Qaida or its affiliates want someone who can channel the American idiom after Awlaki, they’re going to have to do better than Gadahn — someone who never fit in much of anywhere.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/al-qaida-metalhea/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
|
Big Bunny
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Joined: Apr 2003
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Posts: 50,822
Location: Sydney, Australia
| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #138 on Oct 6, 2011, 10:06pm » | |
Afghanistan is losing time for a peaceful solution – and the Taliban know it
Headlines of the past decade in Afghanistan have been about the bloodshed, but behind them lies political failure at every level
o Declan Walsh
o The Guardian, Friday 7 October 2011
![[image]](http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/8132/taliban0055769078.jpg "[image]")
Ten years after they were hounded across the border into Pakistan and were ready to surrender, Taliban insurgents have regrouped to become a formidable force once more. Photograph: Véronique de Viguerie
Ten years ago, as the first American bombs fell on Afghanistan, a Pashtun tribal leader slipped across the Pakistani border riding a motorbike. He wore a loosely tied turban, was accompanied by three companions and carried a CIA-donated satellite phone. His name was Hamid Karzai.
US-backed militias were sweeping towards Kabul from the north; Karzai's job was to help rout the Taliban in the south. Using his CIA phone he called in a team of US special forces soldiers, who swooped in by helicopter with weapons for another 300 fighters. Together, they pushed towards the Taliban's spiritual home of Kandahar. Victory was at hand. But first, a momentous meeting.
On the morning of 5 December, Karzai received a Taliban delegation in Shah Wali Kot, 20 miles north of Kandahar. Things were moving fast. Hours earlier, Afghan tribal elders gathered in Bonn, Germany, had anointed Karzai as the country's interim leader; the UN signed off on the arrangement. In Kandahar, the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar dispatched his second in command and defence minister, Mullah Obaidullah, to meet Karzai.
Recognising defeat, the Taliban wanted to talk peace: a formal surrender, the transfer of vehicles and weapons, an end to fighting in Kandahar, all in return for assurances their leaders could be able to return to their villages. That night Obaidullah sent bread for Karzai, in a gesture of conciliation.
In retrospect, it was a tantalising opportunity for a smooth post-Taliban transition and, perhaps, a novel political dispensation. But it wasn't to be. Furious after the 9/11 attacks, the US war machine pursued the Taliban hard. Karzai, the new leader, acquiesced. And the Taliban leadership slunk across the border into Pakistan to lick their wounds and plan the resurgence that is racking the country today.
The exact circumstances of that meeting are still debated among historians. But the irony is lost on few that, today, President Karzai wants to get back into that room with the bearded Talibs in Shah Wali Kot. After 10 years of steadily rising conflict and with the prospect of a major American withdrawal by the end of 2014, Karzai knows that his political future – and perhaps that of his country – could hinge on a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The question is whether there's enough time left to achieve it.
The headlines of the past decade in Afghanistan have been written in blood – about 17,000 civilians and 2,750 foreign soldiers killed, countless suicide bombings and, in recent years, guerrilla spectaculars such as the recent 20-hour assault on the US embassy. But if war has dominated the news, the greatest failings have been political.
At first, it seemed anything was possible. As the Talibs fled in late 2001, reporters filed stories about jubilant women casting off their burqas; kites, banned under the Taliban, fluttered in the skies. Then came more substantial gestures: promises of money, development and democracy. That mood of hope peaked in 2004, with the first presidential poll. Some 70% of voters participated and Karzai scooped a 55% majority, with support from every ethnic group. Designer Tom Ford hailed him as the "chicest man on the planet" for his flowing cape and wool hat.
An airy sense of confidence gripped Kabul, which expressed itself in small ways – young lovers who defied convention and eloped in "love marriages"; palatial wedding halls modelled on mirrored-glass skyscrapers from Dubai; flourishing body-building and sports clubs. On the edge of the city, I visited the Kabul golf club, which had shut under the Taliban, now open after the putting greens had been swept for mines. The course pro, recently returned from exile, told me the Taliban had flogged him with a steel cable. Now a gentrified warlord was financing the renovations. "Attack the course," urged the scorecard.
The joke was not seen as bad taste. The Taliban insurgency was distant, largely confined to the southern provinces, more nuisance than serious threat. A Swiss Red Cross worker had been killed in Kandahar in March 2003, but western military officials had started to speak of the Taliban as a declining force. At Bagram airbase, north of Kabul, American soldiers took pedicures and massages in a beauty parlour. "You can't fight if you have sore muscles," one young officer told me.
Yet this brave democracy had perilously fragile foundations. The US invasion had toppled the Taliban but, many Afghans complained, left behind the force they hated equally: the warlords who had plundered the country for decades. Instead of being banished, many of the old faces were back. Some stood for election, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, the US-allied warlord accused of suffocating up to 2,000 Taliban fighters in shipping containers. In 2005 Karzai made him chief of staff to the military.
The president protested he had little choice but to accommodate such bullies – the Americans wanted nation building on the cheap. He had a point. The Bush administration, preoccupied with the war in Iraq, had only 8,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the time of the 2004 election. Commanders, intelligence assets, military equipment – all were being re-routed to Baghdad.
Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the Taliban leadership were plotting a comeback. There was clearly no place in a political process – American leaders bundled them in the same basket as al-Qaida fugitives, which was a mistake. Then, in 2005, they made a dramatic reappearance. Violent incidents soared to more than 4,000, from 1,500 the year before. Coalition deaths doubled from 60 to 131.
Pakistan denied the insurgents were using its territory but Nato officers spoke of the "Quetta Shura" – the Taliban ruling council headquartered in western Pakistan. More worrying proof was available. In 2006 I attended a funeral north of Quetta for a fallen Taliban fighter; the homily was read by a mullah who was also the provincial minister of health.
It was a perfect storm for the British deployment to Helmand. Few took seriously the statement by the then defence secretary, John Reid, in mid 2006 that "not a single shot" might be fired. But British officers did promise to do things differently from the Americans. Criss-crossing the desert in nimble – but hugely exposed – open-top jeeps, officers said there would be no kicking down people's doors. They talked confidently about the lessons of Northern Ireland; young soldiers strolled the bazaars, playing football with local kids.
None of that lasted long. By June, British troops had been sucked into a vicious fight in Sangin, a village deep in Helmand's heroin country that threatened to become a British Alamo. Insurgents streamed across the desert from Pakistan; the death toll inched upwards. British commanders turned to pulverising air strikes and helicopter gunships that killed hundreds of Taliban fighters. But the more the British killed, the more fighters seemed to spring up.
The violence spread like a virus. Nato launched Operation Medusa in neighbouring Kandahar in summer 2006 – the alliance's first land operation. It was a success, of sorts. Canadian soldiers started the fight and Americans finished it, driving the Taliban back over the border towards Quetta. I toured the battlefield with Colonel Stephen Williams, a flamboyant American who played heavy metal music as his artillery pounded Taliban-held compounds. "Rock'n'roll, man," he said.
But the Taliban were also adapting. The insurgency melted out of sight, instead attacking western and Afghan forces with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. Casualties of western troops mounted, touching a high of 711 last year. Some 2,700 civilians also perished. The main problem was that the Afghan government seemed incapable of holding captured ground. In Kabul, western officials scrambled to come up with solutions.
Every season brought a new initiative – counter-narcotics, building the justice system, rooting out corruption. At first western forces demobilised Afghan militias, then they started to arm them. Diplomats attended fundraising events in Tokyo, Berlin and London, trying to maintain flagging interest. The term "Afghanisation" – putting Afghan soldiers, civil servants or policemen up front – became an article of shaky faith.
But no amount of money or soldiers seemed capable of patching up the deeply dysfunctional relationship at the heart of the affair. Anger and frustration turned to resentment and deep mistrust on both sides. Diplomatic cables from 2009 released through WikiLeaks showed the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, describing Karzai as a "paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building". Another cable noted that Karzai's deputy, Ahmad Zia Massoud, had been questioned after arriving in Dubai with $52m in cash – raising questions about financial propriety at the highest levels of government.
The Obama "surge" of two years ago, bringing the US contingent to more than 100,000 troops, was supposed to rescue the situation. It succeeded in part. Western troops now control a greater swath of southern Afghanistan than they have for years; Taliban violence there is receding. Yet the fight has simply shifted to the mountainous east, along the border with Pakistan's tribal belt.
The area is controlled by the notorious Haqqani network – the tribal jihadi clan based out of north Waziristan, and recently the subject of friction between the US and the Pakistani military. The US accuses Pakistan's ISI intelligence service of supporting the Haqqanis, who carried out the daring 13 September attack on the US embassy. The Pakistanis say they don't know what the US wants – to make peace with the insurgents, or to fight them.
Amid the confusion, the one sure thing is that, by the end of 2014, the US and Britain will have withdrawn most of their troops. Talk of an "endgame" may be premature: informed officials say that between 10,000 and 20,000 US soldiers will remain behind to support Karzai's government.
But will it survive? The prospect of talks with the Taliban has already resurrected old ethnic tensions; grave talk of civil war runs quietly in the corridors of diplomacy. Karzai periodically says he would like to sit down with the Taliban leaders, as he once did 10 years ago. The question now is whether that would solve Afghanistan's conflict, or propel it into a new phase.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct....eaceful-resolve
AND:
How the invasion of Afghanistan changed lives – for better and worse
It's 10 years since the first American bombs fell. Here five Afghans describe the ways that they have been affected
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 October 2011 21.48 BST
![[image]](http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/6927/hajiawazali0075836853.jpg "[image]")
Haji Awaz Ali, whose police officer son, Jan Ali, was killed by a suicide bomber. Photograph: Jerome Starkey
Haji Awaz Ali, 69, whose son, a police officer, was killed by a suicide bomber
Ten years ago, we thought there would be no more fighting. We were happy. Now the fighting still continues. Will it stop? Only God knows. Is it better or worse? It's the same.
Ten years ago, people could breathe comfortably. Now people can't go out of their houses because of suicide bombers. The Taliban are the enemy of God, the enemy of people. They are coming in the name of Islam but they are the enemy of Islam. They killed my son.
He was at the gate of his police compound when the attacker tried to come inside. My son, Jan Ali, went to the attacker, grabbed him, hugged him and then the attacker exploded himself. My son, my brave son, he died. He was 27.
The Mesharano Jirga [parliament's upper house] gave my family a medal and his monthly salary of 15,000 afghanis (£202). The Americans gave us $2,000 (£1,300) and a medal. But that's all we have. His salary used to pay the rent. I went to the presidential palace and they said they would give me a house but I don't have any news. Without Jan Ali, we can't afford to send his four daughters to school.
Maulvi Qalamuddin, 60, ex-Taliban deputy minister for prevention of vice and promotion of virtue, peace council member
Ten years ago, when the Taliban fell, I went to Logar province, where I was teaching students before I was arrested by foreigners and I spent 18 months in jail in Kabul. But no one registered a complaint against me so the president approved my release.
I went back to Logar and tried to work as a mediator between the people and the government to bring security, but the situation got worse. Foreign forces doubted that I was working with the government so I returned to Kabul. I now work for the ministry of education as an editor of their curriculum.
During the Taliban regime, there was rule of law, people were safe and there wasn't any corruption. Unfortunately the Taliban government had no relation with the world community. The minister of public health was a mullah. For that position, it should be a doctor. The minister of mines should have been an engineer, but he was a mullah.
But while people might have been hungry, they were happy with that because it was a religious government. Now we have elections, a constitution, law courts, new schools, asphalted roads. These are the gains from the billions the world has spent, but it's nothing. People don't trust the government.
Ghulam Mohammad Farabi, 25, Afghan national army soldier
I joined the Afghan national army four years ago. I had to join the army because I took a loan against my family's land. I did this because my father was sick. We could not treat him here and had to take him to Pakistan with the $6,000 I got as a loan. He had cancer and we could not save him. It was very sad for us all. I was studying but when he died I had to quit studying. I joined the ANA because I thought it was better resourced than the police.
When stationed in Herat I got shot in the leg. I had not been to my home for two-and-a-half years, so I asked to be taken home as I have a wife and a daughter. We were in a car crash and my wounded leg was broken in the crash.
I have spent the past nine months in hospital but now I am being told I have to come back to work as they have cut my salary. But I still can't walk and they have taken bone out of my leg so one is shorter than the other.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, who is said to be in hiding in Afghanistan
Who started the fighting? The foreigners started on us. We wanted to treat the country's pains and problems but the occupiers, the invaders, brought fighting here. We couldn't start any reconciliation or talks after they started with tanks and planes. Now it is dependent on the invaders when this war will end.
The time has passed for talks. They could have started at the beginning. But now our country is occupied, people have been killed, and until our country becomes free, talks are impossible. Our position, we repeat, is the withdrawal of foreign forces. Everyone knows that, it was our position from the start.
After 10 years, the foreigners know that they can't win this war. They must make a decision to leave. Our people don't allow invaders in our country. Now America has casualties every day, and economic problems. They must go. They can't make people content by force. Ten years ago we started from zero, now we have high morale and are strong, standing against them. We can continue like this for another 50 years.
Farkhunda Zahra Naderi, 30, MP in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house
When the Taliban was removed from power, I was in England as a student. Ten years later, we have had tremendous attention given by the world. That has never happened in the history of our country. We have had some achievements. For instance, that I am a member of parliament is an achievement. Now we have women in parliament, 69 of them, more than a quarter of the seats, which is enshrined in our constitution.
But unfortunately I am always disappointed that we don't have a single woman in the supreme court. The other positions women have can be symbolic because the main power comes from the supreme court. You can see this in cases of violence against women; as soon as they come to court they disappear because we don't have women in the higher levels of the justice system.
I remember when I was still a student coming to Afghanistan for holidays; people were hopeful because after the withdrawal of the Taliban they were thirsty for democracy. People hated the Taliban. We all know that.
But as you can see, over time an unpopular regime is getting back into power. The atmosphere in Kabul is not the same as it was at the beginning of the time the foreigners came. People wanted to see democracy bring positive changes. But they have seen their lives not get better, so there is anger.
I know it's frustrating for the world that they have spent a lot on this country and people are not satisfied. But it was not only the Afghans' fault. Their approach was wrong, our approach was wrong, so we both became a bit careless. They didn't invest in institutions, they invested in individuals, something Afghanistan has always suffered from.
Good things don't come easily and we have to keep fighting for them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct....ersary-invasion
AND:
Vanity, machismo and greed have blinded us to the folly of Afghanistan
The decade-long retribution exacted on this nation has cost the west dearly – and our old foes laugh at our expense
o Simon Jenkins
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 October 2011 20.30 BST
![[image]](http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/7877/crossesofremembrancefo0.jpg "[image]")
The first remembrance field dedicated solely to British military personnel who have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.
Everything about Afghanistan beggars belief. This week its leader, Hamid Karzai, brazenly signed a military agreement with India, knowing it would enrage his neighbour, Pakistan, and knowing it would increase the assault on his capital by the Haqqani network, reported clients of Islamabad's ISI intelligence agency. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Pentagon is exulting over its new strategy of drone killing, claiming this aerial "counter-terrorism" can replace the "hearts and minds" counter-insurgency. Down in Helmand, visiting British journalists gather to recite the defence ministry's tired catechism: "We are making real progress on the ground."
The opening decade of the 21st century has been marked by two epic failures by the western powers that so recently claimed victory in the cold war; failures of both intellect and leadership. One is the inability to use the limitless resources of modern government to rescue the west's economy from prolonged recession. The other is the use of an attack on America by a crazed Islamist criminal as an excuse for a retaliatory war embracing a wide swath of the Muslim world. The decade-long punishment of Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden has been an act of biblical retribution. The demand that it also abandons the habits of history and adopt democracy, capitalism and gender equality was imperial arrogance.
What happened in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 has spawned an industry of hindsight, with over a hundred titles of wisdom after the event. We learn of the post-9/11 arguments within the Taliban, many of them old CIA allies. We learn of the possible role of Abdul Haq in Kabul, of Pakistan's intelligence double-dealing, and of the Kandahar jirga of October 2001 which came close to evicting Osama bin Laden.
Yet every counsel of caution in dealing with Afghanistan was disregarded in America's rush for vengeance – even the warning of Donald Rumsfeld that America "had no dog in the Afghan fight" and should avoid nation-building after a punitive raid. A great surge of imperial eagerness seemed to overwhelm Washington, London and Nato, as if the whole of western liberalism were craving a role in the world.
The occupation of Afghanistan has been a catalogue of unrelieved folly. America is spending staggering sums on the war, which it is clearly not winning. Congressional studies show virtually no US aid reaches the local economy, most remaining with contractors in the US or going on security or being stolen. Local democracy has failed, as warlords feud with drug lords and tribal vendettas resurface. The "training of the Afghan police and army" has become a dope-befuddled joke.
Britain's part in this has been dire. The thesis that Whitehall and its NGOs could somehow end Afghan corruption was absurd. Clare Short's mission in 2002 to "eradicate the poppy crop" and Kim Howells' spending of £270m "defeating the drugs trade" were beyond satire. I still have before me John Reid's briefing as gung-ho defence secretary in 2006, that Britain's job was "to build a prosperous, democratic, stable and secure Afghanistan", with British troops "not waging war but helping to rebuild". I recall General Sir David Richards at the time assuring me it would all be over soon in Helmand thanks to his "inkspots" strategy. The conclusion drawn in Frank Ledwidge's book, Losing Small Wars, is that the performance of Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand was "nothing short of disastrous … leaving a legacy of destroyed towns, refugees and civilian casualties". Whitehall's compensation payments to Afghan civilians killed and injured by its troops are doubling each year.
Three hundred and eighty-two British soldiers have died in this war. Can any minister look their families in the eye and claim the loss was worth it? Worth what? Except in garrisoned towns, security in Afghanistan is as bad as ever. British soldiers have been told that they are being withdrawn over the next two years. Since they cannot pretend to have achieved their mission, it makes no sense to leave them in harm's way a moment longer.
The policy now is to "talk to the Taliban", as if it were the German high command on Luneburg Heath. All that is happening is that Karzai's emissaries and Taliban chiefs are seduced into "talks", and then murdered either by their own side or by America's trigger-happy drones. Five of Karzai's negotiators have already been killed, including his brother. The drones are removing one Taliban or al-Qaida leader after another. While it is hard to feel sorry for them, the wrecking of any hierarchy of control replaces a path to peace with renewed vendetta. American policy has turned the tiny cell of Bin Laden's al-Qaida into a global terrorist brand.
What is strange, as Barbara Tuchman wrote, is not the folly of policy as such but its immunity to correction even when known to be folly. Any visitor to Kabul soon learns two things. First that it is senseless to confuse Pashtun nationalism with Taliban insurgency, and that with al-Qaida terrorism. Second, if Nato wants to eradicate a security threat in this part of the world, some accommodation must be made with the mujahideen or, as the Russians found, they will simply win. Accommodation, that is, with their Pakistan sponsors. The only key that unlocks this door is the departure of Nato troops.
As during Vietnam, some wars pass the stage where politicians and generals dare step back and look. Pride, a craving for glory, an aversion to defeat, above all, the institutionalising of the war in its surrounding territory, come to drive strategy. Kabul is occupied by tens of thousands of soldiers, diplomats, NGO officials and contractors. Afghanistan has become a stew of the military/industrial complex, with aid mixed in.
American estimates from Brown University are that some $3.7 trillion will have been spent avenging the 9/11 deaths. Britain's contribution to this stupefying sum is £18.8bn. Whether this spending has prevented another terror attack, whether that would be value for money, or whether the whole venture has been little more than a cruel exercise in vanity, machismo and greed can never be answered, though Bin Laden himself was dealt with quite cheaply. All we know for sure is that revenge has not been sweet, just very expensive.
The irony of this great folly is that its chief beneficiaries are likely to be those who lost the cold war, Russia and China. As the west's leaders struggle to rescue embattled armies and embattled economies from morasses of their own creation, they have left their old foes laughing with glee. Democracy has snatched defeat from the arms of victory – without a shred of a reason.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/06/afghanistan-folly-expense
AND:
Raising hope for women in Afghanistan
Ten years ago, a massive feminist experiment began in Afghanistan. But can the advances in education and women's rights be sustained, even when the troops leave?
o Samira Ahmed
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 October 2011 21.30 BST
![[image]](http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/1668/afghankuchigirlsattend0.jpg "[image]")
Afghan girls attend lessons, on the outskirts of Kabul in Afghanistan. Photograph: SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images
For the past 10 years we have watched a giant social experiment in Afghanistan, an experiment in feminism in one of the most misogynist cultures in the world. It may only have touched a minority in the big cities, but an entire generation of girls were born and raised with a widely promoted idea: that they had a right to an education, to vote, to hold paid employment, to stand for elected office and even to live a life without domestic violence and forced marriage. If you are an Afghan woman under 20 today, there's a chance you got schooling and encouragement, from western NGO-led programmes with military security support, to be more like "us".
Oxfam's report released this week to mark Friday's 10th anniversary of US and British forces' intervention in Afghanistan cited "2.7 million girls in school, compared to a few thousand in Taliban times". Action Aid claimed in its report that women's rights "were slowly but steadily improving after the fall of the Taliban", adding that this improvement had stalled in 2005-6 with the growing insurgency. The charity commissioned a poll of 1,000 women from different tribes, regions and social backgrounds across the country, which found that 72% believe their lives are better now than 10 years ago; 37% think the country will become a worse place if international troops leave, and 86% fear a return to Taliban rule – many naming their daughter's education as their main concern. Homa, 50, a teacher from Mazar-e-Sharif, says: "Women are the most vulnerable if the Taliban come back. Women will be back in their homes like prisoners."
Western feminists may have been sceptical about politicians and their spouses (notably Laura Bush) claiming women's rights as a key justification for launching the military campaign after 9/11, but the hatred of women apparent in many aspects of Afghan society is undeniable, helping to make it one of the less controversial feminist causes of our age. A celebrity-backed campaign, Green Scarves for Solidarity, launches on Friday to ask world leaders to keep their promises to Afghan women made 10 years ago. Yet the situation is not a cut-and-dried one to everybody.
Two arguments stand out. First, the cultural relativism argument, which leads to 15-year-olds at one of Britain's leading girls' schools asking me whether domestic violence wasn't different in Afghanistan. Then there's the imperial arrogance argument. By this argument, opening up schools and enterprise schemes is tainted by the fact that it was done with military support.
Much of the news analysis to mark the 10th anniversary has rightly pointed out that women and children have suffered disproportionately in the drone attacks increasingly used by Nato commanders. There have been those who argue that this destruction outweighs the benefits of community projects such as schools, banks and health centres made possible by the involvement of the military.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton made an interesting feminist counter-argument while still a senator: "A post-Taliban Afghanistan where women's rights are respected is much less likely to harbour terrorists in the future."
The recently assassinated head of the country's high peace council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was no liberal softy. But he himself had remarked on the Taliban's stubborn refusal in negotiations to countenance modifying their firm opposition to even modest liberation for women.
Certainly, there is a hideous irony in the increasing use of burqas in insurgent attacks. After the 20-hour-long attack on the US embassy in Kabul on 13 September the police found burqas alongside explosives in a van used by the attackers. Why burqas as a disguise? Well, Kabul's police chief, General Ayub, admitted that they didn't have female police to search female passengers.
One of the 382 British servicemen and women who have died while serving in Afghanistan over the past 10 years was 51-year-old senior aircraftman Gary Thompson from Nottingham. The company director and RAF reservist was killed in April 2008 while on patrol around Kandahar airfield. He was the oldest British serviceman to die in Iraq or Afghanistan, and a father of five daughters. Before he went on his last tour of duty he said: "I want women in Afghanistan to have the same opportunities my daughters have had. Three of them are at university." His widow, Jacqui said: "Gary wanted to make a difference in Afghanistan, particularly for the women and children there."
It is easy to be glib about claiming a moral mission in what can seem futile or questionable military circumstances. A new survey of US veterans has found a third felt the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting. But NGOs acknowledge that their schools, clinics and training for women to run their own businesses are all in jeopardy when the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) pulls out. Many aid workers have been targeted by the Taliban. Action Aid lost four workers in a single attack in 2006. While conducting the polling for its latest report, the daughter of one of its surveyors was shot.
So is what has been created in Afghanistan an unsustainable "bubble" of feminism? The country now has more female MPS (27%) than the world average (including prospective 2014 presidential candidate Fawzia Koofi), girls make up 39% of children in school and 5% of the army and police force. Many parents educated their girls in secret during the Taliban years and now one in four teachers in Afghanistan are women. Set against this, one example of how powerless Afghan women are came from a British asylum lawyer who told me her teenage clients often listed only their male relatives when first making a claim, because, in Afghan society, women didn't count. Once they had leave to remain and could bring over close family, the young men would name their mothers and sisters but the authorities would understandably refuse, as they hadn't been named from the start.
When Isaf leaves altogether, could a moral philosopher argue that all Afghan women should have a right to claim asylum in the west? It's worth remembering that the argument about security coming before women's rights was widely made in 1996 when the Taliban takeover ended the seven-year civil war.
One 17-year-old student interviewed by Action Aid, Seema, was home schooled by her father for three years during Taliban rule: "When the Taliban left I was very happy to be able to come back to school and study. Things are better now than in the past. The Taliban don't see women as human. They don't let them work or study or be in the government. I want to be minister of health and help women and children."
Who knows if military and diplomatic strategists ever try to quantify the value of hope? Nato troops are due to be phased out by early 2015. A conference in Bonn, Germany, in December this year will see delegates from 90 countries represented to discuss the future for Afghanistan. But there is concern among Afghan's women's groups that they are being kept in the dark and may not be fairly represented. Certainly the idea of removing hope completely from a generation of girls who have just been given it is too hideous to contemplate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2....nist-experiment
AND:
Afghanistan: the limits of power
The short war has become a long war which even now, on the 10th anniversary, we do not know how to end
* Editorial
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 October 2011 22.05 BST
America and Britain invaded Afghanistan 10 years ago, for reasons which were understandable, to wage a short war that was unavoidable. We stayed, through all the twists and turns imposed by events and by the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable. The short war has become a long war which even now we do not know how to end. The ambition to remake Afghanistan on the western model has been silently discarded.
Optimistic generals have come and gone. Increasingly sceptical diplomats have filed ever more pessimistic dispatches to their capitals. Idealistic aid agencies have seen their work prosper, only to find it blighted by shifts in the balance between government and insurgents or undermined by corruption. Journalists have written their reports and made their television programmes. Mercenaries have made their money and consultants have taken their fees. The invaders have changed, and so have the Taliban in ways that are still evolving. There have been many books, some of them bestsellers, some of them illuminating, some meretricious, some self-serving. And, at home, endless comment. The only reason for adding to that quantity is that an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect.
We should look back on what we have learned, and look forward to answer the question of what we should do now. What we have learned is that we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies. The hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain, nor, if more briefly, in the other countries which joined in the Afghan intervention. This overweening sense that anything and everything was possible goes back to the moment of triumphalism at the end of the cold war. Its military dimension was expressed in one rightwing intellectual's claim that the American empire had "appropriated the entire Earth and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice".
The trouble was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan, they were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents who soon found ways of countering the technical superiority of the invaders. But this military overconfidence, of which the British armed forces had their own scaled-down version, was not the only problem. Soft power was found as wanting as hard power in the Afghan story. Some Afghans were indeed "like us", recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number. In some of Afghanistan's possible futures, they may have a more important role to play, and we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later. But the majority were not like us, and we could not make them so by wish or fiat.
The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity. As the Guardian's Jonathan Steele underlines in his new book, we pushed our way into a civil war whose nature we at first understood hardly at all. When we did understand it better, we did not know what to do about it. The situation now is one of stalemate. The Taliban cannot be defeated, but nor are they likely to be able to prevail in large parts of the country. There is a minimal common interest in a power-sharing settlement as part of a deal under which foreign forces leave, and neighbouring powers agree to certain rules about their permissible influence in Afghanistan. That may be beyond achievement, but, after 10 years of muddle and mayhem, it must be our duty – our remaining duty – to aim at it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/....power-editorial
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #139 on Oct 21, 2011, 6:29am » | |
Western intervention, is it ever helpful?
According to Greg Muttitt, a London-based writer, the best thing the West can do for Libya is to leave it alone.
Dan Hind Last Modified: 21 Sep 2011 15:31
![[image]](http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7395/20119171015113773420619.jpg "[image]")
The most useful thing European powers can do for Libya is to leave it alone [GALLO/GETTY]
Last week I wrote about Libya and expressed the hope that the country would be able to find its own path in a future without Gaddafi. The rebels have received important help from France and Britain among other foreign powers. Those foreign powers will be eager to establish a regime in Libya that suits them. Only the Libyan people can create a country whose natural resources support the freedom and prosperity of the many.
Plenty of people will be on hand with advice for the Libyans in the months ahead. I thought it might be useful to think a little more about how best people outside the country might be able to contribute. I turned to Greg Muttitt, a London-based writer who has made an intense study of the politics of Western intervention and Iraqi resistance in the years since the invasion of 2003.
In the interests of transparency I should add that I commissioned Greg's book, Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq when I was an editor at Random House.
I began by asking Greg about what he made of the reporting about Libya he'd seen in the Western media in recent weeks. "Reporters and commentators have been assuming that Britain, France, and the US should somehow take the lead in helping Libya's transition, as though the occupation of Iraq has taught valuable lessons and that the West should somehow take responsibility of nation-building. The clear lesson from Iraq should instead be that the West should stay out of Libyan affairs. At every stage US-UK involvement in Iraqi politics played a negative role."
Another thing that's striking in Western coverage, according to Greg, is the low level of knowledge about Libyan culture, society and politics. There's a lesson to be learned from Iraq. Starting with a very vague understanding of the country and its politics the Western powers created a system that emphasised sectarian identities, even though Iraqis themselves didn't think that way.
"We should watch out for Western interpretations about what Libyan society is like. It is in the West's interests for the Libyan political class to be weak and isolated, so it can be easily influenced from outside. That doesn't mean that officials and generals have to sit down and work out a 'divide and rule' strategy. But everyone is tempted to see things in terms that suit their interests. Western policy-makers are no exception. There's ample evidence of that in recent history."
The Western powers, in other words, will find the Libya that suits them in the months ahead. They might find that it is divided tribally, or between 'moderates' and 'Islamists'. Those of us who wish Libya well should resist the temptation to believe what plausible voices in the mainstream media tell us about the country.
Advice and interests
I wanted to ask Greg a bit more about the way that Western governments tried to influence events in Iraq after the invasion in 2003.
"The word most commonly used in Iraq in this context was 'advice'".
Governments have interests and the 'advice' they offer is inevitably shaped by those interests. Greg explains: "I put this point to a British civil servant working on the Iraqi economy. He accepted the argument and said, 'well we don't go around advising countries to set up cooperatives and hold big consultations' ... I looked at this in relation to former senior executives of major oil companies 'advising' Iraq on its oil policy. It wasn't that they were corrupt or doing favours to their old employers or anything like that. From the way they saw the world, foreign multinationals were obviously the best placed to run the Iraqi oil industry."
![[image]](http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/2906/20119191330217758096466.jpg "[image]")
Any 'advice' offered to the Libyan people from foreign governments is most likely tainted by consideration of their own interests [GALLO/GETTY]
The Americans and the British will aim to support Libyan politicians that they feel they can do business with. They will tend, quite naturally, to think that they helping moderates, but these moderates will also be willing to work in ways that suit the Western powers.
"In Iraq Bremer said he promoted exiles because they understood democracy better. What that meant in effect was that they were also more likely to be pro-American. Everyone likes to think they are promoting democracy and human rights."
So the most useful thing the European powers can do is to leave Libya well alone. I wanted to ask what foreign citizens can practically do to support Libyan self-determination and to frustrate their own countries' attempts to meddle.
"The key thing here is to connect, to listen to Libyans and to learn about the country. If all we have is government relaying its perspective, or mainstream media reporting with all its shorthand and sensationalism, a Libyan voice, apart from the elites chosen by the West, will be absent from the debate about the country's future."
Grassroots approach
A handful of independent and mainstream journalists did crucial work in Iraq, helping people outside the country to know what was going on. Greg singles out Ahmed Mansour at Al Jazeera, Jonathan Steele at the Guardian and Anthony Shadid at the Washington Post in the established media: "The independent ones were especially important; Dahr Jamail, Rahul Mahajan. There were activists, too, people like Ewa Jasiewicz, Jo Wilding."
These people did the crucial work of finding out what Iraqi society was actually like. They found people who were struggling to make the best of things in the chaos after the invasion. People on the ground were able to find grassroots activists. And the relationships built then had a huge significance later.
"I did most of my work with the oil workers' trade union, which has been the target of much government repression. A lot of this is because the union has played a central role in the (so far successful) campaign against a new oil law. At various times the Iraqi government tried to arrest the union's leaders, seize their equipment, transfer them, and so on. The union has been very effective at building the right connections within Iraq, but at those times of crisis, international solidarity made a real difference. The AFL-CIO and the TUC wrote to the Iraqi government in their defence, for example, when the Iraqi government was threatening to attack them."
Those who want to help Libya, Greg is clear, will be most effective if they learn as much as they can about the country and take their lead from the Libyans themselves.
![[image]](http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/3240/20119191335568964369647.jpg "[image]")
The edge Libya has over Iraq is that there are no foreign troops on the ground [GALLO/GETTY]
"We should reject the agenda of the military and of civil servants in our own countries, but strengthen our cultural links and our solidarity with grassroots Libyan civil society. Those independent journalists and activists who bravely travelled to Baghdad in 2003 to meet Iraqis and make sense of the culture and politics - they were heroes, in fact the only non-Iraqi heroes of the whole episode. Meanwhile, parts of the anti-war movement worked very closely with members of the Iraqi diaspora in Britain who could help interpret events and guide campaigning. If we are serious about helping the Libyans, that's the lesson to learn - that we should show humility in learning from Libyans about their country rather than bombarding them with lectures about democracy and how to run an economy."
There's a chance for Libya now that Iraq didn't have. There is no foreign army of occupation in the country. Those of us who want to see an end to Western meddling in the region have a responsibility to pay attention to what our own governments are doing and to do what we can to learn about a country that is emerging from decades of dictatorship.
Real Libyan democracy will be the achievement of the Libyan people, not a gift from outside. And it will be a reversal for the foreign powers, who have so little time for 'cooperatives and big consultations'. Make no mistake, whatever happens in Libya will reverberate around the Middle East and the wider world.
Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is the author of two acclaimed books: The Return of the Public and The Threat to Reason. He is this year's winner of the Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize.
Follow him on Twitter: @danhind
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: Al Jazeera
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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« Reply #140 on Oct 21, 2011, 7:12am » | |
Awlaki's son, 16, killed by drone
Ken Dilanian
October 21, 2011
WASHINGTON: The American son of the al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki was only 16 when he was killed by a US drone in Yemen weeks after a similar strike killed his father, the youth's family says, raising fresh questions about the Obama administration's use of targeted killings as a counterterrorism tool.
Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki was among several people killed in a missile strike near the town of Azzan in southern Yemen last Friday. US officials said the target was the Egyptian-born Ibrahim al-Banna, a senior figure in al-Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, who also was reported killed.
The Awlaki family condemned the attack and said Abdel-Rahman was only going to dinner and was not involved in terrorism.
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''His Facebook page shows a typical kid,'' the family, who are based in Yemen, said in a statement on the social networking site. ''A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.''
US officials ''had no idea'' Abdel-Rahman was with Banna, but ''this was a military-aged male travelling with a high-value target'', a senior Obama administration official said.
In the Facebook statement, the Awlaki family said Anwar al-Awlaki's younger brother, 17-year-old Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki, also was killed in the air strike last week.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/awlakis-son-....l#ixzz1bPxFbrEc
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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« Reply #141 on Oct 22, 2011, 1:58pm » | |
Turban-searching rule disrespectful, say Afghan men
October 22, 2011
Following a spate of assassinations using explosives hidden in headgear, spot checks have angered locals, writes Alissa Rubin.
KABUL, Afghanistan: Straight-backed, his bearing almost regal, Malik Niaz, 82, entered the Afghan President's compound this month proudly wearing his best turban: a silk one from Turkestan in the north of the country, grey and black and white, its long tail draped over his shoulder.
He watched in disbelief as the guard asked the elder ahead of him to remove his turban and lay it on the table. Niaz, who had journeyed more than eight hours on rugged roads, shuddered.
''That made us so embarrassed, and it made me so sad,'' he said. ''I felt dishonoured when the guard said,'' he hesitated, as if even recalling the words made him upset, '' 'undo your turban'.''
''I had wanted to see the President,'' he added, ''but after that search, I thought it would have been better if I had not come.''
The turban-searching rule at President Hamid Karzai's presidential palace has been rigorously enforced since the assassination of the head of Afghanistan's peace process, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a bomb hidden in the attacker's turban. It was the third such killing in four months, leading youths in Kabul to coin the word ''Turbanator'' and US soldiers to invent the new acronym TBIED, for turban-borne improvised explosive device.
The other two instances were the killing in July of Kandahar's senior cleric as he prayed in a mosque, and a few weeks later the killing of Kandahar's mayor.
The searches are deeply disturbing for most Afghan men, as the turban signifies one's religious faith and is a national dress - not to mention being something of a fashion statement.
Turbans are worn across the Muslim world because the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have worn one, and they are especially favoured by imams and mullahs. In Afghanistan, which is a deeply pious country, usage is broader, with dozens of styles and colours. There are ones made of synthetics from Pakistan that cost about $20, silk ones from Herat that cost twice as much and ones made of more luxuriant silks from the north of Afghanistan that cost still more.
However, most turbans in Afghanistan now - and in the pre-Taliban era - are subtle greys and charcoals, deep olive greens, lighter greens and browns.
On the back streets of Kabul's central bazaar, where the turbans are sold neatly folded, thin as a pamphlet and wrapped in torn pages from old magazines, many turban wearers are so angry about the situation that they blame the Americans. Before their arrival, intrusive searches were unknown.
''My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my prophet wore a turban, and that's why I wear it,'' said an older man, looking irritable at the question, adding: ''Who brought these turban bombers and turban searchers? You did,'' he said angrily, referring to Westerners, which many Afghans feel are agents of the decline of the society.
Many clerics take a more contemplative view. Faith transcends costume, and a man can pray in any outfit as long as the prayer comes from the heart, but it is an honour to God to dress properly, said Abdul Raouf Nafee, the mullah at the Herati mosque in central Kabul.
As an example, he talked about butchers: ''Even if their clothes are dirty with blood, they can pray and God will accept their prayers, but it's kind of disrespectful. God likes beauty and organisation, but he will accept your prayers,'' Nafee said.
There is also a darker view of turban attacks: that the bombers were so distraught that their turbans' holiness no longer mattered, and that they were forced to use any means available to take revenge on the Americans.
''Is it wrong to respond to the killings of the civilians that you do with your drones, that shoot from the air and do not even have pilots?'' asked Hajji Ahmad Farid, a mullah and a conservative member of Parliament from an insurgent-dominated area of Kapisa province, near Kabul. ''Think about why a man blows himself up: some foreign soldiers go to his house and accuse him and tie his hands and dishonour him and search his wife and his daughters, and this poor man is just watching and can do nothing.
''When a man has lost his dignity, he does not care about his shawl or his turban.''
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/turbansearch....l#ixzz1bXRsDDVQ
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #142 on Oct 22, 2011, 2:00pm » | |
Basque rebels finally end armed struggle
Giles Tremlett
October 22, 2011
![[image]](http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/8988/artbasque420x09434863.jpg "[image]")
Three members of Basque separatist group ETA call for a definitive end to 50 years of armed struggle. Photo: Reuters
SAN SEBASTIAN: Half a century of bloodshed in Spain's northern Basque country has ended after armed separatist group ETA finally renounced the use of arms and sought talks with the Spanish and French governments.
The announcement that one of Europe's bloodiest groups was calling a final stop to the use of bombs and bullets was made by three masked leaders of the group in a video on the website of the Basque Gara newspaper.
''ETA has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity,'' they said.
ETA was following a peace script put together with the help of mediators led by the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan after a year in which it had observed a unilateral ceasefire.
The definitive end to ETA's campaign of bomb and gun attacks follows a petition from Mr Annan's group and following pressure from ETA's political allies in the so-called ''Basque separatist left''.
Mr Annan's group made its petition late on Monday, urging ETA to end more than 50 years of violence with ''a public declaration of the definitive cessation of all armed action''. Leaders of the separatist left publicly backed the call the next day.
ETA's swift response suggests that Basque separatist left politicians such as Rufino Etxeberria and Arnaldo Otegi, both of whom have served ETA-related prison terms, exercise growing power over the group, according to sources close to the negotiations.
They also suggest that ETA's leaders have lost not just power over their political allies, but also the support they once enjoyed among the 10-to- 20 per cent of Basques who traditionally voted for pro-ETA parties.
It was not immediately clear how the governments of Spain and France would react to a request for talks that ETA said should address ''the resolution of the consequences of the conflict - to overcome the armed confrontation''.
That is taken to mean, among other things, talks about the future of 600 ETA members in Spanish and French jails.
The Spanish government will also come under immediate pressure to legalise the Batasuna party and other separatist organisations that were banned for being ETA fronts.
Although Spain's Socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez, did not meet the Annan team when he travelled to San Sebastian on Monday, observers speculated that group members, including the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, would not have gone to Spain without government consent.
The regional prime minister of the Basque country, fellow socialist Patxi Lopez, has already suggested that ETA prisoners be moved to prisons closer to their families.
The conservative People's Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, which has traditionally been tough on ETA, is expected to win a landslide on November 20, giving it the task of dealing with outstanding issues.
It will come under pressure from ETA victims, including the families of People's Party politicians it has killed, not to concede anything to the group.
While other members of his party have insisted that all they will accept is ETA's surrender and dissolution, Mr Rajoy has not commented.
The announcement came 53 years after Euskadi ta Askatasuna, which means Basque homeland and freedom in the region's Euskera language, was founded by young separatists while Spain was being ruled by the military dictator General Francisco Franco.
The group has killed 830 people in bomb and gun attacks across Spain since it claimed its first victim, a civil guard police officer, in 1968.
Most of its victims, however, died in the years following Spain's transition to democracy and the approval of a statute of partial self-government for the region in 1979.
The group's has been seriously weakened by police action in recent years, and some observers claim it has simply been defeated.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/basque-rebel....l#ixzz1bXSQplGk
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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« Reply #143 on Oct 23, 2011, 3:34pm » | |
19 October 2011 Last updated at 12:25 GMT
Researchers warn of new Stuxnet worm
![[image]](http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/7925/50062407uraniumenrichme.jpg "[image]")
Uranium enrichment centrifuge, SPL - Stuxnet seems to have been designed to target uranium enrichment systems
Researchers have found evidence that the Stuxnet worm, which alarmed governments around the world, could be about to regenerate.
Stuxnet was a highly complex piece of malware created to spy on and disrupt Iran's nuclear programme.
No-one has identified the worm authors but the finger of suspicion fell on the Israeli and US governments.
The new threat, Duqu, is, according to those who discovered it, "a precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack".
Its discovery was made public by security firm Symantec, which in turn was alerted to the threat by one of its customers.
The worm was named Duqu because it creates files with the prefix DQ.
Symantec looked at samples of the threat gathered from computer systems located in Europe.
Initial analysis of the worm found that parts of Duqu are nearly identical to Stuxnet and suggested that it was written by either the same authors or those with access to the Stuxnet source code.
"Unlike Stuxnet, Duqu does not contain any code related to industrial control systems and does not self-replicate," Symantec said in its blog.
"The threat was highly targeted towards a limited number of organisations for their specific assets."
In other words, Duqu is not designed to attack industrial systems, such as Iran's nuclear production facilities, as was the case with Stuxnet, but rather to gather intelligence for a future attack.
The code has, according to Symantec, been found in a "limited number of organisations, including those involved in the manufacturing of industrial control systems".
Symantec's chief technology officer Greg Day told the BBC that the code was highly sophisticated.
"This isn't some hobbyist, it is using bleeding-edge techniques and that generally means it has been created by someone with a specific purpose in mind," he said.
Whether that is state-sponsored and politically motivated is not clear at this stage though.
"If it is the Stuxnet author it could be that they have the same goal as before. But if code has been given to someone else they may have a different motive," Mr Day said.
He added that there was "more than one variant" of Duqu.
"It looks as if they are tweaking and fine-tuning it along the way," he said.
The worm also removes itself from infected computers after 36 days, suggesting that it is designed to remain more hidden than its predecessor.
The code used a "jigsaw" of components including a stolen Symantec digital certificate, said Mr Day.
"We provide digital certificates to validate identity and this certificate was stolen from a customer in Taiwan and reused," said Mr Day.
The certificate in question has since been revoked by Symantec.
Cyber warfare
The discovery of the Stuxnet worm was a game-changer in the world of malware and forced governments around the world to beef up the security behind critical systems such as power and water.
It brought the issues of cyber warfare, government-to-government espionage and cyber terrorism firmly to the top of the agenda.
Experts who have studied the Stuxnet worm say that it was configured to damage motors used in uranium-enrichment centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control.
Iran later admitted that some of its centrifuges had been sabotaged although it downplayed the significance of Stuxnet in that.
Stuxnet is not the only example of malware designed to cause government-level disruption.
In 2009 China was accused of spying on Google and in the summer US defence firm Lockheed Martin was victim of a "significant cyber-attack" although it said that none of its programmes had been compromised.
This week the US Department for Homeland Security warned that politically-motivated hackers such as the Anonymous co-operative could begin to target industrial control systems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15367816
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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« Reply #144 on Nov 1, 2011, 4:50pm » | |
1 November 2011 Last updated at 19:32 GMT
Kenya warns al-Shabab of bombing by Twitter
Kenya's military spokesman has warned the residents of 10 towns in Somalia via Twitter that they "will be under attack continuously".
Maj Emmanuel Chirchir clarified to the BBC that bases of the al-Shabab militia were outside those towns, and that these camps would be their target.
Kenya sent troops into Somalia earlier this month as it blames the Islamist group for a spate of kidnappings.
Al-Shabab, which is in control of most of the south, denies the allegations.
"The Kenya Defence Forces urges anyone with relatives and friends in the 10 towns to advise them accordingly," Maj Chirchir said on his official Twitter account.
He listed nine towns in one of his tweets: Baidoa, Bardhere, Dinsor, Afgoye, Buale, Barawe, Jilib, Kismayo and Afmadow. The town of Baidoa was listed twice.
Maj Chirchir said it was difficult to fit all the information into the 140 characters allowed in a Twitter message.
He told the BBC most al-Shabab bases were on the outskirts of the towns the group controlled.
![[image]](http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1729/56132699somaliakenya304.gif "[image]")
"We're not attacking towns - I want to make that clear - we're attacking al-Shabab camps - all we're saying is that people in Somalia, [should] avoid being close to al-Shabab camps," he told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.
He said the al-Shabab-controlled towns were targets because they were suspected of receiving weapons from an arms consignment carried in two aircraft that landed in Baidoa on Monday.
He said it was an operational decision and the attacks would begin "any time" from Wednesday.
His warning follows controversy over the aerial bombardment of Jilib on Sunday.
Maj Chirchir said a Kenya fighter jet only hit al-Shabab positions in Jilib, killing 10 militia fighters.
But the medical charity MSF-Holland said at least five people, including three children, died after a camp for internally displaced people was bombed.
People abducted from Kenya since September include a French woman suffering from cancer, who French authorities say has since died, a British woman taken from a coastal resort, whose husband was killed in the raid, and a Kenyan driver and two Spanish aid workers seized from the Dadaab refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border.
After two decades of civil conflict, Somalia is awash with guns, and analysts say any number of groups could have carried out the kidnappings - including pirate gangs.
Al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaeda, is locked in a battle with the weak UN-back interim government for control of the parts of the country which are currently outside its power, particularly the capital, Mogadishu.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15547512
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #145 on Nov 1, 2011, 4:55pm » | |
1 November 2011 Last updated at 12:04 GMT
'Kill team' trial: Are atrocities inevitable in war?
By John Tirman MIT Center for International Studies
Why do soldiers kill innocent civilians in wartime?
The question is an old one, animated again by the "kill team" prosecution of US soldiers from the US Army's 5th Stryker Brigade and the court martial now under way of the alleged ringleader of the atrocities, Sgt Calvin Gibbs.
Several civilians were alleged to have been wantonly killed in Afghanistan by five soldiers in 2010.
It was a troubling episode, hardly typical of the conduct of American military men and women in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet, atrocities large and small recur with disturbing frequency.
The habitual response of the military is to describe such rampages as an "aberration" - bad actors among generally well-behaved soldiers.
An alternative account is that atrocities result from structural reasons: poor training, aggressive commanders, a permissive military.
And there are the conditions of war itself.
Bad actors?
The fog of war now involves a blurry distinction between enemy fighters and civilians, and daily operations - house-to-house searches, roadblocks and vulnerable convoys, among others - in which soldiers anxiously encounter civilians.
Which explanation accounts for the "kill team" and the many other incidents of murders in Iraq and Afghanistan?
The answer is likely to involve all three.
The "bad actor" theory is most convenient for the military as it implicitly exonerates the military and the war policy.
Without a doubt, however, there are bad actors.
In the case of the "kill team", drugs and alcohol fuelled some of their deadly escapades. Prosecutors say Sgt Gibbs in particular goaded the others into the series of crimes.
But other known atrocities did not have these elements.
In the massacre of more than 100 unarmed civilians at No Gun Ri in Korea in 1950, only revealed 50 years later, no such bad actors were apparently at work.
Even at My Lai, where nearly 400 Vietnamese were murdered in 1968, the perpetrators did not manifest aberrant behaviour before that day.
Body counts
The structural causes are more plausible as a general explanation.
Training on the rules of war is clearly inadequate, while training to kill is intensive.
A survey of US troops in Iraq at the height of the violence there found one-third of marines and one-quarter of soldiers saying that their leaders failed to tell them not to mistreat civilians.
Another army survey in 2007 found that "only 38% of marines and 47% of soldiers said non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect."
More than one-third said torture of civilians was permissible to get information, and 17% viewed all civilians as insurgents.
Attitudes among officers during the Vietnam War were similar.
A survey of officer candidates in 1967 found half willing to use torture to get information, and a very large survey in 1970 found that 15% of officers and enlisted men did not comprehend the rules of war.
One-third of them gave incorrect answers to more than half of the questions about those rules, which are meant to protect civilians.
At the same time the training of soldiers to be killers is powerful.
A study of US soldiers in World War II found that only 15% to 20% ever discharged their weapons, even in the midst of combat.
Training changed that to 55% in the Korean War and 90% in Vietnam.
Some scholars say this shows a natural reluctance to kill other humans, a behaviour that must be hammered out of new soldiers in training.
The attitude of field officers is another major problem.
Officers were under pressure to produce high body counts of enemy in Vietnam and those pressures persist.
Killing civilians requires an investigation, so officers are prone to err on the side of describing all fatalities as those of the enemy.
In a survey, less than half of troops in Iraq told researchers that they report civilian casualties while 10% admitted they had harmed civilians.
Tragic consequences
Nowadays, too, soldiers do several tours of duty in these difficult circumstances.
Sgt Gibbs himself was on his third tour - the first a difficult one in Iraq. This form of battle fatigue creates in many young men mental health stresses that have brutal consequences.
We don't know precisely how many civilians are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even less data is available from earlier wars.
But the estimates for Iraq from household surveys suggest it is in the hundreds of thousands. Afghanistan, which is less violent, is likely in the tens of thousands.
Much of this is attributable to insurgents. But the coalition forces have their share of responsibility.
How to change this dreadful outcome is not an easy question.
Better training, rules of engagement that emphasise civilian protection, fostering attitudes of respect toward the populations we are there to protect - these measures could help but they conflict with many other pressures and practices.
These practices and the sheer violence of war have tragic consequences.
When journalist Seymour Hersh was probing the My Lai massacre he spoke with the mother of one of the accused soldiers on her Indiana farm.
"I sent them a good boy," she told him, "and they sent me back a murderer."
John Tirman is Executive Director and principal research scientist of the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15499138
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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« Reply #146 on Nov 1, 2011, 6:07pm » | |
Russian Rearmament: Moscow Fears China And Islamist Insurgents
Russia's decision to plough more than 400 billion pounds into upgrading its armed forces is motivated by a fear of China and radical Islam on its southern borders.
By Andrew Osborn, Moscow
7:30AM GMT 25 Feb 2011
Although the Kremlin has been careful to cultivate warm ties with Beijing in recent years, it is acutely aware of China's own dizzying rise as both an economic and a military power.
Russia, which shares a long border with China in the Far East, is competing with China for influence in Central Asia, and is also, paradoxically, one of China's main suppliers of weaponry and energy.
Yet the Kremlin and many ordinary Russians fear that one day Russia and China may have to face off against one another militarily. That is because the Russians suspect that China secretly has eyes for large tracts of resource-rich Siberia which is sparsely populated and in parts geographically closer to Beijing than Moscow. Many Chinese migrant workers have already relocated to Siberia, and, in some places, road signs are in Mandarin as well as Russian.
The Kremlin's other main concern is its own southern flank where an Islamist insurgency fuelled by crushing poverty is in full flow in the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus area. A central plank of Russian policy is preserving the country's territorial integrity at any cost and the Kremlin has made it clear it will do everything in its power to ensure Islamist extremists operating in places like Chechnya and Ingushetia do not undermine that. As the 2008 Georgia war showed, Russia also has the ability to come to blows with neighbours in the volatile South Caucasus area.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew.... nsurgents.html
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #147 on Nov 3, 2011, 6:03am » | |
Invading, not investigating, has led to a decade of violence
Noam Chomsky
November 3, 2011
Opinion
As we all know, the United Nations was founded ''to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war''. The words can elicit only deep regret when we consider how we have acted to fulfil that aspiration, though there have been a few significant successes, notably in Europe.
Can we proceed to at least limit the scourge of war? A persuasive stand, I think, is that of the pacifist thinker and social activist A.J. Muste: what he called ''revolutionary pacifism''. Muste disdained the search for peace without justice. He urged that ''one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist'', by which he meant that we must deal ''honestly and adequately with this 90 per cent of our problem'' - ''the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil - material and spiritual - this entails for the masses of men throughout the world''.
If we ever hope to live up to the high ideals we passionately proclaim, and to bring the initial dream of the UN closer to fulfilment, we should think carefully about crucial choices that have been made, and continue to be made, every day.
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The West has just commemorated the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and what was called at the time, but no longer, ''the glorious invasion'' of Afghanistan. Partial closure was reached with the assassination of the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, by US commandos who invaded Pakistan, apprehended him and then murdered him, disposing of the corpse without autopsy.
Pakistan's leading daily recently published a study of the effect of drone attacks and other US terror. It found that ''about 80 per cent [of] residents of [the tribal regions] South and North Waziristan agencies have been affected mentally while 60 per cent people of Peshawar are nearing to become psychological patients if these problems are not addressed immediately''. In part for these reasons, hatred of America had already risen to phenomenal heights. One consequence was firing across the border at the bases of the US occupying army in Afghanistan - which provoked sharp condemnation of Pakistan for its failure to co-operate in an American war that Pakistanis overwhelmingly oppose, taking the same stand they did when the Russians occupied Afghanistan. A stand then lauded, now condemned.
The specialist literature and even the US embassy in Islamabad warn that the pressures on Pakistan to take part in the US invasion, as well as US attacks in Pakistan, are ''destabilising and radicalising Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States - and the world - which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan'', quoting a British military/Pakistan analyst, Anatol Lieven.
The assassination of bin Laden greatly heightened this risk in ways that were ignored in the general enthusiasm for assassination of suspects. The US commandos were under orders to fight their way out if necessary, in which case there might have been a major confrontation with the Pakistani army. Pakistan has a huge nuclear arsenal and the system is laced with radical Islamists, products of strong US-Saudi support for the worst of Pakistan's dictators, Zia ul-Haq, and his program of radical Islamisation. The US President, Barack Obama, has added the risk of nuclear explosions in London and New York, if the confrontation had led to leakage of nuclear material to jihadis.
The invasion of Afghanistan was not aimed at overthrowing the brutal Taliban regime, as later claimed. That was an afterthought, brought up three weeks after the bombing began. Its explicit reason was that the Taliban were unwilling to extradite bin Laden without evidence, which the US refused to provide - as later learnt, because it had virtually none, and in fact still has little that could stand up in an independent court of law, though his responsibility is hardly in doubt. The Taliban did in fact make some gestures towards extradition and we since have learnt that there were other such options, but they were all dismissed in favour of violence, which has since torn the country to shreds. It has reached its highest level in a decade this year according to the UN, with no diminution in sight.
A very serious question, rarely asked then or since, is whether there was an alternative to violence. There is strong evidence that there was. The September 11 attack was sharply condemned within the jihadi movement, and there were good opportunities to split it and isolate al-Qaeda. Instead, Washington and London chose to follow the script provided by bin Laden, helping to establish his claim that the West is attacking Islam, and thus provoking new waves of terrorism. The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, warned right away and has repeated since that ''the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally''.
These are among the natural consequences of rejecting Muste's warning, and the main thrust of his revolutionary pacifism, which should direct us to investigating the grievances that lead to violence, and when they are legitimate, as they often are, to address them.
When that advice is taken, it can succeed very well. Britain's experience in Northern Ireland is a good illustration. For years, London responded to IRA terrorism with greater violence, escalating the cycle, which reached a bitter peak. When the government began instead to attend to the grievances, violence subsided and terrorism has effectively disappeared.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/i....l#ixzz1cdgV2Czt
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
|
Big Bunny
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #148 on Nov 4, 2011, 11:08pm » | |
Mullah Omar warns Taliban against hurting Afghan civilians
Fugitive Taliban leader tells insurgents they face sharia justice if found negligent in edict seen as attempt to win hearts and minds
* Jon Boone in Kabul
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 November 2011 18.42 GMT
![[image]](http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4439/talibanfighterstoldto00.jpg "[image]")
The Taliban was responsible for 80% of the 1,462 civilian casualties in the first six months of this year, according to the UN. Photograph: EPA
Taliban foot soldiers will face sharia justice if they kill or injure innocent civilians without taking precautions, the fugitive leader of the Afghan insurgency has warned.
Mullah Omar, the Taliban's supreme cleric, released an 1,800-word statement that dwelled at length on the need to protect civilians in a sign of the insurgency's growing defensiveness on the issue.
Human rights workers described the statement, published in five languages on Friday to mark the Islamic festival of Eid, as extremely significant. They said it went into far more detail about the issue than any other previous pronouncement.
The mujahideen, as the rebels style themselves, are ordered to "take every step to protect the lives and wealth of ordinary people".
The decree said: "Scholars should be employed every now and then to preach protection of civilian life, wealth and honour to mujahideen and promote virtue … All civilian casualties which are caused or are believed to be caused by mujahideen should be reported to the superiors."
It also called for investigations by the movement's "legal offices" of cases where locals say civilians have been hurt by landmines, suicide bombings or other attacks. "If it is irrefutably proven that the blood of innocent Muslims is spilled by the negligence of mujahideen then a penalty should be implemented in accordance with sharia," the statement said. The family of the victims should also be compensated, it suggested.
Afghan civilians are also ordered to protect themselves by not "moving in close proximity to Americans who patrol in villages and countryside".
Kate Clark, a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said even though the statement was in part propaganda it could also help civilians trapped in the middle of fighting between Nato and Taliban forces. "It is much, much more specific than ever before on the Taliban's system of internal discipline and command and control," she said. "And they admit that they themselves are causing civilian casualties, not just people doing it in their name."
That Omar's statement on the issue is an indication of how embarrassing the problem of civilian casualties has become for a movement that sees itself as the protector of the Afghan people against foreign military aggression.
According to the latest UN figures, the Taliban were responsible for 80% of the 1,462 civilian deaths caused by fighting between insurgents and pro-government forces in Afghanistan in the first six months of this year. Of those killed by insurgents, 38% of deaths were due to IEDs, or homemade roadside bombs.
Georgette Gagnon, the UN's director of human rights in Afghanistan, said it remained to be seen whether the insurgents would take any real steps to reduce casualties. "I would like them to say publicly that they will stop using indiscriminate, pressure plate IEDs," she said, saying that while in power the Taliban regime banned anti-personnel mines as un-Islamic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov....fghan-civilians
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
|
Big Bunny
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| | Re: The War On Terror II
« Reply #149 on Nov 5, 2011, 6:40am » | |
Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans
* By Spencer Ackerman
* November 4, 2011
![[image]](http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/7275/5187648798e544610z30513.jpg "[image]")
Pakistan is taking nuclear paranoia to a horrifying new low. And it’s making the world a vastly more dangerous place in the process.
Freaked out about the insecurity of its nuclear arsenal, the Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division has begun carting the nukes around in clandestine ways. That might make some sense on the surface: no military wants to let others know exactly where its most powerful weapons are at any given moment. But Pakistan is going to an extreme.
The nukes travel “in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic,” according to a blockbuster story on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in “vans with a modest security profile.” Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world’s most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck.
Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You’ll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.
Except that Pakistan isn’t trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It’s trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the U.S. military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the U.S., with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.
The irony is that the U.S. isn’t planning to steal Pakistan’s nukes — but Pakistan’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear security is making the U.S. think twice about whether it should revise some worst-case-scenario contingency planning.
Should any of the nukes go missing, an “Abbottabad redux” would likely occur, Ambinder and Goldberg report. An anonymous military official tells the pair that the Joint Special Operations Command “has units and aircraft and parachutes on alert in the region for nuclear issues, and regularly inserts units and equipment for prep.” Seizing Pakistani nukes during or after a military coup is a much harder mission, but the reporters consider it doable. “t’s wise for the U.S. to try to design a plan for seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in a low-risk manner,” Goldberg and Ambinder advise, placing a lot of rhetorical freight on the words “low-risk.”
That is, if the U.S. actually knows where the nukes are. “Anyone who tells you that they know where all of Pakistan’s nukes are is lying to you,” ex-national security adviser Jim Jones allegedly said. The Econolines of Doom make that knowledge even more uncertain.
All of which points to the self-reinforcing downward spiral of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. U.S. cash continues to go into the Pakistanis’ pockets, and from there into the hands of anti-American terrorists. There is, for many justified reasons, absolutely no trust between either side’s security services and militaries. There is also no alternative to the toxic relationship that anyone cited in the Atlantic piece is willing to contemplate. (When I recently suggested that the U.S. cut off aid and continue the drone war until Pakistan reins in terror groups, I got blasted on Twitter as a warmonger.) “There is no escaping this vexed relationship,” Ambinder and Goldberg conclude, reflecting the conventional wisdom in Washington and Islamabad.
Which sinks the U.S. into the nadir of absurdity. It funds a terrorist-sponsoring state while conducting a massive undeclared war on part of that state’s territory. It wants that state’s assistance to end the Afghanistan war while that state’s soldiers help insurgents wage it. And seeking a world without nuclear weapons while its “Major Non-NATO Ally” drastically increases the probability that terrorists will acquire a the most dangerous weapon of all.
[i]Photo: Flickr/Jon Rawlinson
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/pakistan-nukes-delivery-vans/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
| |
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