taliban | ukwatch.net

Civilian dead are a trade-off in Nato's war of barbarity

eddie — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:04:08 +0000

While the eyes of the western world have been fixed on the global financial crisis, the military campaign that launched the war on terror has been spinning out of control. Seven years after the US and Britain began their onslaught on Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, the Taliban surround the capital, al-Qaida is flourishing in Pakistan and the war’s sponsors have publicly fallen out about whether it has already been lost.

As the US joint chiefs of staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen concedes that the country is locked into a “downward spiral” of corruption, lawlessness and insurgency, Britain’s ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is quoted in a leaked briefing as declaring that “American strategy is destined to fail”. The same diplomat who told us last year that British forces would be in Afghanistan for decades now believes foreign troops are “part of the problem, not the solution”.

The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to “talk about a political settlement”, that was “precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this”. The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship.

This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain.

In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July – US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.

By far the most comprehensive research into Afghan casualties over the past seven years has been carried out by Marc Herold, a US professor at the University of New Hampshire. In his latest findings, Herold estimates that the number of civilians directly killed by the US and other Nato forces since 2006, up to 3,273, is already higher than the toll exacted by the devastating three-month bombardment that ousted the Taliban regime in 2001. And over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of Nato forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement.

But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. “Close air support” bomb attacks called in by ground forces – which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice – are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the occupation forces.

But while 242 US and Nato ground troops have died in the war with the Taliban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and Nato reliance on air attacks minimises their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers.

It is that equation that makes a nonsense of US and British claims that their civilian victims are accidental “collateral damage”, while the Taliban’s use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and classic guerrilla operations from civilian areas are a sign of their moral depravity. In real life, the escalating civilian death toll is not a mistake, but the result of a clear decision to put the lives of occupation troops before civilians; westerners before Afghans.

Dependence on air power is also a reflection of US imperial overstretch and the reluctance of Nato states to put more boots on the ground. But however much the nominal Afghan president Hamid Karzai rails against Nato’s recklessness with Afghan blood, the indiscriminate air war carries on regardless. Given that the US government spent 10 times more on every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill than it does in “condolence payments” to Afghans for the killing of a family member, perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But nor should it be that the occupation’s cruelty is a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban. As Aga Lalai, who lost both grandparents, his wife, father, three brothers and four sisters in a US bombing in Helmand last summer, put it: “So long as there is just one 40-day-old boy remaining alive, Afghans will fight against the people who do this to us.”

That doesn’t just go for Afghanistan. Gordon Brown recently told British troops in Helmand: “What you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain.” The opposite is the case. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq – and the atrocities carried out against their people – are a crucial motivation for those planning terror attacks in Britain, as case after case has shown. Now the US is launching attacks inside Pakistan, the risks of further terror and destabilisation can only grow.

Senior Pakistani officials are convinced Nato is preparing to throw in the towel in Afghanistan. Both Bush and the two US presidential candidates are committed to an Iraq-style surge, though the number of troops being talked about cannot possibly make a decisive difference to the conflict – and in Barack Obama’s case may be as much about providing political cover for his plans for Iraq. But the strategic importance of Afghanistan doesn’t suggest any early US withdrawal: more likely an attempt to co-opt sections of the Taliban as part of a messy and protracted attempt to rearrange the occupation.

It will fail. The US and its allies cannot pacify Afghanistan nor seal the border with the Taliban’s Pakistani sanctuary. Eventually there is bound to be some sort of negotiated withdrawal as part of a wider regional and domestic settlement. But many thousands of Afghans – as well as occupying troops – look certain to be sacrificed in the meantime.

Chorus of failure grows ever louder over Afghanistan

Ellie Keen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:04:26 +0000

GIVEN centuries of cross-Channel antipathy, can we believe what a Frenchman has to say on the thoughts of a Briton on progress in the war in Afghanistan? If a coded French diplomatic dispatch obtained by the respected Paris weekly Le Canard enchaine is to be believed, London’s man in Kabul thinks this war is lost.

In the ways of diplomacy, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles might be forgiven for believing his exchange early last month with Francois Fitou, the No.2 at the French Embassy, was strictly entre nous. But Fitou was so alarmed by what he heard, that he reported all its explosive detail to Paris – where it was promptly leaked to the investigative and satirical Le Canard enchaine.

Cutting across the official belief in Washington and London that the war is hard but winnable, Fitou says that Cowper-Coles told him current American strategy “is destined to fail”.

Fitou summarises the Englishman’s assessment: “The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the [Afghan] Government had lost all trust. [The insurgency], while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

“The presence – especially the military presence – of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime that would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis.”

Cowper-Coles apparently sees no benefit in boosting allied troops in Afghanistan – it would only increase the sense of an occupation and give the Taliban more targets, Fitou reports. Instead, the British ambassador argues that the only realistic solution is the emergence of “an acceptable dictator”, which would allow Britain to withdraw its troops within five to 10 years.

The report provoked howls in London. But stopping short of a denial, the Foreign Office declined to go into what was the thinking of the British ambassador. Resorting instead to its own sleight of hand, it denied something that Le Canard enchaine had not reported – that the thoughts attributed to Cowper-Coles were the views of the British Government.

The French report coincides with a crisis of confidence among Washington and its allies in Afghanistan, including on-the-record expressions of frustration by British officers after seven years of fighting in the country’s south.

“The perception of the threat from the Taliban continues to outstrip reality,” Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith told The Times last week. “This struggle is more down to the credibility of the Afghan Government rather than the threat from the Taliban.”

Washington has begun a raft of reviews of the conduct of the war amid conflicting assessments of what is required. The most senior levels of the American military are demanding more troops but at the same time they insist that an Iraq-style surge is not the answer.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge’,” the new US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, said in Washington this week. Instead, he spoke of a “sustained commitment” over “many more years” and what ultimately would be a political, not a military solution.

But McKiernan argued that co-opting the Afghan tribes, as the US had done in Iraq after spurning their help for three years, was more a recipe for civil war than it was for peace or stability. “We’re in a very tough fight,” he told reporters. “The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”

However, as Washington persists with fighting the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, investing just a fifth of what it spends in Iraq, unflattering comparisons are being made with past conflicts.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Kabul, has lectured Washington that it is repeating the mistakes made by Moscow during its 1980s occupation of Afghanistan, when it believed that control of Kabul and the provincial centres equated with control of an essentially rural population.

Increasingly, another benchmark is Vietnam. Writing in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the US military analysts Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason started by highlighting that more Americans have died in seven years in Afghanistan than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War.

“More and more the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War – with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affect the slow and eventual decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency,” they write.

They, too, see a parallel with Moscow’s Afghanistan adventure. “That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centres. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.”

They argue America is failing because of its “endemic failure” to engage and protect rural villages and to immunise them against the insurgency.

The cornerstone of the policy – to extend the reach of the Karzai Government – was precisely the wrong strategy in a country and society in which the most important level of governance was local. But allied military contact with remote villagers was rare, typically brief and nearly always limited to daylight hours.

“Re-empowering the village councils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to recreate the traditional check against a powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalised by the Taliban,” they write. “But the elders will not commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder.”

The analysts suggest the deployment of 200 development and security teams in the south and east of the country. Each would have 60 to 70 NATO troops, 30 to 40 Afghan National Army troops and an equal number of logistics and development staff.

The current system of international reconstruction teams was spread far too thinly. Confined to the regional centres, their ratio to the local population was one team per 1 million people and they visited districts only once a month.

The teams proposed by Johnson and Mason would be a permanent international presence at the district level. “State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists and so on could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence,” they say.

“As long as the compounds are discretely sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.”

The Afghanistan debate has always been about balancing the need to fight the Taliban and the other insurgency groups, and to defend the population so they might get on with their lives.

The latter means a radical change in a military-heavy strategy in a part of the world where killing one enemy creates 10 more.

It also requires greater recognition of the warning from General David Richards, who headed NATO forces in Afghanistan until February last year: “If NATO doesn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 per cent of Afghans will shift their loyalty to the Taliban.”

Richards’s warning had less drama than the words attributed to Cowper-Coles – but both men seem to be singing from the same song sheet.

It’s a song about failure.

Al Qaida- The SWISH Report

tim — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:14:33 +0000

An eighth report from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the al-Qaida Strategic Planning Cell (SPC) on the progress of the campaign

Thank you for inviting us to deliver another report on the progress of your movement. You will recall that our work for your planning cell commenced with an initial assessment in July 2004, a follow-up in January 2005 and further reports in February 2006 and September 2006 and (in light of political developments in the United States) December 2006.

The next analysis was presented in November 2007; but the pace of events in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan – in the context of the evolving United States presidential-election campaign – led to the request for the next report only three months later, in February 2008. This last document clearly signalled to you that this might be the final occasion when our services might be required.

We are then particularly pleased that – even though our February 2008 assessment was somewhat blunt in terms of your movement’s overall prospect – you have invited us to deliver one more report. We understand that on this occasion you require a brief updating of our analysis on your main theatres of operation, together with an analysis of the impact of the possible outcomes of the US residential election in November 2008.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

In our last briefing we made three judgments about Pakistan. First. that the country’s then general-president Pervez Musharraf had been much weakened by the result of the country’s just-held parliamentary election, and that we were not convinced he would survive. Second, that it was doubtful that a stable parliamentary coalition would emerge. Third, that there would be we increased United States military activity within western Pakistan. In all three respects our analysis was accurate: Pervez Musharraf has gone, the domestic governing coalition is in disarray, and the US military is now conducting special-forces operations across the border with Afghanistan.

The assumption of the presidency by Asif Ali Zardari is also an indication that the feudal pattern of Pakistani politics is thriving; though civil-society elements and the legal profession may cause problems for the government. It is likely that President Zardari will be supportive of increased US military action, but this may cause deep unease in sections of the Pakistani military, as well as increasing the more general anti-American mood.

While our predictions seven months ago for Pakistan were reassuringly accurate, we must confess we were less effective in our analysis concerning Afghanistan. There, we were doubtful that the revitalised Taliban would extend their activities to major assaults on coalition forces – in the face of overwhelming firepower we instead expected to see an intense concentration on roadside bombs and martyr attacks. While these have indeed been increased, we also note the effective move towards the targeting of supply-routes, and a willingness, on occasions, to conduct substantial military operations. These have included a successful assault on the main prison in Kandahar and lethal attacks on US and French units.

One outcome of these developments is that the US military now puts a much greater emphasis on the war in Afghanistan and is looking to increase its own military deployments while seeking to persuade its Nato partners to be more supportive.

Iraq

In our February 2008 report, we anticipated that the George W Bush administration, along with neo-conservative commentators, would develop an overall narrative centred on a “probability of victory” in Iraq which would downgrade the significance of the war in that country during the latter months of the presidential campaign. This has indeed been what has happened, with the framers of the narrative placing a great emphasis on Iraq’s increased security. It is interesting in this context, however, that the United States military leadership is deeply reluctant to withdraw combat-troops to a level much below that of the pre-surge (that is, pre-February 2007) deployments. In spite of the pressing need for troops in Afghanistan, it now looks as though just one of the fifteen remaining US combat-brigades will be withdrawn in the September 2008 – March 2009 period.

We strongly suspect that many of the more astute military analysts in US Central Command (Centcom) and the Pentagon believe that security in Iraq is far more problematic than their political masters would like their citizens to believe. This is partly due to the hard line now being taken by the Nouri al-Maliki government, especially towards the integration of Sunni militias into the security forces, but also relates to strains in Shi’a / Kurdish relations and the growing influence of Iran.

The al-Maliki government claims to want a total United States military withdrawal by 2010 or 2011, but oil geopolitics makes this nonsensical – the US is in Iraq for the long term. While your associates in Iraq have had major reversals, we suspect these are short-term. We stand by our assessment of seven months ago:

“Although circumstances will not always be as favourable as 2006-07, rest assured that your paramilitary combat-training zone in Iraq will remain viable and of great use to you for the foreseeable future.”

In this context, we note recent reports that some of your paramilitary associates from Iraq are now active in Somalia.

The American election campaign

In our last report to you it had become clear that John McCain was likely to be the Republican candidate and that Barack Obama might defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Our overall view was that:

“What is best for you is that the United States remains resolute in its support for Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; fully addicted to oil and therefore determined to remain dominant in the Persian Gulf; and prepared to continue to pursue its war against you with the utmost vigour. In other words, eight more years for George W Bush would have been ideal. Sadly for your movement, that cannot be.”

As a whole, we considered McCain to be a far better prospect from your perspective; though we had some concerns that such rightwing incumbents can, on occasions, opt successfully for radical change.

Today, with the Obama/McCain contest fully underway, we indeed believe that a McCain presidency is – by a considerable margin – the more favourable to your movement; not least because the Republican ticket is now supplemented by a vice-presidential nominee who is a Christian fundamentalist as well as a climate-change sceptic from an oil-rich state.

It remains the case that if elected, Barack Obama could be very limited in his security options. His speech to the leading American pro-Israel organisation Aipac in June 2008 was markedly hardline; he supports military reinforcements for Afghanistan; and he has implied that he would be willing to order more direct US military action in Pakistan. Even so, part of the reason for taking such positions relates simply to the realities of electoral politics. What he says now and what he would do in office may be very different, especially if the Democrats have convincing majorities in both houses of Congress.

In any case, whatever his actual policies, we most certainly would expect under an Obama presidency a marked change in style towards a more listening, cooperative and multilaterally-engaged America. That must be of deep concern to you. A more “acceptable” America in global terms is the last thing you want.

In one sense, however, we can reassure you about the outcome; for our associates in our Washington office believe that John McCain will win by a relatively small margin, although Congress is likely to remain Democrat-controlled. Their assessment is based on a prediction that while polls may well give Obama a small margin even up to election-day, a small but significant portion of those voting will be sufficiently influenced by residual prejudice to opt for McCain in the privacy of the polling booth. Their point is that even if only one in fifty voters behaves in this manner, that should help ensure a victory for McCain.

We acknowledge that this is very tentative, and that American politics are currently volatile and unpredictable; and that, after all, our assessment in November 2007 was made in the context of a likely Rudy Giuliani / Hillary Clinton contest!

Your concern must still be with the prospect of an Obama victory, and a key question is whether you should engineer a major attack against US interests shortly before the election. We would advise against this. Whether or not you have the resources to mount a major attack (and we understand why you will not take us into your confidence), the result could be unpredictable.

In the immediate wake of a 9/11-scale attack within the continental United States, Obama’s advisers would know that this would benefit their opponent strongly. They might well then take the risk of going on the offensive against McCain, pointing to the folly of George W Bush’s policies and the manner in which they have made the United States unsafe. It would be a risky strategy but these would be desperate times for the Obama campaign and it might just come off. The risk to you is too great and for this reason alone we do not advocate such an attack.

Instead, we stand by our recommendation in February 2008 that you seek, in the weeks before the election, to make it known that you favour Barack Obama and believe he would be a president with whom you could do business. This would be combined with strong statements to the effect that you believe a John McCain presidency would be a disaster for the United States and that he would be a leader unto darkness and death. Such a strategy, we believe, would go a long way to ensure he was elected, this being the outcome you should most earnestly desire.

Wana

South Waziristan

10 September 2008

Laughable rhetoric

tim — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:40:18 +0000

When an occupying military power knows that it has the backing of the most powerful global information outlets, it can indulge itself in the most laughable rhetoric.

And this was underlined in the wake of the killing of an Afghan woman and two children by rockets fired by British forces in Helmand province.

Although these civilian casualties were caused by troops who came from thousands of miles away to occupy the country, an International Security Assistance Force spokesman had the temerity to say: “The enemies of Afghanistan have yet again shown a complete disregard for the lives of the innocent who they claim to fight for.”

That is precisely what the Afghans who oppose imperialist occupation would say and with far greater reason.

Yet the pro-occupation international media continues to relay propaganda about Taliban forces launching attacks from among civilians, even though they would know that this would result in bloody responses from the occupying forces against their own families.

The allegation beggars belief, as does puppet governor Gulab Mangal’s comment that “support for the Taliban in Helmand is reducing.”

Resistance to occupation in the entire south and east of Afghanistan has escalated in recent years and the steady increase in British military casualties illustrates this.

The British troops sent to Afghanistan have been lied to over their role.

They are in an unwinnable conflict and are kept there as tokens of new Labour’s subservience to the White House.

They should be brought home immediately, leaving the Afghan people to work out their future without outside interference.

US stooge

Outgoing Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf has always been a loyal toady of US imperialism and his resignation will suit Washington as much as it does the general himself.

Gen Musharraf’s expectation is that his stepping down will short-circuit the growing public clamour for his impeachment, while the US will hope for no in-depth investigation of the dirty alliance it foisted on him.

That means that the role of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in setting up the Taliban in the early 1990s will not be investigated.
Nor will the activities of the ISI during his time as Pakistani military commander.

It will also mean that Washington’s support for the general, especially since 2001 when he executed a political back-flip to join the White House “war on terror,” will not be subject to inquiry.

Gen Musharraf has all along been susceptible to US power, which is why he dropped the Taliban and was passive in the face of US bombing raids on Pakistani tribal areas abutting the border with Afghanistan.

Despite this influence and its constant rhetoric about democracy, freedom and the rule of law, the Bush administration was unbothered by the general’s political dictatorship and his assaults on the judiciary.

Washington’s readiness to see him stand down only came about when it could see the scale of opposition building up against him and the dictatorship.

Development of democracy in Pakistan will depend on the level to which political forces are able to resist US tutelage and assert popular sovereignty.

US/NATO casualties climb in Afghanistan

tim — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:38:46 +0000

The US/NATO occupation force in Afghanistan on Sunday suffered the largest number of casualties in a 24-hour period in more than three years. Nine American troops lost their lives and as many as 15 were wounded in a day-long battle with insurgents who attacked a US base in the eastern province of Kunar. Another soldier, also believed to be an American, was killed in a roadside bombing in the volatile Sangin district of Helmand province.

Sunday’s attack was one of the most effective insurgent operations in the six-and-a-half year war. The US military and Afghan government forces had only established a base in Wanat, a village near the Pakistani border, three days earlier. A sizeable force of guerillas converged on the base in the middle of the night. According to an Associated Press report, they evacuated the civilian community and took up firing positions in buildings surrounding the facility. At approximately 4.30 a.m., the insurgents launched an assault.

Fighting lasted throughout the day, with the anti-occupation fighters repeatedly engaging the base with mortars, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades. According to some reports, militants managed to get inside the US compound. Multiple US air strikes had to be called in to drive off the attackers.

A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) told journalists: “We defended the base. There are still some operations on-going. The insurgents were repulsed and there is no fighting now, but they might pop up again.” NATO sources claim that dozens of insurgents were killed.

Wanat is near the district of Deh Bala, in the adjacent province of Nangahar, where US fighters bombed a wedding party on July 7. As many as 27 men, women and children were slaughtered. The assault on the American base may well have been a revenge attack.

The attack, however, is part of a trend over recent weeks of set piece battles against the occupation forces. In late June, a large force of guerillas seized a number of villages in the Arghandab Valley to the northwest of Kandahar. Scores were killed during the US/Afghan government operation to take back control of the district.

Anti-occupation fighters also attempted several offensive operations in Sangin last week, crossing the Helmand River to attack NATO and Afghan Army personnel. US retaliatory air strikes on Sunday reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least 40 guerillas, as well as the destruction of several improvised bridges and dozens of small boats.

Also on Sunday, a suicide bomber detonated an explosion at a crowded bazaar in the town of Deh Rawood in Uruzgan province, killing five Afghan police and as many as 19 civilians, including a number of young children. The suicide attack came in the wake of a massive blast that struck the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 41 people and injuring over 140.

Most US and NATO casualties continue to be the result of remotely-detonated roadside bombs. A total of 20 occupation personnel have already lost their lives in July, including a 42-year-old American junior officer who appears to have committed suicide on July 4.

Among the recent casualties was a Hungarian explosives expert who was killed by a bomb on Saturday in the northern province of Baghlan. The 32-year-old had only arrived in Afghanistan several weeks ago—to replace a Hungarian explosives expert who was killed trying to defuse a bomb on June 10.

A roadside bomb in Paktika province took the lives of two US National Guardsmen from Guam last Thursday. More than 15 percent of all American troops serving in Afghanistan are part-time civilian soldiers.

Nine UK troops were wounded near Sangin on Wednesday when a British helicopter gunship, which had been called in to rescue them from an ambush, mistakenly fired on their position. Three of the men suffered serious injuries. One had to be flown back to Britain for specialised medical treatment. He is said to be in a stable condition.

An Australian special forces soldier was killed and three others wounded by a roadside bomb in Uruzgan province on Tuesday. This was the fifth Australian fatality in the past nine months. The same day, an American soldier was killed in a bombing near Bagram airport.

The insurgency is based among the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. Some guerilla groups are loyal to the fundamentalist Taliban movement that was overthrown by the US invasion in 2001. Others follow Pashtun Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Huqqani—both of whom received huge amounts of money and arms from the CIA to conduct a guerilla war against the Soviet force occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Fighting has been taking place inside Pakistan over the past several weeks. The Pakistani government, responding to pressure from Washington to curb the movement of guerillas into Afghanistan, has ordered its security forces to crack down on various militant groups operating in the tribal provinces along the Afghan border. The focus of the operations has been the area surrounding Peshawar—the largest city on the road through to the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan.

Insurgents retaliated over the weekend, ambushing a convoy of Pakistani Frontier Corps—the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal regions—on Saturday near the border city of Hangu, to the south west of Peshawar. According to Pakistani media sources, eight troops were killed and eight others who were captured were executed by firing squad. Local Taliban groups claimed they had captured and were still holding a further 29 soldiers and police.

The attack coincided with an unannounced visit to Pakistan by US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen. He met with President Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and the head of the armed forces, General Ashfaq Kiyani.

The purpose of Mullen’s trip was to deliver a blunt message to the Pakistani establishment to step up operations in the border regions against Pashtun militants. The Bush administration and NATO countries have repeatedly accused Islamabad of not doing enough to stop insurgent activity and thereby facilitating the rise in attacks on their troops in Afghanistan. Mullen repeated the claim on Saturday, telling a press conference that the “border is more porous than it was a year ago. It’s very important that action be taken to respond to that.”

The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has gone further and accused the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), and sections of its military of assisting the Taliban insurgency. An Afghan government spokesman blamed the ISI for last week’s bombing of the Indian embassy. Other Afghan figures have implied it was involved in the assassination attempt on Karzai in June.

Yesterday, Karzai repeated the accusations, declaring: “The murder, killing, destruction, dishonouring and insecurity in Afghanistan is carried out by the intelligence administration of Pakistan, its military intelligence institutions…. We have told the government of Pakistan and the world and from now on it will be pronounced by every member of the Afghan nation.”

The implicit threat facing Musharraf and Gilani is that the US military will step up its own operations inside Pakistan’s tribal regions unless the situation is brought under control. Just days before Mullen’s visit, nine Pakistani troops and several civilians were wounded when a border outpost was bombed in South Waziristan on Thursday. Local tribesmen told the Associated Press that the bombing was a US air strike. The Pakistani government, anxious not to further inflame the mass resentment and hostility over its collaboration with the US, stated that casualties were inflicted by mortars fired from Afghanistan and that the attacker had “yet to be determined”.

The escalating war in Afghanistan is fuelling calls for the deployment of additional US troops to the war zone. Significantly, Barack Obama, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, who has supported US military action against insurgent bases inside Pakistan, was among them. He called in an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times for the dispatch of an additional two combat brigades, or more than 10,000 troops. “We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence gathering and more non-military assistance to accomplish the mission there,” he wrote.

Afghanistan: state of siege

tim — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:22:54 +0000

On 7 July 2008 a suicide-bomber detonated a large car-bomb at the gates of the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing fifty-four people and injuring more than 140. The embassy stands in one of the most secure parts of Afghanistan’s capital, yet this did not protect it from what security forces described as the worst bombing [1] in the city since the termination of the Taliban regime in November 2001. Taliban sources denied that the movement was responsible, while Afghan sources implied [2] (albeit without supporting evidence) a Pakistani intelligence connection. The high death-toll is in part attributable to the fact that many people were queuing at the embassy at the time; this may be a factor too in the Taliban reaction, for it has been a regular practice of the group to deny responsibility for attacks where large numbers of civilians are killed.

Whoever was responsible, the Indian embassy attack came at a time of escalating violence in Afghanistan marked by a number of high-profile paramilitary actions. These include an assassination attempt against President Hamid Karzai at a military parade on 27 April 2008), and the dramatic raid on Sarpoza prison in Kandahar which freed dozens of Taliban prisoners and which was followed by the seizure of several villages close to the city (see “Afghanistan in an amorphous war [2]”, 19 June 2008). A day after the embassy attack, a bomb was found [3] on a bus carrying Indian workers in the province of Nimroz (where many Indian projects, including the strategic Zarang-Delaram highway project, are centred).

The seriousness of the situation in Afghanistan has led to the United States navy’s redeployment [4] of a carrier battle-group led by the aircraft-carrier USS Abraham Lincoln from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea; this will enable [5] US strike aircraft to provide further airpower in Afghanistan.

The problem with this response is the danger it carries of continuing the pattern of inflicting civilian deaths in misdirected air-strikes, which in turn provokes affected communities to turn against the coalition forces. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC [6]) estimates that in the period of 2-7 July 2008 alone, paramilitary violence and coalition military action together killed at least 250 civilians, and that deaths caused by US air power being a particular source of tension on the ground (see ICRC, “Civilians in the line of fire [7]”, 9 July 2008).

The question of deaths as a result of missile-strikes [8] is a source of great controversy. In two recent incidents, for example, there is dispute over the identity of the dead Afghans. Local Afghan officials claimed that the fifteen people who died in a US missile attack in Kunar province on 4 July [9] were civilians, while American spokespersons insisted that only militants were killed; Afghan officials were equally adamant that the at least twenty-seven victims of a missile attack on 6 July [10] included nineteen women and children, reportedly members of a group of around eighty or so people in a wedding party who were taking a rest while walking to the groom’s house.

Whatever the true circumstances of these and other cases [11], the killing of civilians by coalition forces is deeply unsettling and has added to the anti-western mood in many parts of the country already hard-pressed [12] by problems such as growing food insecurity. The pattern of civilian deaths also comes at a time when coalition sources are beginning to admit to the seriousness of the strategic predicament they face in Afghanistan.

A chain of influence

Each year since the Taliban regime was ended, foreign troop numbers in the country have risen; the single greatest increase has been since early 2007, with 20,000 additional troops arriving to take the overall total to around 66,000 (see the editorial, “Afghan Escalation [13]”, Washington Post, 6 July 2008). Despite this, the intensity of Taliban activity has also increased. Much of it is seasonal, with less fighting during the severe winter months, but even here there has been a change. In recent years, suicide-attacks in cities such as Kabul and Kandahar have increased overall, but they have also continued through the winter months.

For the US forces, the biggest surprise has been the growth in Taliban activity in the eastern part of the country. This region, close to the Pakistan border, has been garrisoned by US forces operating independently of Nato, and there have been frequent claims of progress over the past two years. The US forces and spokespersons have made pointed references to the contrast between their “success” and the difficulties experienced by British troops in Helmand province and the Canadians [14] in Kandahar.

Now, though, the US claims are sounding less assured. The newly-appointed US military commander for eastern Afghanistan, Major-General Jeffrey J Schloesser, has highlighted [15] the increased sophistication of the methods used by the insurgents as a factor in the rising violence. This has led to a near-doubling of the number [16] of US troops killed in the country in the first six months of 2008 compared with the similar period in 2007. What has become particularly noticeable has been the more widespread use of roadside bombs, with tactics developed in Iraq being deployed in Afghanistan (see Peter Spiegel & Julian E Barnes, “Afghan Attacks Rise, U.S. Says [17]”, Los Angeles Times, 25 June 2008).

The escalation of violence in Afghanistan has two other elements. The first is a loss of support for the war in a number of Nato member-states that have committed troops. A Pew Global Attitudes Project [17]survey conducted in a number of Nato countries in April 2008 (even before the violence intensified in the following two months) found majority support for the withdrawal of Nato forces – ranging from 54% to 72% in countries including France, Germany, Spain, Poland and Turkey (see Jim Lobe, “Afghanistan Moves Back Into the Limelight [18]”, Inter Press Service, 3 July 2008).

The second element is the steady rise in power of Taliban and al-Qaida paramilitaries in western Pakistan. The Pakistan-based Taliban militias now have considerable influence [21] in many of the border districts of Pakistan, including parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies [22], and North Waziristan and South Waziristan.

This influence in turn has two effects. The first is that Taliban groups fighting in Afghanistan have safe havens across the border [23]; but if US forces mount raids into western Pakistan this simply stirs up more anti-American feelings across the country.

The second effect, and just as significant from a US perspective, is that the Taliban control has allowed al-Qaida to regenerate. An informed assessment is that there are as many as two thousand paramilitaries established in training camps in western Pakistan, up from several hundred three years ago (see Mark Mazzetti & David Rohde, “Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan [24]”, New York Times, 30 June 2008). The issue has been complicated by differences of opinion within the United States over the need for US forces, whether CIA, special forces or regular military, to operate within Pakistan. This remains unresolved but has become even more complicated by the uncertainties of politics within Pakistan itself (see Gary Thomas, “Instability, Uncertainty, Fuel Pakistan, Afghan Attacks [25]”, Voice of America, 8 July 2008).

A “winning fight”

Pervez Musharraf remains president, though his diminishing [26] influence means that his markedly pro-American outlook carries less weight. The coalition government remains in some disarray [27] over the president and other issues, but its overall mood – reflecting an even stronger popular feeling – is unwillingness [28] to allow greater US military involvement in the border districts. The bottom line, which is keenly recognised within the higher echelons of the Pakistani civil service, is that the population as a whole will simply not accept more US involvement. It has become a political non-starter.

The consequences for the US military are thoroughly negative. The senior Nato commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, states:

“The porous border has allowed insurgent militant groups a greater freedom of movement across that border, as well as a greater freedom to resupply, to allow leadership to sustain stronger sanctuaries and to provide fighters across that border” (see Eric Schmitt, “Pakistan is said to be attracting insurgents [29]”, International Herald Tribune, 10 July 2008).

American military and intelligence sources are reporting a marked increase in the involvement of foreign fighters with Taliban militias in western Pakistan. These include young men from Chechnya, Uzbekistan and the Gulf states; since March 2008 the numbers have increased (according to an unnamed Pentagon official) “from a trickle to a steady stream”. This is part of a trend in which Pakistan and Afghanistan are now the focus of attention for paramilitaries intent on fighting western forces.

The International Herald Tribune report on this phenomenon is worth quoting at length:

“The American officials say the influx (of foreign fighters), which could be in the dozens but also could be higher, shows a further strengthening of the position of the forces of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas, increasingly seen as an important base of support for the Taliban, whose forces in Afghanistan have become more aggressive in their campaign against American-led troops.

...American intelligence officials say that some jihadist Web sites have been encouraging foreign militants to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is considered a ‘winning fight’, compared with the insurgency in Iraq, which has suffered sharp setbacks recently.

Four senior military officials said that Al Qaeda was strengthening its increasingly close operational ties in the tribal areas with the Taliban and other various militant groups – financing, training recruits and facilitating attacks into Afghanistan, though not necessarily conducting attacks themselves.”

A decisive year

The accumulating result of these trends is a deteriorating security situation across much of southern and eastern Afghanistan, made worse by the Taliban/al-Qaida revival [30] across the border. A forceful United States government might have insisted on taking the war to Pakistan, even against the overwhelming opinion against this within that country. But the George W Bush administration is nearing the end of its term and is, in any case, far more preoccupied with Iran (see “Iraq task, Iran risk [30]”, 3 July 2008).

In April 2008 a number of analysts were suggesting that 2008 would be a decisive year for the seven-year war: either the Taliban would succumb to the overwhelming weaponry available to Nato and US forces, or the movement would increase its power. At the midpoint of the year, the latter view looks more accurate – so much so that Afghanistan might even exceed Iraq as an issue at the heart of the American presidential campaign.

Links:

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080709/ap_on_re_as/afghan_explosion
[2] http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=5328140
[3] http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=454096&sid=NAT
[4] http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/08/carrier.moves/
[5] http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=56054
[6] http://www.icrc.org/eng/afghanistan
[7] http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/afghanistan-news-090708%21…
[8] http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=2008-07-09_D91QAEAO0&show_articl…
[9] http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jkKFU8CvHoLV5ont_58iLTVBWLVQD91O9R500
[10] http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008036533_afghan07.ht…
[11] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7498041.stm
[12] http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79162
[13] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/05/AR200807…
[14] http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=8d56ddc9-9f6d-4f99…
[15] http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-usafghan25-2008jun2…
[16] http://icasualties.org/oef/
[17] http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/25/world/fg-usafghan25
[18] http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=1567
[19] http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/paulrogers.htm
[20] http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745641966
[21] http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080709/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanattacksin…
[22] http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?issue_id=3893
[23] http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/afghan_pak_border_map.htm
[24] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washington/30tribal.html
[25] http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-07-08-voa51.cfm
[26] http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=172441
[27] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c93103c0-4dce-11dd-820e-000077b07658.html
[28] http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hkOyy6iVkNxhRAX9Mio7wSQxbnYQD91QM9R00
[29] http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/10/asia/10terror.php
[30] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/world/asia/10terror.html?em&ex=1215748…

Afghanistan - a hidden catastrophe

tim — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:32:33 +0000

When it is mentioned at all, the war in Afghanistan is presented as a humanitarian, nation-building operation. The reality is that the occupation is itself creating a humanitarian disaster.

In the summer of 2007 the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that the situation in Afghanistan was becoming desperate: “Civilians suffer horribly from mounting threats to their security, such as increasing numbers of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and regular aerial bombing raids…Thousands of people have fled their homes and are continuing to move in search of safer areas”.

The Red Cross report said that the local population was suffering particularly badly in the south where the fighting has been heaviest and where most British troops are based.

Afghanistan is now one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world. It stands at 174 out of the 178 countries on the UN’s world development index. More than one third of children suffer malnutrition. Seven per cent of under-fives die of hunger. Life expectancy is 44, health care is non-existent for the majority of Afghans and the country has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

The authoritative Senlis report says that only two countries in the world have worse child poverty rates and that poverty and fighting have led to the uncontrolled spread of refugee camps across the country. The report blames this situation directly on the NATO forces’ war against anti-government groups which has “rendered reconstruction efforts in the area obsolete” and on the shameful level of aid delivered “notwithstanding proclamations of commitments towards the people”.

In the first year of occupation the US promised Afghanistan 1/ 40th of the aid promised to Iraq in 2003. Very little even of that has been delivered. Only 8 billion dollars of the 20 billion promised by the international community has materialised.

All the indications are that over the last year the level of fighting has increased dramatically. There are now nearly twice as many foreign troops in Afghanistan as there were in 2006, and Oxfam estimates that last year therewere four times as many aerial bombing raids on Afghanistan as Iraq. But a series of official reports out in January 2008 show that the military strategy is not working and that Afghanistan is on its way to becoming a failed state.

It is not surprising that opposition to the occupation is growing. The Senlis report states that the Taliban has “increasing control of several parts of southern, south eastern and western Afghanistan”. In the past, it says, the Taliban was finding it difficult to retain control of terrain it had conquered. “That situation has now changed”.

Anti-occupation forces now control much of Afghanistan’s key infrastructure. They regularly disrupt the ring road from Kabul to Herat, and have the capacity to close the other main roads to the capital. They run electricity substations in three key districts in Helmand, effectively giving themcontrol over the region’s power supply.

The resistance is not mainly inspired by religion. It is fuelled by a mixture of social and economic grievances which include the number of civilian deaths caused by the occupiers, lack of aid, forced crop eradication, lack of public services and the perception that the Karzai government is a puppet regime. No wonder that even US appointee, President Karzai, has recently criticised the occupation and refused to back Paddy Ashdown as ‘Viceroy’.

Military commanders from Britain and the US have been warning it will take decades to ‘pacify’ Afghanistan. The disaster that is Iraq has made some semblance of success in Afghanistan vital for the western powers. But the truth is that the mission here too is failing, and recognition of failure is causing a crisis in NATO. Canada has served notice it will withdraw its troops unless there are significant reinforcements, and in defiance of the US, Germany has refused to send its troops to the combat zones in the south. In the meantime the occupation causes untold suffering for the Afghan people. It is time for the troops to leave.

Chaos in Afghanistan

Ellie Keen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:50:00 +0000

Bad and Getting Worse

Can anyone state exactly why foreign troops are fighting in Afghanistan? What is the collective aim, the specific mission, the ultimate objective, of the 60,000 soldiers there? I ask this because as I write the total of US deaths in Afghanistan “and region” is over 450, and news has come in of the killing of more British and American soldiers. And I wonder what all of them have died for.

There are three separate foreign military organizations in Afghanistan, and they conduct operations entirely differently. The International Security and Assistance Force, the NATO countries’ military contingents, and the independent US forces have no single overall headquarters ; they have entirely unrelated Rules of Engagement (a preposterous and almost unbelievable situation) ; and do not have a combined mission statement. If a young captain at any military college in the world were told to produce a planning paper for direction of military operations in a foreign country and came up with such a harebrained cockamamie muddle he would be laughed at and sent packing.

***

The situation in Afghanistan is bad and getting worse, but before sketching the history of foreign military failure in that harsh and barbaric country it should be noted that its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, remains host to the largest number of refugees existing in any one country in our horrible world. There is no other nation that has accepted so many displaced people for so long – or has received less international gratitude for its generosity to foreign exiles. There has been attentive care, of course, from the saintly UN High Commission for Refugees whose staff around the world rarely receive the recognition they deserve. But Pakistan has not received any acknowledgment, either, for its hosting of millions of Afghans, some of whom are intent on wrecking the country that has given them haven.

There remain in Pakistan over 1.5 million Afghans who have the status of refugees. (Plus some 400,000 who have been absorbed into Pakistan society, legally or otherwise.) They cannot return to their own country, no matter how much they may want to, because it is still in a state of chaos, thanks to inept foreigners, evil fanatics, terminally corrupt politicians, and ruthless tribal thugs who are allowed by the government and occupation forces to rule their fiefdoms with no regard for laws of God or man.

***

The US Government Accountability Office made it clear last week that there should be no more funding of training for the Afghan army because there is no “coordinated, detailed plan” for its future – after five years of foreign military occupation of the country. Remember the chaotic scenes in Kabul in April when President Karzai fled for his life and Afghan soldiers ran equally swiftly from the scene of a shooting at a military parade? That black comedy summed up the pathetic non-effectiveness of the new Afghan army. And the situation in Afghanistan would be uproariously funny, because of the amateur and clumsy dabbling by so many western nations, were it not that the majority of its citizens are in a state of even deeper poverty, fear and despondency than applied when the weird, fanatical, illiterate and psychotic Taliban were in power.

***

After Britain’s three Afghan Wars in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the Soviet Union, in a fit of Kremlin madness (for it transpired that it was a gigantic mistake), decided they would succeed where the British had failed, and in 1979 they invaded a country which had been doing quite well until a coup had deposed leadership that actually tried to look forward socially and improve the lives of ordinary Afghans. In the course of the Fourth Afghan War the country was destroyed, and brutal mujahideen “freedom fighters” prospered as a result of vast American subsidies. Their viciousness was promoted by tiny-minded gung-ho knuckle-dragging foreigners whose egos were matched only by the size of their moneybags.

When the USSR retreated from Afghanistan it was expected that western powers would rally round and help the country in its time of greatest need. Reconstruction, good governance and establishment of rule of law were obvious imperatives. Not a bit of it. There is no oil in Afghanistan. It doesn’t produce vast quantities of anything marketable, apart from heroin, so was not a desirable plot to be cultivated. There was no encouragement of democracy ; no notion of supporting the few forward-thinking Afghan leaders who wanted to bring at least a modicum of social improvement and equality to a benighted country that was in a state of anarchy. So the moronic Taliban came to power and thrust Afghanistan even further back towards the Dark Ages.

But because the Saudi Arabian suicide plane-destroyers on 9/11 in America were guided by a murderous Saudi Arabian lunatic who lived in Afghanistan, the place became a priority. Not for development, of course, for that was the last thing in the tiny minds of George Bush and his demented crew : their priority was vengeance. US air attacks destroyed countless villages and an unknown number of Afghans. An assault on the area in which bin Laden was supposed to be hiding was ludicrously unsuccessful, and the whole story of that bizarre and militarily unprofessional fiasco has yet to be fully told. (I give some details in my next book, but am restricted by having many years ago signed the Official Secrets Act which, as retailed in the wonderful BBC TV series ‘Yes Minister,’ is “Not there to protect Secrets. It is to protect Officials.” There are, however, a couple of interesting tales.)

The Afghan brutes who are dignified by the word ‘warlord’ by the western media – for there is something swashbuckling in the word that appeals to hacks and headline writers – but who are only grubby gangsters – had a wonderful time, courtesy of the CIA and MI6. They murdered hundreds of their closest enemies and laughed all the way to their Swiss banks, while bin Laden disappeared. Elsewhere, the drug thugs have had an even more vindictive and lucrative time. The Fifth Afghan War has been good for some – especially the dozens of corrupt members of the present government in Kabul who have prospered mightily. (Their names are well known by western nations involved in Afghanistan – I had detailed descriptions of names, places and bank accounts during my last visit to Kabul.)

But last week the ineffectual President Karzai of Afghanistan said that Afghan troops would cross the border into Pakistan to pursue and kill anyone who had been fighting against Afghan or “coalition” forces. This would be a very serious statement were it not for the fact that the US Government Accountability Office has observed that “only two of 105 Afghan army units are considered [operationally] capable,” with a third of them able to perform “only with routine international support” – for which read massive US bombing strikes such as killed Major Akbar of the Pakistan army and ten of his Frontier Corps soldiers on 11 June.

Afghanistan is a disaster area. The lives of hundreds of foreign soldiers have been sacrificed by their governments. The army of Pakistan has suffered thousands of dead and wounded. For what? The collective wisdom of the condescending west has produced nothing other than chaos, death, corruption, hatred and booming heroin exports.

Is there any optimism that the next five years of the Fifth Afghan War will be any better than the last if present policies apply? It is time for a common sense approach to Afghanistan by all the clever foreigners who think they know how the country should be governed. Does anyone think that will happen?

Brian Cloughley’s website is www.briancloughley.com

This is an expanded version of ‘The Fifth Afghan War’ that appeared in two newspapers in Pakistan, The Nation and The News, on June 25.

Afghanistan in an Amorphous War

Ellie Keen — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:53:14 +0000

An incident causing major loss of life in Iraq, and an enduring pattern of low-level violence in north Africa, have created concern that the cautious sense of progress in the campaign against al-Qaida in recent months may prove more apparent than real. Even these serious events, however, are overshadowed by evidence of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. At the same time, all these theatres of the global "war on terror" share underlying affinities that United States strategy in this war is tending to reinforce.

The Iraqi incident was a car-bomb attack on a crowded Baghdad market on 17 June 2008 which killed sixty-three people and wounded seventy-eight. This, the most destructive explosion in the city since 6 March, was all the more painful for coming at a time when a certain optimism about Iraq's security and wider prospects was achieving traction (see "Iraq starts to fix itself", Economist, 12 June 2008). A further aspect of this was the declining number of victims, both American (in May 2008, nineteen soldiers died, the lowest monthly total than in any month since the war began in March 2003) and Iraqi (civilian casualties were also at a relatively low level in May – although still in the hundreds).

These signs of improvements had done much to support the view – expressed most vocally on the American right, but shared by others too – that the war in Iraq was, or was becoming, winnable. Those sympathetic to John McCain in the presidential campaign suggest that he should make this theme (and his broader support for the war and the US's military "surge" strategy) a centrepiece of his contest with Barack Obama (see Charles Krauthammer, "McCain must make case for Iraq", Newsday, 19 Jun 2008). The implication here is that Iraq is and will remain what it has been – the pivot of the entire "war on terror", where the now-expected destruction of what is termed "al-Qaida in Iraq" is a sign of decisive progress in the war as a whole.

The Afghan landscape

The progress that has been made in increasing security for many Iraqi citizens – partly through the social division of much of the population by repeated bouts of fighting and expulsion, partly through the deals made with elements of the Sunni community against al-Qaida forces, partly though the exhaustions of war – is given as justification of this optimistic view. This approach, however, tends to ignore other, more uncomfortable pointers to the al-Qaida movement's condition – including the attack on 2 June on the Danish embassy in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad; and a series of bombings on 4-8 June in Algeria that killed a number of people (the precise total is in dispute). The most important of these trends is the upsurge in violence in Afghanistan. In May 2008, the deaths among coalition troops in that country exceeded those in Iraq for the first time; June has also been marked by numerous hits against British troops, which took the total killed in the war to 106.

There had earlier been a widespread anticipation that the summer months would see a renewed Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan, although there was also some caution about the prospect of major attacks (see "Al-Qaida's afterlife", 29 May 2008). The fact that overwhelming firepower is available to Nato forces has made it all the more likely that Taliban and other militias would opt to diversify and "miniaturise" its tactics, including the use of roadside- and suicide-bombs.

The war in Afghanistan has been attracting less media attention in the United States than that in Iraq, and the evolving reportage of the presidential campaign may accentuate the contrast (see Jim Malone, "Iraq: The Defining Difference Between McCain, Obama", VOA, 13 June 2008). But inside the Pentagon it was becoming clear that the security problem there was rapidly developing, in part because many districts in western Pakistan had become safe havens for Taliban, al-Qaida and other militias.

The US response to this increased threat has been threefold:

increase troop levels in Afghanistan and seek to take overall responsibility for the counterinsurgency war, at least in the southern and southeastern parts of the country
pressurise Pakistan to limit militia operations in its own western districts

make a determined effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

An announcement by Britain's ministry of defence series of incidents in which British troops were killed led the country's Britain's ministry of defence to announce a further increase of 230 in troop numbers, taking the total to around 8,030 by spring 2009 – though this was linked to a claim that the Taliban were in retreat rather than making gains. This bullish assessment contrasted with a more cautious measure of the condition of security in Afghanistan from the senior US army commander in the country, General Dan K McNeill, at the end of his sixteen-month posting on 3 June (see Ann Scott Tyson, "A Sober Assessment of Afghanistan", Washington Post, 15 June 2008).

McNeill emphasised that the last three years had seen a gradual resurgence of Taliban activity. At the same time, the number of troops operating under Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) had risen over a three-year period to 53,000 from forty countries. But this was not enough, McNeill contended: a much larger troop deployment would be required if the Taliban militias were to be defeated.

The Taliban vision

Three major developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that took place within days of McNeill's departure from the country both underpinned his judgment and gave an indication of the likely course of events in summer 2008.

The first was the killing on 10 June of eleven members of Pakistan's official Frontier Corps as a result of a US air-strike. Some reports say that the Pakistani troops were actually aiding a Taliban group under attack by US and Afghan troops close to the border. This has not been confirmed, but it would not be entirely surprising, given local sympathies for fellow-Pushtun Pakistani paramilitaries in some parts of the Pakistani army (see Anna Mulrine, "Pakistan's Border Badlands Are a Challenge for the Next President", US News & World Report, 13 June 2008.

More important, though, is the reaction within Pakistan to this event. The loss of life has intensified a deep-seated public antipathy to the United States and its conduct of its "war on terror". The killing of the Frontier Corps soldiers will make it difficult for a Pakistani government of any persuasion to work with Washington. Moreover, the incident comes at a time when the Pentagon's closest ally in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf – still the country's president, though weakened after the elections of February 2008 – is facing severe political challenges to his authority, and may even be obliged to resign in the next few weeks (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "US strike hits Pakistan's raw nerve", Asia Times, 12 June 2008).

The second development was the extraordinary break-out from Sarpoza prison in Kandahar, in an operation planned and executed by Taliban elements. In a coordinated assault where the explosion of a bomb hidden in a road-tanker was followed by a direct paramilitary invasion of the city's main prison, several hundred Taliban prisoners were released. The incident is all the more serious because (as is perhaps not fully appreciated in the western media) Kandahar is one of the main centres of coalition military resources in Afghanistan, host (for example) to its second-largest air base.

The third development compounded the Taliban attack on the jail. This was the deployment of at least 500 paramilitaries to overrun a number of villages close to Kandahar. At the same time, the combination of the jail attack and the subsequent offensive is unlikely to mark the start of a Taliban operation to take control of Kandahar, since Nato with all its firepower will not allow that to happen. What is more probable is that this operation is a show of strength, and the prelude to a Nato counter-offensive which the Taliban forces will respond to by melting away until the next opportunity is chosen.

The two actions show is that the Taliban militias do not have to limit their operations to small-scale guerrilla attacks; the level of their support means that they are well beyond that and can engage in large-scale offensives too, at a time of their own choosing.

More generally, the Taliban strategists will see this as one part of the early stage of a decades-long war; they do not have to win in the conventional military sense, they merely have to outlast those foreign forces seen as the occupiers, especially in the face of divisions within Nato (see Anna Mulrine, "A Struggling Coalition of the Willing and the Not-So-Willing", US News & World Report, 16 June 2008).

The global horizon

These recent developments in Afghanistan confirm that the focus of the US "war on terror" may really be shifting eastwards. At the very moment when neo-conservative elements in Washington speak of winning the Iraq war, that very war is becoming less relevant in the context of the larger picture. The US insistence on maintaining a very large military presence there indicates that the Iraq war is far from reaching its endgame, but in one sense it has already served its purpose (see Tom Englehardt, "The Greatest Story Never Told: Finally, the US Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News", TomDispatch.com, 15 June 2008).

More than five years of fighting in Iraq have given the wider al-Qaida / jihadist movement a new generation of paramilitaries trained against well-armed and equipped US soldiers and marines. Many of the tactics honed in Iraq are now being applied in Afghanistan, not least in the form of roadside bombs and the tactical nous employed to avoid Nato's air power (see Caroline Gammell & Tom Coghlan, "The increasing sophistication of Afghanistan's roadside bombs", Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2008). All this, combined with the persistent uncertainties in Iraq, and the significant and under-reported currents in north Africa, means that the "war on terror" has moved on.

Whether they are right or wrong, those who claim that Iraq is or is becoming a success fail to realise that the country's importance in the global arena of conflict is diminishing. This has been the recurrent story of the George W Bush administration's "war on terror". It is a further reason to argue that, in the absence of fundamental changes of approach, the world is still in the early stages of a decades-long confrontation.

Al-Qaida’s afterlife

tim — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:08:11 +0000

A number of current trends in Afghanistan are of far more than local significance. The pattern of violence is the most visible: for example, a series of attacks on 26-27 May 2008 killed [1] thirty seven people (among them police officers, soldiers, and bus passengers) in the provinces of Kandahar, Farah, Khost and Nimroz. But armed action and the bloodshed it causes are also the surface manifestation of a strategic reordering that is inserting the Afghan conflict into regional and even global realities in new ways.

These incidents reflect the fact that many of the paramilitary groups in the country [2] (and not just the Taliban) have become cautious about frontal assaults on western forces and are instead laying roadside- and suicide-bombs (see “Afghanistan’s Vietnam portent [2]”, 17 April 2008). The tactic is routinely directed against Afghan police and army units, as well as government officials and NGO workers (mostly local, since a majority of international agencies have withdrawn).

This incremental rise [3] in the level of violence may continue after the opium-poppy harvest, though so too in all probability will the current minimal level of western media coverage (diminishing to near-invisibility in the United States). But if the media and publics are less than engaged in this, the first theatre [4] of the “war of terror” after the assaults of 11 September 2001, the Pentagon is treating events in Afghanistan [5] with utmost seriousness – and ever greater ambition.

A military-political purpose

A 2,400-strong force of US marines is now deployed in Helmand province, reportedly with as much air support as the British ground forces in the same province (which number 7,300). There are indications that further US contingents amounting to 7,000 extra troops will be deployed; inaddition, the operations in Afghanistan’s embattled [6] southern region will be transferred from Nato to direct US control (see “A war of money as well as bullets [7]”, Economist, 24 May 2008). British, Dutch and Canadian forces in southern Afghanistan have, notwithstanding differences of approach with the US, won a certain professional respect from US military commanders.

But deep divisions among these distinct Nato forces remain, and they are not helped by continuing resource constraints (US demands at the Nato conference [8] in Bucharest in April 2008 for its allies to contribute more have had little effect, apart from a few hundred additional French troops). The result is an American plan (born partly out of frustration) to substantially increase the firepower within the country. But this is only one part of a programme that places as much emphasis on events on the other side of the border with Pakistan.

Two aspects of the Afghan dimension of this agenda are central. The first is to intensify pressure [11] on the Pakistani government over its attitude to Pakistani Taliban leaders – in favour of a tougher approach, rather than continue with the present policy of local negotiations (see Bill Roggio, “Pakistan strikes deal with the Taliban in Mohmand [12]”, Long War Journal, 28 May 2008).

From Islamabad’s perspective, the advantage of the latest phase of its deal-making policy (highlighted in September 2006 when a formal agreement [13] was made with Taliban fighters in the region of North Waziristan) is that this will help ease tensions in the frontier districts. Washington takes a different view: that it creates entire zones free of any government authority where Taliban militias can operate (reminiscent of the territories held by the Farc guerrillas in Colombia [13]). The US military wants to expand its ability to operate in these districts – as does the CIA. Both have already stepped up their activities in the region, such as aerial surveillance and ground-based intelligence (the latter from new posts just inside Afghanistan).

The current state of Pakistani politics complicates this project. The elections [13]Â of 18 February 2008 have opened a new phase of instability, characterised by divisions among the leading parties and personalities (see Irfan Husain, “Pakistan’s rivalrous coalition [13]”, 19 May 2008); but the formation of a new government has also constrained further the ability of the president, Pervez Musharraf, to ensure that Pakistan accedes to American demands. Musharraf was already isolated in his pro-US stance before he was forced to allow a return to (albeit flawed) electoral democracy; now the political leaders are more able to represent the broadly anti-American mood of the country (see Jonathan Manthorpe, “Democracy in Pakistan makes it tougher for its allies [14]’, Vancouver Sun, 28 May 2008).

The power of Pakistan’s military and the rooted influence of the US in the region mean that these US efforts to increase operations in western Pakistan – to, for example, interrupt the Taliban’s delivery of supplies and personnel across the border into Afghanistan – will not be halted altogether. But the Americans now have to tread more carefully with their Pakistani “ally”. The second Afghan aspect of the US’s plan in Pakistan is equally significant: a new-found determination to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

A meeting seems to have taken place at a US base in Qatar to plan an operation to this effect, attended by General David Petraeus (the incoming heads of US Central Command), and Anne Petersen (the American ambassador to Pakistan (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, “In the Footsteps of Osama [15]”, Asia Times, 28 May 2008). The focus was on the areas where bin Laden is assumed [16] to operate: western Pakistani areas such as Bajaur Agency [17]Â and neighbouring districts of Nuristan province.

The US’s triple aim, then, is:

to pressure Pakistan to limit [18] negotiations with militia-controlled areas of its own country

to increase its force-level in Afghanistan to enable it to take full control of military operations in

the most violent parts of the country

to intensify the operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

All three aspects, if reflected in actual achievement, would have an important public-relations component. The first and second would be portrayed in terms of effective counterinsurgency policy and action that parallel the advances championed in Iraq (even if the latter are less impressive on close inspection; see “The Iraqi whirlwind [18]”, 3 April 2008). The third objective would be especially welcomed by a George W Bush administration desperate for signs of tangible proof that the “war on terror” is bring won; it would also burnish a discreditable presidential record and may help secure a continuation of Republican control of the White House, while reducing the scale of any electoral reversals in Congress.

A life in death

Such outcomes represent very much the optimal scenario for the United States over the next four months. But even if this arrived by the time the votes are cast, it could not possibly end the serious problems posed by the current he has embodied. True, the death or detention of Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have an impact on the al-Qaida movement, not least in curtailing some of the funding coming from Saudi Arabia, where the aura of bin Laden’s leadership still carries a cachet (see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune [19] [Penguin, 2008]). At the same time, al-Qaida is a far looser entity than in 2001: a new generation of leaders is coming to the fore, and bin Laden himself is increasingly a figurehead rather than a formative influence on this dispersed and often pervasive transnational entity.

Moreover, his death (and to a degree that of al-Qaida’s chief ideologue, Ayman al-Zawahiri) would make him a “martyr” to more than his followers; while his detention (assuming the Americans would be able or prepared to take him alive – and that the “surprise” is not in the other [20] direction) would have the effect of creating a worryingly unpredictable and uncontrollable media cycle and legal process (see “A world beyond control [20]”, 22 May 2008). In strict military terms too, the precedent of Saddam Hussein’s capture [20] in December 2003 – which the Americans confidently predicted would lead to the collapse of the Iraq insurgency, and did no such thing – does not augur well here.

But the Iraqi insurgency has been confined to Iraq. The wider point is that in the years since the “war on terror” was launched, a largely unrecognised process has transformed the Taliban and its partner militias from an Afghan-centred movement with ethnic and nationalist elements to a much more globally-orientated jihadist one (see Malise Ruthven, “The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists [21]”, 29 May 2008). In this light, even “success” for American forces in their current endeavours may well be the seed of further failure.

For if US forces deploy to greater effect in the region – and especially if they capture or kill theirtwo main human targets [22] – the domestic political effect would be more likely to favour the continuation of a hardline military policy by Washington in 2009. That, though, would be just what bin Laden’s successors – who, like their “martyr”, measure in decades the conflict they are involved in – want. Another four years of sustained US military involvement in the middle east and southwest Asia will be sweet indeed for the jihadist camp. In that case, Osama bin Laden’s sacrifice will not have been in vain: indeed, it would symbolise and reinforce the trends that are making the conflict in AfghanistanÂ part of a still-evolving global confrontation.

Links:
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0529/p99s01-duts.html
[2] http://geology.com/world/afghanistan-satellite-image.shtml
[3] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-afghan-pakistan_barkermay24,0,521…
[4] http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/Operat…
[5] http://www.operations.mod.uk/mapping/Afghanistan.jpg
[6] http://www.senliscouncil.net/modules/maps/images/maps/afghan_violence
[7] http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11402695
[8] http://blogs.sipri.org/Afghanistan/my-first-blog-entry
[9] http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/paulrogers.htm
[10] http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745641966
[11] http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jk2aVRuVhP0HgNAsCVkEplizhCrA
[12] http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/05/pakistan_strikes_dea.php
[13] http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0908/p01s04-wosc.html
[14] http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/
story.html?id=d390ebe1-47c4-42b9-b767-71aab0b33f47
[15] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JE28Df01.html
[16] http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c_online.php?leftnm=10…
[17] http://bp1.blogger.com/_h5L0bq0pIhY/R3tSY1ixILI/AAAAAAAAAbg/I_59rNcK0fU/...
[18] http://www.cfr.org/publication/16317/
[19] http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781846141249,00.html
[20] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,544921,00.html
[21] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21438
[22] http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080528/FOREIGN/546311031/1103/ART&Pr…

The War that can bring neither Peace nor Freedom

Ellie Keen — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:38:06 +0000

The Afghan war, you will remember, was supposed to be the “good war”. Unlike the catastrophe of Iraq, from which most former cheerleaders still prefer to avert their eyes, Afghanistan was thought to be different. Senior British military figures might wince in private over their Basra humiliation, but would earnestly insist that they were fighting the good fight in Helmand “at the request of the elected Afghan government”. Gordon Brown felt able to tell parliament only six weeks ago that “we are winning the battle in Afghanistan”.

But in the wake of a string of reports that the country is fast becoming a failed state and a humanitarian disaster, as armed attacks on western troops and Afghan forces multiply and Nato splits down the middle over sending reinforcements, that looks ever more other-worldly. The US coordinator on Iraq, David Satterfield, even suggested last month that Iraq would turn out to be America’s “good war”, while Afghanistan was going “bad”. After a conflict that has already lasted longer than the second world war, Paddy Ashdown, rejected at the last minute as UN proconsul in Kabul, was clearly closer to the mark than Brown when he declared: “We are losing in Afghanistan.”

Tomorrow, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, arrives in London to discuss Nato’s Afghan crisis, triggered by Canada’s threat to withdraw its 2,500 troops from Kandahar unless other states bolster the western occupation in the bloodiest areas of the south. But there seems little prospect of anything more than token gestures, after both Germany and France rejected US demands to extend their commitments — despite taunts from the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, about their inability to fight insurgencies. In most Nato states, public opposition to the Afghan war is strong and growing stronger. That includes Britain, where 62% want all 7,800 UK troops withdrawn within a year, a view unshaken by attempts to boost support with military parades and gung-ho Beau Geste-style media reporting from the frontline.

Public cynicism towards Britain’s first co-occupation of a Muslim country in the US’s “war on terror” can only be deepened by the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s public denunciation last month of the British military role in the south — which had, he said, led to the return of the Taliban. The criticism caused outrage, but Karzai is either a sovereign ruler or he is not. Together with his complaint that he had been strong-armed by the British into removing the governor of Helmand, with disastrous consequences, it clearly cuts the ground from beneath the claim that western troops are simply in Afghanistan to support the government.

Karzai was, after all, installed by the US after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001 and subsequently confirmed in bogus US-orchestrated elections three years later. If even someone regarded as a US-British stooge, whose writ famously barely runs outside Kabul, is reduced to protesting in public that his western protectors are doing more harm than good, that not only makes a mockery of the idea that Afghanistan is an independent state. It also strongly suggests this is a man who recognises that the occupation forces may not be around indefinitely — and he may have to come to more serious terms with the local forces that will.

For all the insistence by Britain’s defence secretary, Des Browne, and others that this is a “commitment which could last decades”, there is no doubt that armed resistance to foreign occupation is growing and spreading. Nato forces’ own figures show that attacks on western and Afghan troops were up by almost a third last year, to more than 9,000 “significant actions”. And while Nato claims that 70% of incidents took place in the southern Taliban heartlands, the independent Senlis Council thinktank recently estimated that the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, arguing that “the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when”. Meanwhile, US-led coalition air attacks reached 3,572 last year, 20 times the level two years earlier, as more civilians are killed by Nato forces than by the Taliban and suicide bombings climbed to a record 140. The Kabul press last week predicted a major Taliban offensive in the spring.

The intensity of this armed campaign reflects a significant broadening of the Taliban’s base, as it has increasingly become the umbrella for a revived Pashtun nationalism on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, as well as for jihadists and others committed to fighting foreign occupation. The original aims of the US-led invasion were of course the capture of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden, along with the destruction of al-Qaida.

None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the two leaders remain free, while al Qaida has spread from its Afghan base into Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and Afghanistan has become the heroin capital of the world. For the majority of Afghans, occupation has meant the exchange of obscurantist theocrats for brutal and corrupt warlordism, along with rampant torture and insecurity; while even the early limited gains for women and girls in some urban areas, offset by an explosion of rape and other violence against women, are now being reversed. The meaning of “liberation” under foreign occupation can be measured by the death sentence passed last month on a 23-year-old student for blasphemy after he downloaded a report on women’s rights from the internet.

The war in Afghanistan, which claimed more than 6,500 lives last year, cannot be won. It has brought neither peace, development nor freedom, and has no prospect of doing so. Instead of eradicating terror networks, it has spread and multiplied them. The US plans to send 3,000 more troops in April to reinforce its existing 25,000-strong contingent, and influential thinktanks in Washington are pressing for an Iraqi-style surge. But only a vastly greater deployment could even temporarily subdue the country, and that is not remotely in prospect. The only real chance for peace in Afghanistan is the withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a wider political settlement, including the Taliban and neighbouring countries like Iran and Pakistan. But having put their credibility on the line, it seems the western powers are going to have to learn the lessons of the colonial era again and again.