[Part VI of a multi-part
dossier]
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Daily Telegraph, 28th December 2009: “Initial reports indicate that in a series of operations by international forces in Kunar province… 10 civilians, eight of them school students, have been killed…A senior official in the Afghan government, speaking on condition anonymity, said the death toll could change because investigations are ongoing.
Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) had no information on any operations or casualties in Kunar.
A senior Western military official told that US special forces have been conducting operations against militants in the border regions of Kunar.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6900673/Foreign-forces-kills-schoolchildren-and-adults-in-Afghanistan.html
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Stephen
Kinzer in The Guardian, 28th December 2009:
“One way for the US to have reacted to the Soviet invasion would have been to
cheer the Soviets’ stupidity and wait patiently for Afghan resistance fighters
to do their duty to history. This would have been a prudent, restrained policy,
one of limited ambition and risk. It would have kept the US out of a dangerous
place where it had not previously been entangled and which it did not know
well.<p>
Instead the US chose the opposite path: hyperactive engagement. The CIA launched its biggest operation ever, pouring billions of dollars into the Afghan resistance, matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia. This operation contributed decisively to the Soviet defeat, culminating in the Red Army’s retreat back across the Amu Darya in 1988.
America’s decision to escalate this war also had other effects
that only became clear later. It brought tens of thousands of foreign fighters,
including Osama bin Laden, to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. With them these
outsiders brought harsh forms of Islamic fundamentalism that had been little
known in Afghanistan. Their influence ñ Wahhabi fanaticism preached to Afghan
resistance fighters in a war paid for by the US and Saudi Arabia ñ gave birth
to the Taliban. Pakistan served as eager midwife and quickly turned the Taliban
into its proxy force in Afghanistan. Once in power, the Taliban offered a safe
haven to al-Qaida, which prepared the September 11 attacks there.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/28/afghanistan-1979-america-intervention
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Jonathan
Wynne-Jones & Duncan Gardham in the Sunday Telegraph, 13th December 2009:
“The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the
Islamic fundamentalists that recognises their humanity. The Church of Englandís
Bishop to the Forces warned that it will be harder to reach a peaceful solution
to the war if the Afghan insurgents are portrayed too negatively….Bishop Venner
stressed his admiration for the sacrifices made by the British forces fighting
in Afghanistan but also urged the need for a reassessment of how the Taliban
are viewed.
‘We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,’ said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
‘There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6804155/Taliban-can-be-admired-for-their-faith-and-loyalty-says-bishop.html
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Ewan MacAskill in the Guardian, 3rd December 2009: “US officials said Obama wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in office in January 2013, leaving behind a small contingency force…The new strategy comes at the end of three months of intensive debate in Washington over the future of Afghanistan, an issue that has swamped the rest of Obama’s agenda…The risk for Obama is that the extra 30,000 troops may not be enough to counter an increasingly confident Taliban and that the timetable for training the Afghan army and police is over-optimistic.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/barack-obama-speech-afghanistan-war
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Malalai Joya in the Guardian, 1st Dec 2009: ” have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week’s announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.
Already this year we have seen the impact of an increase in troops occupying Afghanistan: more violence, and more civilian deaths. My people, the poor of Afghanistan who have known only war and the domination of fundamentalism, are today squashed between two enemies: the US/Nato occupation forces on one hand and warlords and the Taliban on the other.
While we want the withdrawal of one enemy, we don’t believe it
is a matter of choosing between two evils. There is an alternative: the
democratic-minded parties and intellectuals are our hope for the future of
Afghanistan.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/30/obama-afghanistan-troops
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Jane
Merrick in the Independent on Sunday, 29th Nov 2009: “…the
Prime Minister laid out a series of milestones for the Kabul government to meet
before Britain’s commitment can end.
It follows intense public pressure on Mr Brown to scale back Britain’s commitment to what many see as an unwinnable and ill-judged war. A poll for The Independent on Sunday earlier this month showed seven out of ten people wanted British troops out of Afghanistan within a year or so.
The announcement enables the Labour leader to go into a spring
general election claiming that “Afghanisation” is under way in the country, and
that within the year the number of British troops can fall. Yet, with
corruption rife and troops engaged in bloody battles with Taliban fighters,
such a timetable must be in doubt.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistan-the-hokeycokey-strategy-1830660.html
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Kate
Connolly in the Guardian, 28th Nov 2009: “The future of
Germany’s mission in Afghanistan was thrown into doubt today after a government
minister resigned under growing pressure to admit his involvement in a campaign
of misinformation over an air raid in which civilians were killed….Video
footage emerged yesterdayof the botched air raid ordered by the German
commander, Colonel Georg Klein, on the basis of a single piece of intelligence
from an Afghan informant who was unable to see the vehicles….It was shortly
after midnight on 4 September that a commander ordered what would turn out to
be the most significant military action involving Germany since the second
world war. Militants had seized two tankers delivering jet fuel to Nato forces
in the northern province of Kunduz, where international military operations are
led by Germany. Fearing the fuel could be used in attacks, German officers
called in an air strike, even though the trucks were surrounded by civilians at
the time. “Based on information available at the scene, the commanders believed
they were insurgents,” a Nato spokesman said. It soon became clear this was not
the case. The Taliban said after one of the trucks became stuck in mud the
militants emptied them, and many of those nearby had been local people seeking
to get some of the fuel. Whatever the truth, the final death toll remains
unclear. According to an Afghan government inquiry, 30 of 100 casualties were
civilians. The independent Afghanistan Rights Monitor group said 70 civilians
died.
For several days after the attack Franz Josef Jung, the
then-defence minister, said there was no evidence of civilian deaths, despite
apparently having access to military reports saying precisely the contrary.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/27/germany-afghanistan
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Caroline
Lucas in the Guardian, 26th Nov 2009: “First Tony
Blair, then Gordon Brown, told us that priority number one was Osama bin Laden
and ridding the world of al-Qaida. Then we were getting rid of the Taliban. We
were the benevolent invaders, bringing democracy to a downtrodden people. Or we
were stabilising the region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Our streets would
be safer. It was about women’s rights or the opium trade.
In Washington, Barack Obama considers General Stanley McChrystal’s request for up to 40,000 more troops, which would take the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan towards 150,000. Yet he knows that the deployment of thousands more foreign soldiers has so far failed to stem the tide of Taliban influence. Recent insurgency attacks in Kabul, Peshawar and Baghdad show the violence and insecurity in the region only seem to be increasing.
….Despite the efforts of the UN and the western powers, there is
no credible national government in Afghanistan. In part, wilful amnesia in
foreign policy has prevented us from learning from past mistakes; attempts to
impose a western model of democratic governance on a failing state, with
ill-informed notions about the culture, geography or history of the place and
its people, are bound to end badly. Worse still, attempting to do so through
the barrel of a gun and via million-dollar bribes to corrupt warlords and
criminals can only result in a failure of devastating proportions.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/25/humanitarian-reconstruction-work-afghanistan
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Seamus
Milne in the Guardian, 23rd Nov 2009: “So now we know
the secret weapon of the the new western plan to pacify Afghanistan: cash. As
President Obama prepares to announce the expected dispatch of tens of thousands
more troops to America’s eight-year-old war and occupation, US and British
commanders on the ground have already begun to fund and equip Afghan militias
to help fight the Taliban….It’s classic colonial practice ñ or
“counter-insurgency”, as it’s politely known ñ detectable from Malaya and Kenya
to Vietnam and the Palestinian “village leagues” Israel set up in the 1970s.
But it’s also the delusion of occupiers through the ages that you can kill off
people’s determination to run their own country by handing them wads of notes.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/23/cash-afghanistan
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Simon
Jenkins in the Guardian, 17th Nov 2009: “Britain’s military
failures in Basra and Helmand, rescued in both by the Americans, increased this
subservience. While French and German governments assess their nation’s
interest, Blair and Gordon Brown have been me-too kids on the block, panting
after Washington’s every wild venture. Despite 412 British soldiers dead, Brown
indicated in his speech on Monday night that nothing had changed. The torture
continues. London twitches only when Washington kicks.
Almost nothing Brown says on Afghanistan makes sense, and he seems painfully aware of it. He must say that soldiers are dying in Helmand to make Britain’s streets safe, even when intelligence reports say the opposite…..
Britain and America should demilitarise the war on terror,
surely the most counterproductive main-force deployment in recent history. They
need no longer rely on grand armies, popinjay generals and crippling budgets;
on bringing death, destruction and exile to hundreds of thousands of foreigners
in the faint belief that this might stop a few bombs going off back home. They
would hand that job to the appropriate authorities; to the police and security
services.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/17/afghanistan-obama-withdrawal-america-military
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Jim
Jarrasse in Le Figaro, 17th Nov 2009: “A new instruction
manual recommends making payments to those Afghans tempted to join the ranks of
the Taliban. The British Defence Secretary prefers to talk about the
‘importance of financing projects’ – replacing ‘weapons’ with ‘sacks of gold’.
There we have it – the advice in a new manual of directives for British
soldiers arriving in Afghanistan…this new doctrine, explains General Paul
Newton, is more suited to modern insurrections. It was adopted by the Americans
since the war in Iraq”.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2009/11/17/01003-20091117ARTFIG00505-l-armee-britannique-prone-la-strategie-du-sac-d-or-.php
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Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, 13th November 2009: “British officials are increasing pressure on the Afghan government to talk to Taliban leaders as part of a major attempt at reconciliation, it emerged today.
The move is strongly backed by the Foreign Office ñ notably Sherard Cowper-Coles, the government’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan ñ by MI6, and by Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, former head of the SAS and Britain’s senior military officer in Kabul, the Guardian understands.
Lamb was deployed to Afghanistan with the task of persuading
insurgents to give up their arms. He believes many young and rank-and-file
Taliban fighters carry a sense of ‘anger and grievances that have not been
addressed’….the prime minister dismissed reports that he was planning to ‘talk
to the Taliban’, although he raised the prospect of ‘mercenaries’ fighting for
the Taliban being reintegrated into Afghan society”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/13/uk-karzai-negotiate-taliban
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Patrick
Cockburn in the Independent on Sunday: “The US and Britain
have tumbled into a second war in Afghanistan that they weren’t expecting.
Justifying their own misjudgements, American and British leaders claim that
Afghanistan is a war that has to be fought because it is the epicentre of the
war against international terrorism. These threats are all grossly
exaggerated…The main reason for Britain’s military commitment in Afghanistan
was to maintain its position as America’s principal ally in the world. …”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistan-time-to-leave-1817004.html
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Sonali Kolhatkar in commondreams.org, 3rd Nov 2009: “One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they’ll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement.
What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban…”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/03-0
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Peter Galbraith in the Guardian, 3rd Nov 2009: “…..For now, however, Karzai is not a legitimate partner to the west and there is no immediate prospect of necessary change. Under these circumstances, sending more troops to Afghanistan to implement a counter-insurgency strategy is a waste of precious military resources. Hamid Karzai was determined to win Afghanistan’s presidential elections without regard to the cost to his country and to the international military mission. He succeeded, and Afghanistan and its foreign friends will now pay the very steep price.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/02/afghanistan-karzai-election-un-west
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Johann Hari in the Independent, 21st October 2009: “…Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders ñ but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren’t hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa’ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: ‘That’s a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It’s not moral’.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-three-fallacies-that-have-driven-the-war-in-afghanistan-1806191.html
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Julian Borger in The Guardian, 29th October, 2009: “Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been on the CIA’s payroll for almost eight years, it was reported today….
The New York Times, quoting unnamed current and former US officials, reported that the CIA was paying the president’s brother, long alleged to be a powerful druglord, for ‘a variety of services’.
The report said these included the recruitment of a paramilitary group to do US bidding in and around Kandahar, where he is the head of the provincial council.
….the president’s brother was also reported to act as a middle man between the CIA and Taliban loyalists as part of attempts to persuade them to change sides. He has long been alleged to be involved in the opium trade in southern Afghanistan, and the CIA links are a cause of deep divisions in Barack Obama’s administration, the New York Times said.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/28/ahmed-wali-karzai-cia
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Rebecca Camber in the Mail on Sunday, 18th Oct 2009: “A British special forces soldier is facing war crimes charges over claims he threatened to shoot a Taliban prisoner during interrogation…
Officers from the Royal Military Police’s special investigation branch are now investigating whether the alleged incident was part of a wider covert policy of using mental torture techniques to extract information from Taliban detainees. ”
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1221278/British-special-forces-soldier-faces-war-crimes-probe-allegedly-threatening-kill-Taliban-prisoner.html
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Andrew Gavin Marshall in globalresearch.ca, 16th October 2009: “NATO undertook its first ground invasion of any nation in its entire history, with the October 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan war was in fact, planned prior to the events of 9/11, with the breakdown of major pipeline deals between major western oil companies and the Taliban. The war itself was planned over the summer of 2001 with the operational plan to go to war by mid-October.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15686
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Seamus Milne in The Guardian, 15th October, “Whoever is in charge, it seems, the war on terror has truly become a war without end. Eight years after George Bush and Tony Blair launched it, with an attack on Afghanistan under the preposterous title of “operation enduring freedom” and without any explicit UN mandate, Gordon Brown has agreed to send yet more British troops to die for a cause neither they nor the public any longer believe in….
There has been a 7% increase since last month in support for immediate withdrawal, according to a Populus poll for the Times, with 68% wanting troops out within the year and strongest backing for a pullout among Labour voters.
That is feeding the growing disaffection among serving soldiers towards what many see as a futile sacrifice, supposedly on behalf of a hostile population in Helmand province….
Yet one after another, the official aims and justifications of the war in Afghanistan have failed or been discredited. It was a war fought to kill or capture Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, but both are still at large. It was a war fought to destroy al-Qaida, whose leadership simply decamped and set up new bases from Pakistan to Iraq. It was a war for democracy, women’s rights, development and opium eradication ñ all successively demonstrated to be a hollow joke.
Now we are told it is a war to prevent al-Qaida-inspired terrorism on the streets of London, which shamelessly turns reality on its head. There were no such attacks before 2001, and both bombers and intelligence agencies have repeatedly identified the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as a central motivation for those who try to launch them. Last week, General Richards, new chief of the general staff, conjured up an even more lurid justification: if Nato pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Qaida would seize Pakistan and its nuclear weapons.
The opposite is the case. It is the Afghan war that is destabilising Pakistan and driving the Pashtun rebellion there.”
Yet one after another, the official aims and justifications of the war in Afghanistan have failed or been discredited. It was a war fought to kill or capture Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, but both are still at large. It was a war fought to destroy al-Qaida, whose leadership simply decamped and set up new bases from Pakistan to Iraq. It was a war for democracy, women’s rights, development and opium eradication ñ all successively demonstrated to be a hollow joke.
Now we are told it is a war to prevent al-Qaida-inspired terrorism on the streets of London, which shamelessly turns reality on its head. There were no such attacks before 2001, and both bombers and intelligence agencies have repeatedly identified the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as a central motivation for those who try to launch them. Last week, General Richards, new chief of the general staff, conjured up an even more lurid justification: if Nato pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Qaida would seize Pakistan and its nuclear weapons.
The opposite is the case. It is the Afghan war that is
destabilising Pakistan and driving the Pashtun rebellion there.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/14/afghanistan-nato-troops-democracy
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Simon
Jenkins in The Guardian, 14th October 2009,
“…much of Obama’s cabinet and, it would seem, the president himself, cannot see
the point in pouring good men and money after bad when all intelligence from
the front points to strategic failure. …
For the last three years in Afghanistan, every British politician has mouthed the same nonsense. The war is ‘winnable but only if Ö’ some unrealisable policy nostrum is adopted. … As for the poor bloody infantry, they are ‘dying for freedom’ while politicians play for time.
Some glimmers of sanity are showing in Washington, if not in London. Suddenly it is ‘time to negotiate with the Taliban’, as if this were unthinkable before. There is talk of an ‘Iraqi-style surge’, of somehow separating Taliban from al-Qaida, of good Taliban and bad Taliban, of decapitating the Taliban’s extremist leadership with drone bombers.
There is even talk of the Taliban not being the real enemy of
the west after all, as indeed they keep asserting….he sooner the Afghan war
ends, the better. It has no real bearing on western security and is merely
cover for politicians to avoid confronting their past mistakes”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/13/more-troops-war-in-afghanistan
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Brian
Brady, Jonathan Owen and Nina Lakhan in the Independent on Sunday, 11th Oct
2009: “The full scale of the lethal challenge facing UK forces in
Afghanistan was laid bare last night after the Government reported that British
soldiers fought directly with Taliban insurgents seven times every day….
New details of the number of ‘contact events’ undergone by British forces in Helmand province emerged as a new study, compiled from official Ministry of Defence figures, revealed that British forces are suffering death rates as bad as those endured by the Soviets, who lost a war of attrition against Afghan insurgents in the country during the 1980s.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/british-troops-fight-taliban-seven-times-a-day-1801009.html
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Peter Baker & Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, 7th October 2009: “President Obamaís national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States…Now the discussions in the White House Situation Room, according to several administration officials and outsiders who have spoken with them, are focusing on related but separate strategies for fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban….The official contrasted that with the Afghan Taliban, which the administration has begun to define as an indigenous group that aspires to reclaim territory and rule the country but does not express ambitions of attacking the United States.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/world/asia/08prexy.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
