:: Article nr. 69448 sent on 04-sep-2010 03:02 ECT

Ramadan 23, 1431 A.H, Friday, September 03, 2010

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

The Americans are trying again to pave the way for some demagogues faces in the coming days to reach the corridor of the parliament, in an effort to give legitimacy to the occupying forces and the puppet Kabul administration. However, the short-list of the would-be winners has already been finalized in the American embassy in Kabul. They have selected characters that passed the America criteria. The invaders are confident enough that those selected will never ratify a resolution against American interests.

The Americans and the campaigners of the candidates know very well that conduct of transparent and open elections in a peaceful environ is out of the question in any area, district or province of the country. Equally is not possible that the 20% voters as per the American prediction will ever show up on the polling day.

The Afghans know that on this day, Mujahideen will target American military convoys and soldiers who are to provide security to the parliamentarian elections. Most of the candidates do not enjoy even 5% grassroots votes; some of them have already been detained by Mujahideen with the support of the people; some of them have been threatened or escaped from their residential areas to live in the Capital. They think that they will mobilize people in their support while sitting in Kabul. So in this dangerous and difficult situation, the American drama of deception will not achieve its target, despite the fact that they have spent millions of dollars and are going to deploy security contingents and units on this day.

It is important to note that the election has no credibility in the eye of the common man in spite of the fact, that the Americans have spent or are spending large amount of money and campaigns to bribe people are in full swing. But all these not withstanding, they will fall flat. No one can say that the parliament will ever live up to people’s expectation.

The sagacious Afghan nation knows that in any country under foreign occupation, all laws, regulations and assemblies and parleys are honed to pander to wishes and interest of foreigners. Therefore, as far as the people are concerned, all the efforts and campaigns launched by the occupying forces have no reliability in their eyes.

The Afghan people still remember the poor and demagogue record of the past term of the Kabul stooge regime’s parliament. They did not serve the nation, nor did boycott parliamentarian sessions even for a single day in protest to the incessant encroachments on our religious injunctions and national values by the invading Americans, or for their other sundry abominable actions that they committed; nor the parliamentarians led huge demonstrations and marches to condemn the blind bombardments and the killing of thousands of civilians during house searches conducted by the invaders, so that they might have proved that they are real representatives of people, not American puppets. But instead, they provoked racial, lingual and geographical issues, using the forum of the parliament. They did put forward proposals for disintegrations of Afghanistan. They engineered diabolical conspiracies to set stage for conflicts between fraternal ethnicities and tried to engage them in endless hostilities.

Now, the Afghans are well aware of the ploys used by the Americans against our religious principles and national traditions under the fatuous slogans of democracy. It is not possible that these fake slogans will deceive them any more. They know that during the past nine years, these committees, the parliament and other puppet entities could not solve people core issues like security, protection of the religion and people and eradication of poverty.

Now when America is on the descent, and it is itself seeking ways and means for escape, then how would it would solve these issues amicably.

WSWS, September 3, 2010

A series of attacks across Afghanistan have driven the death toll for American troops in the country to at least 326 this year, according to the icasualties.org website, making 2010—with four months still to go—already the deadliest year yet for US forces. In all of 2009, the US military suffered 317 fatalities.

At least 26 US soldiers and Marines have lost their lives since last Saturday as armed groups opposing the US-led occupation and the puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai have carried out deadly bombings and engaged US forces in firefights concentrated in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

With 56 fatalities, August trailed only July, with 65, and June, with 60, as the most costly month in nearly nine years of war.

Two more US soldiers were killed in fighting Thursday.

According to icasualties.org, 1,273 US troops, 332 from Britain, 152 from Canada and 304 from other countries have been killed since the war began.

There is no accurate count of Afghan civilians killed in the war, though conservative estimates place the death toll in the tens of thousands.

US and NATO officials have attributed the recent spike in casualties to the Obama administration’s "surge," which has sent an additional 30,000 US troops into the country, bringing the total force to nearly 100,000 American soldiers and Marines, together with nearly another 50,000 NATO and other foreign forces.

Gen. David Petraeus, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, told reporters Tuesday that the US occupation force would reach full strength within days. "For the first time, we will then have the tools and what is required in place to carry out the kind of campaign that [is] necessary here with our Afghan partners," he said.

Petraeus repeated his formulation downplaying the significance of President Obama’s July 2011 deadline when, as Obama put it last December, "our troops will begin to come home."

"July 2011 is a time when a process begins, the pace of which is determined by conditions on the ground," said Petraeus. "There has been a misinterpretation that this is when we race for the exits and find a light switch to turn them out before we leave the room. And that is not the case."

Acknowledging growing opposition to the war in the US, with recent polls indicating at least 60 percent of the population opposed to it, the general demanded that the American people allow the war to continue.

"It is understandable that there is impatience and a desire to see progress right now," he said, "but the nature of these endeavors is such that progress is slow, it is hard-fought," he cautioned.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who arrived in Kabul Thursday after officiating at a ceremony in Baghdad marking the formal end to US "combat operations" in Iraq—while 50,000 American combat troops continue to occupy the country—was even more blunt.

In an interview with Fox news, Gates said, "My gut tells me that we will probably have a troop presence in Afghanistan for some period of time." The defense secretary continued, "I don’t know what that period of time is. I would say certainly more than two years. But I don’t know what that length of time would be. It will depend on the success of our operations; it will depend on the pressures the Taliban feel themselves under when they discover in August of 2011 we’re not gone."

Gates and other US and NATO officials have warned that casualties will continue to rise as the American military presses ahead with its offensive against the southern city of Kandahar and as violence rises in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for September 18. Various non-governmental entities have called for the elections to be called off, warning that security has deteriorated markedly since the debacle of the presidential and provincial council elections held last year, and that the corrupt system that presided over a rigged vote then has remained unchanged. Washington is determined to go ahead with the exercise.

An indication of the growing pressure on the US military has come in the form of a series of press statements emphasizing body counts for alleged insurgents killed by US and other occupation forces.

"In August, the security force detained more than 500 insurgents and killed 160 more in security force operations," read a press release issued by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO umbrella group. "More importantly, the security force captured or killed 23 Haqqani Network and 53 Taliban leaders."

While it is clear that US and other foreign occupation forces are unleashing greater firepower against the Afghan resistance, including stepped-up air strikes, a series of incidents have called into question the claims by NATO as to the "precision" character of these strikes and the identity of their victims.

In the latest incident, Afghan officials in the northern province of Takhar reported that 10 election workers were killed Thursday morning, when US warplanes and helicopter gunships attacked a convoy organized by a candidate as part of his election campaign.

ISAF had earlier claimed credit for the attack, claiming that it had been launched against a car carrying a leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. "After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft conducted a precision air strike on one sedan and later followed with direct fire from an aerial platform," said the ISAF release, which claimed that "eight to 12 insurgents were killed or injured in the strike, including a Taliban commander."

The governor of the northern province of Takhar, Abduljabar Taqwa, disputed the claim, telling BBC, "Without any co-ordination, without informing provisional authorities, they attacked, on their own, civilian people who were in a campaign convoy."

"There aren’t even any Taliban in this area," Taqwa said.

Among those wounded in the US attack was Abdulawahid Khorasani, a parliamentary candidate, who was on his way to campaign in the Rostaq district. Among the dead were members of his family and other supporters.

"I thought that the foreign troops came here to bring us security and democracy," he told the BBC. "I believed they were helping us so that we can campaign for the parliamentary election. Instead they attacked me."

The office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement condemning the air strike. "In the war on terror, pro-democracy people should be distinguished from those who fight against democracy," Karzai said in the statement.

A similar claim issued by the US military earlier this month concealed another atrocity in Afghanistan’s eastern Wardak Province, as a report by McClatchy news agency correspondent Dion Nissenbaum revealed.

The news release issued by the occupation command claimed that "An Afghan and coalition security force killed several suspected insurgents and detained many more, including a Taliban commander," in an August 12 operation.

While Nissenbaum acknowledged that many such releases are retailed by the media without examination, in this case the military action provoked an angry anti-occupation demonstration.

The information in the press release, Nissenbaum writes, "proved to be inaccurate and, in many ways, misleading." The "Taliban commander" was no such thing, and the "insurgents" killed by US special forces turned out to be three young unarmed Afghan students who had just returned to their home to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. "Blood stains in photos provided by the family suggest that the three were killed where they had been sleeping," he reports.

The McClatchy reporter writes that the US military says that special forces teams like the one that carried out this massacre "are conducting more than 30 operations each day."

:: Article nr. 69430 sent on 03-sep-2010 03:28 ECT

WSWS, September 2, 2010

The coalition’s offensive in Kandahar, touted as the centrepiece of the "surge" in Afghanistan announced by US President Obama last December, is now well underway. With barely any coverage in the media internationally, as many 50,000 foreign and Afghan Army troops have deployed in and around the city.

Kandahar, which has a population of around 500,000, is under a state of military siege. The presence of the armed forces is felt everywhere, with constant patrols and expanding military bases. There are now 30,000 more US soldiers than a year ago and increased military police numbers.

Over the past four months, checkpoints have been established at all the main routes into the city, and thousands of tall concrete blast walls have been installed around police stations and government buildings. At the checkpoints, thousands of residents are daily subjected to population control measures by Afghan and foreign military police, including searches and biometric eye scans, which are checked against a list of around 25,000 suspected insurgents. Tens of thousands of residents have been issued with new identity cards.

Outside Kandahar city, in the western districts of Panjwai and Zhari and the northern district of Arghandab, occupation troops are conducting major "clearing" operations, using overwhelming and indiscriminate force against so-called Taliban "strongholds". Hundreds of alleged insurgents have been killed or arrested.

The Taliban fighters themselves are poorly armed and stand little chance in direct engagements with foreign troops. Canada’s National Post described a recent attack in Panjwai in which "two Canadian Griffon helicopters flew overhead and fired a hailstorm of bullets at insurgents. A US aircraft then dropped a bomb. Canadian soldiers watching and listening from a nearby combat outpost cheered."

Such accounts are reminiscent of attacks in Iraq which resulted in substantial civilian deaths, including the infamous 2007 massacre of civilians from an Apache helicopter in Baghdad which was revealed by WikiLeaks in April.

The increased killing in Kandahar and throughout Afghanistan is being overseen by General David Petraeus, the architect of the former Bush administration’s "surge" in Iraq. Petraeus was appointed by Obama to replace General Stanley McChrystal in June. McChrystal, while ostensibly fired for comments to Rolling Stone criticising the administration, was removed after he delayed the assault on Kandahar due to the failure of thousands of troops to secure the Marjah area in Helmand province.

Since taking command, Petraeus has ordered the start of the offensive despite the significant fighting still taking place against the occupation forces in Helmand and other areas. The same strategies used by Petraeus to crush the Baghdad insurgency in 2007 are now being used in Kandahar. During the Baghdad offensive, entire areas of the city were turned into what the US military termed "gated communities", with blast walls, checkpoints and control measures used to imprison the population and facilitate the targeted killing of insurgents.

Reports from Kandahar indicate widespread hostility to the "surge". Thomas Johnson, an adviser to Canada’s Task Force Kandahar, told reporters last week that he was amazed by the number of children throwing rocks and tomatoes and making obscene gestures at passing foreign troops. "I think that might be a leading indicator of other thoughts and conversations that are occurring in families . . . that we’re being viewed as the occupier".

Tor Ghani, a taxi driver, told the Canadian Press that the new checkpoints reminded him of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, adding that the corrupt Afghan National Police used them to collect bribes. A majority of respondents to a US Army survey earlier this year identified army and police checkpoints as the biggest threat to their security while travelling in Kandahar.

Foreign troops are widely seen as propping up the corrupt and illegitimate provincial government of Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai, as well as the local government of Kandahar mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi. During a visit to the city last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was bluntly told by three tribal elders that "the voice of ordinary people doesn’t reach this government".

The elders also criticised the escalating military operations. One asked: "Are you bringing security here or are you bringing violence?" When Mullen responded that in the past month the Taliban had killed 45 civilians, while coalition forces had killed five, one of the men pointed out that none would have died "if you weren’t here".

Many terrorised villagers in the Kandahar area have been forced to flee their homes. A taxi driver from a village in Panjwai told reporters last week that "security is getting worse day by day. …We are not able to see our land because of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and fighting. We are just alive. Our children cannot sleep due to the sounds of aircraft and fighting. It’s terrible being out there." He added: "Every person is thirsty for peace and now everyone lost his hope, because we don’t believe the current administration will ever restore it."

While US and Afghan military officials insist that the population is being terrorised by the Taliban, comments from residents demonstrate that their main fear is being killed by an occupation air strike or night-time raid. One Zhari farmer, Habibullah, told reporters: "If they carry out an air raid at our homes because the Taliban are there, or send soldiers at night, what will happen to us?" A villager from Malajat said he was "scared of an air strike, because we can have casualties there". He added that he had seen many civilians killed this way.

The occupation forces have repeatedly sought to blame civilian casualties inflicted by foreign troops on the insurgents. Last month, the Washington Post reported that Lieutenant Campbell Spencer from the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell had "said that the Taliban has taken to holding Afghan civilians as hostages to make it more difficult for the forces to attack without killing innocent people."

Support for the insurgency is growing as more and more civilians are killed. Despite the troop buildup, Taliban fighters still move freely in villages surrounding Kandahar. In June, a survey by the International Council on Security and Development of 552 men in the Helmand and Kandahar provinces found that 70 percent opposed recent foreign military actions in their area, while only one percent believed that foreign troops were rebuilding the country. In Helmand, 83 percent of respondents said that the recent military surge there had been bad for the Afghan people.

A survey of 1,994 people in Kandahar in March, commissioned by the US Army, found that 94 percent of people supported a peace conference with the Taliban and 85 percent viewed the Islamist fighters as "our Afghan brothers."

Petraeus and other top US and NATO commanders insist that the nine-year Afghan war is entering its "final stages", and that a victory in Kandahar will bring them closer to defeating the insurgency. Others in the US military establishment, however, have voiced concerns that the surge could be in vain, since the Taliban has now spread to virtually every province in the country.

Marc Sageman, an analyst from the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former CIA agent, told the Washington Post last week: "You can pacify Kandahar and you’ll still lose the war because Afghanistan remains a highly decentralised society, and in the countryside, the Kabul government has little legitimacy".

The February offensive in the largely rural area of Marjah in Helmand province ultimately failed to uproot the Taliban. Now, under Petraeus, the US-led forces are resorting to even more bloodshed and repression as they desperately attempt to crush the resistance to the neo-colonial occupation of the impoverished country.

In response, insurgent attacks on foreign troops have increased. On August 31, another six US soldiers died—four of them in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan, and two in gunfights with insurgents in the south—bringing the total killed in the past four days to 23. The total number of foreign troops to die this year is 489, compared to 521 for all of 2009.

Coalition attacks throughout the country are also increasing, resulting in more civilian deaths. On August 22, NATO commandos massacred eight civilians, including two women and a child, and injured 12 more during a raid in the village of Naik in Baghlan Province. An air strike in Kunar Province last week killed six children between the ages of six and 12. Another was seriously injured.

September 2, 2010

KABUL — Two US soldiers in Afghanistan died Thursday after separate insurgent attacks, NATO said, compounding the bloodiest year yet for American forces in the Afghan war.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said both had died following insurgent attacks, one in the country's east, the other in the south.

ISAF confirmed to AFP that both were Americans.

A total of 326 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war in 2010, compared with 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website.

The number of international troops killed in Afghanistan so far in 2010 stands at 493, not far off the 2009 total of 521.

The commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus, told AFP earlier this week that international forces should reach full strength of 150,000 within days.

That includes an extra 30,000 US troops ordered by President Barack Obama as part of a surge aimed at speeding an end to nearly nine years of war with a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy.

The insurgency, which began soon after a US-led invasion ousted the 1996-2001 Taliban regime, is spreading across the country, though it remains fiercest in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

September 2, 2010

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Ten parliamentary campaign workers were killed in a NATO airstrike in northeastern Afghanistan on Thursday, a provincial official said.

The incident -- which took place ahead of the September 18 parliamentary election -- occurred in the Rostaq district of Takhar province, where NATO says it was targeting a militant.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has consistently deplored civilian casualties in the war, condemned the strike, which occurred on the same day he's scheduled to meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Faiz Mohammad, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the event happened because NATO-led and Afghan security forces are not coordinating their activities properly.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force told CNN it is "still looking into this situation" and "gathering the facts."

"We're aware of the allegations that this strike caused civilian causalities and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of the accusations," U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Garza, an ISAF official, said in a press release.

"What I can say is these vehicles were nowhere near a populated area and we're confident this strike hit only the targeted vehicle after days of tracking the occupants' activity."

Along with the deaths, candidate Abdul Wahid Khorazani and another campaign worker were injured, Mohammad said. He said the civilians were campaigning for Khorazani at the time.

ISAF said it carried out "a precision airstrike targeting an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan senior member," determined to be the deputy shadow governor for Takhar.

"Intelligence tracked the insurgents traveling in a sedan on a series of remote roads in Rustaq district. After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft conducted a precision airstrike on one sedan and later followed with direct fire from an aerial platform. The vehicle was traveling as part of a six-car convoy, but no other vehicles were hit in the strike," the military said.

ISAF wasn't able to get a ground force to the region right away, but "initial reflections indicate eight to 12 insurgents were killed or injured in the strike, including a Taliban commander."

CNN's Joe Sterling contributed to this report

September 2, 2010

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.


The CIA is making secret payments to top-level officials of Karzai administration despite the fact that the agency knew in advance that its backing will amplify corruption, but it still paid corrupt officials, so that it can maintain source of information within Karzai government, because Karzai is not aware of the moves made by members of his own government, according a report issued in Washington post last Friday.

Among those on CIA payroll, Muhammad Zia Salehi’s involvement is much prominent, who had been captured on corruption charges, but was released by Karzai. Although Karzai denied the allegations that the top-level officials of his administration are on CIA payroll.

New York Times, quoted the dismissed deputy attorney general Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar as saying, I was forced into early retirement after aggressively promoting corruption investigation against the top-level officials. New York Times and Washington post cited another prominent official who has knowledge of what is going on in the palace, informed that Karzai operates a 10 to 5 million dollars money fund, which flows from Iran and other foreign intelligence services, to rewards the political allies in his administration.

Broadly speaking, Karzai, under the foreigners control, is heading a puppet multi-dimensional administration, whose members are morally, politically and financially corrupt.

Many comments had been made in the month of August, which have expressed the outrage of the masses as they have witnessed during the holy month of Ramadan the non-Islamic behavior of the corrupt top-level officials, one of those comments was address to the ambassador "Mr. Ambassador (Jawad) you are involved in sybaritism, extravagance, and dancing with wine, while the Afghan masses are dancing in blood and floods."

On the other hand, Karim Khalili, the second vice president and his deputy are among the corrupts who, apart from other crimes, are involved in religion and national prejudice.

Karzai takes it as an achievement to have embassies and consulates in different countries of the world with the Afghan flag raising above, whereas he shows a total disregard for the suffering of the Afghans and disrespect of the Islamic and Pashtun values and traditions.

The question arise what would happen to the masses of a country whose head, nobles, and top-level officials are indulging in perverted activities, who’s role models are singers and dancers, who pay no attention to the future of the country’s development and improvement.

The imbalance and incompetence among the members of the parliament and judiciary and others such as Fahim, Khalili, Qanoni, Rakiti, Tanai, Rahmani Uloomi and so forth have affected the life and peace of the entire Afghan masses, and their crimes and corruptions are the direct outcome of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Moreover, the nuclear bombs have been used in Afghanistan, the Afghan people continue to be massacred, while their country’s wealth is being looting, all this is being done in the name of democracy, which is nothing but American hypocrisy, a violation of the rights of the Afghan people and a disgrace to Islamic values.

:: Article nr. 69375 sent on 01-sep-2010 16:56 ECT

August 31, 2010

At least 12 NATO troops were killed across Afghanistan today, capping what has turned out to be the deadliest August yet since the war began. At least five US troops were among those killed, though the nationalities of all the slain have not yet been released.

The deaths bring the NATO toll in Afghanistan to 489 this year, just shy of the record toll set in all of 2009. All eight months so far this year have been the deadliest such month in the war, and there is no indication that trend is going to change.

For August the toll was 79 killed, including at least 55 Americans. Again this number may rise as the nationalities of the last few troops remain unidentified. The number is just shy of last month’s 65 US troops killed, which was itself the deadliest month for US troops since the war began.

NATO has claimed "progress" in the war, though these claims seem not to be backed by any of the official figures and seem to fly in the face of the massive death tolls on the ground. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has blasted the current strategy as killing too many civilians, and urged a rethink.

:: Article nr. 69361 sent on 01-sep-2010 02:21 ECT

August 31, 2010

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- U.S. forces lost 22 soldiers in Afghanistan, mostly to roadside bombs, since Friday, marking a bloody step-up in the insurgency as a major U.S.-led offensive seeks to capture the spiritual homeland of the Taliban movement in Kandahar.

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said it is gaining ground against the insurgents, but violence is rising across the country, including in areas that were considered relatively safe.

Five more U.S. soldiers were killed Tuesday, while three Afghan workers for the British charity Oxfam were killed by a roadside bomb in Badakhshan, which had been one of the safer places in the country.

The coalition says that casualties are rising as they push against the strongholds of the Taliban in the south and the allied Haqqani network in the east. The majority of casualties - 60 percent - this year and in 2009 came from improvised explosive devices planted on roads and paths.

U.S. and Afghan forces are expected to begin soon an offensive in Zhari and Panjwai, southwest of Kandahar city, the last part of operation "Hamkari," to secure and stabilize Kandahar province. Mullah Omar started the Taliban movement in this area in 1994, and it conquered much of the country in the two years that followed.

Of the 22 American losses since Friday, 17 were the result of IEDs, according to figures provided by the ISAF. In that period, only one non-American coalition soldier was killed.

"It has all been in the south and the east, where most of the kinetic activity is at the moment," said Katie Kendrick, a spokeswoman for the ISAF in Kabul, referring to the fatalities.

The United States accounted for 55 of the 76 coalition deaths in August, which topped a painful summer for coalition forces, with 102 foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan in June and an additional 88 in July, according to the website iCasualties, which tracks losses in Afghanistan.

Kandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban, from where Mullah Omar had ruled until Afghan and U.S. forces toppled him from power in 2001. The province is considered to be the primary goal of the Taliban, but until this year, analysts think that coalition forces didn't commit sufficient troops to the area.

While the other major operation in the south of Afghanistan this year - targeting the town of Marjah in Helmand province - had a defined and spectacular start, the Kandahar "mission" is more dispersed and less defined.

The coalition and Afghan forces say they've improved security in Kandahar city, though it remains a dangerous place, and gained control over most of the Arghandab valley to the north of the city. The next goal of the push, expected to start within days, in the south are the Taliban-controlled districts of Zhari and Panjwai, where there is little Afghan government presence.

"Zhari and Panjwai are the last pieces of this problem set," said a senior ISAF officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the record. "Today we own about 10 percent of those areas."

The coalition is under pressure to demonstrate progress in Afghanistan ahead of President Barack Obama's deadline of July 2011 to begin the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan. Obama in a Tuesday evening address is to declare an end to the seven-year combat mission in Iraq.

WSWS, August 31, 2010

Another 14 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Saturday, with the death toll so far this year already rising to the level reached for all of 2009.

A pair of roadside bombings took the lives of seven soldiers on Monday, five of them dying in a blast that tore apart a Humvee in which they were riding. Bomb blasts took the lives of four others in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, while three were killed in clashes with armed groups resisting the US-led occupation.

These latest deaths bring US fatalities for the month to nearly 50, after the record 65 killed in July.

NATO has announced that it is investigating yet another report of civilians killed in a US bombing. The air strike last Thursday hit children who were collecting scrap metal on a mountain in the province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan. A local police commander said that the six children killed by the US bombs were aged six to 12. Another child was seriously wounded.

After a much-reported decline in US air strikes, attributed to orders from sacked US senior commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal that were designed to reduce civilian casualties, such strikes are back up again. According to figures released by the Air Force, US warplanes flew 5,500 "close air support" missions in June and July of 2010, compared to 4,600 in the same months last year.

With the Obama administration’s Afghanistan surge having brought US troops up to the full strength of nearly 100,000, together with another 40,000 troops from NATO and other allied countries, fighting has intensified and casualties among both US troops and Afghan civilians are up sharply. New revelations of rampant corruption and CIA payoffs to the US-backed Kabul government raise the inescapable question: What are they dying for?

Among the bodies shipped back to the US through Dover Air Base in flag-draped coffins this past week was that of a 20-year-old from Elizabeth, New Jersey, Army Specialist Pedro Millet, who was killed by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan.

"I feel like someone ripped my heart out. I have no heart. My baby is gone," the soldier’s mother, Denise Meletiche, told reporters outside her home after making the painful journey from the base in Delaware. She said that her son had joined the Army without telling her, explaining only afterwards that he did it to get money to go to college. "I was against the Army," she said. "I’m against war."

The soldier’s stepfather said that Army recruiters had been allowed into Pedro’s high school and enticed him into joining the military. "We’re losing kids in a war, and what are they doing about it?" he said. "This is ridiculous."

What can justify such human sacrifices? Obama, like Bush before him, has tried to frighten the American people into supporting this brutal war by claiming it is necessary to defeat terrorism. This is just as much a lie coming out of the Democratic president’s mouth as it was when uttered by his Republican predecessor.

US military and intelligence officials have repeatedly acknowledged that there are less than 100 Al Qaeda members in all of Afghanistan—compared to 100,000 US troops. Moreover, the 91,000 classified documents released by WikiLeaks, most of them battlefield reports, make virtually no mention of American troops pursuing terrorists. On the contrary, they are fighting to suppress resistance to foreign occupation, a resistance that enjoys broad support from the Afghan people.

A recent poll taken in Helmand and Kandahar provinces by the International Council on Security and Development, a London-based think tank, bears this out. It found that three quarters of the male population believed it was wrong to collaborate with the US-led occupation forces. Roughly the same share said that the Afghan government officials in the area were connected either to drug traffickers or to the armed groups opposing the occupation.

These figures are essentially in sync with those reported by the Pentagon itself in the spring, indicating that less than a quarter of the people in the areas where US forces are battling to suppress Afghan resistance support the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Another study released by the United Nations last January provided a vivid illustration of why Karzai and his cronies are so hated. It found that 52 percent of Afghan adults had been forced to pay at least one bribe to a public official in the previous 12 months, and that, collectively, Afghans had paid out $2.49 billion in bribes in 2009, an amount equal to nearly one-quarter of the country’s gross domestic product.

In a television interview broadcast at the beginning of this month, Obama admitted to the American people that "Nobody thinks that Afghanistan is going to be a model Jeffersonian democracy."

What an understatement! As media revelations of the past several days have made clear, the US-backed regime in Afghanistan is made up of warlords, drug dealers and kleptocrats, most of whom are on the payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Figuring prominently among them is Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the Afghan National Security Council, who was arrested by a US-created Afghan anti-corruption unit in July for taking bribes and attempting to quash an investigation into a company that is reportedly at the center of money laundering for corrupt officials and heroin traffickers. President Karzai intervened immediately to free the aide and block the investigation into the company.

The New York Times, citing senior officials in both Washington and Kabul, established that Zia Salehi had been on the CIA payroll for "many years."

Before joining the Afghan government, the official had served as spokesman for the Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, also on the CIA payroll. Dostum earned his money in part by massacring thousands of unarmed Taliban prisoners in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif during the US invasion in the fall of 2001.

Earlier it was revealed that President Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was also collecting a CIA paycheck while presiding over both drug trafficking and death squads in Kandahar.

During his West Point speech last December announcing his 30,000-troop surge, Obama insisted that "The days of providing a blank check are over. We’ll support Afghan ministries, governors and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people."

Indeed, the checks are not blank. They bear generous figures and are signed by the CIA. They are going to criminal officials who have sold their loyalty to Washington, but are hated by their own people.

These checks are the unmistakable hallmark of a puppet regime installed in the attempt to assert neo-colonial US control in Afghanistan, against the will of the country’s population. This war is not aimed against terrorism. Rather, young American soldiers, drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, are being sent to kill and die in the interests of a US financial aristocracy that is determined to advance its interests by militarily establishing hegemony over Central Asia and its vast energy resources. Working people at home are forced to bear the cost of militarism as hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cuts are imposed on jobs and social services to pay for war.

What is required is the revival of a genuine movement against war, based on the working class and joined with the struggle to defend jobs and living standards against the onslaught being carried out by the banks and corporations and their government.

It must raise the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and for all those in both the Bush and Obama administrations who are responsible for these wars of aggression to be held accountable for war crimes.

:: Article nr. 69282 sent on 29-aug-2010 17:15 ECT

August 29, 2010

Ever since Barack Obama announced July 2011 as the date U.S. troops will start withdrawing from Afghanistan , western politicians, military personnel, and media figures have been ceaselessly discussing the pros and cons of the expected withdrawal. Recently the military has also joined in the fray, supporting Republican calls for a possible extension of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan . The U.S. commander in Afghanistan , David Petraeus, has said on a number of occasions, that depending on the circumstances, he will be willing to suggest Barack Obama, to extend the U.S. withdrawal date to a later point in time. Other generals have been even more obtuse, stating that the withdrawal date was giving "the Taliban sustenance" (Comments by the head of US Marine Corps, General James Conway).

The U.S. military believes, or purports to believe, that the announced withdrawal date by Obama is fuelling the Taliban’s resistance, and somehow winning it new recruits. Supposedly, the reason behind this is that everybody believes that the invaders will withdraw in a few months. There is no denying that the Mujahideen are in fact winning the war, nor that more and more people are joining the ranks of the Taliban. However, to suggest that an announced withdrawal date is the main driving force behind these two phenomena is an untenable premise. The Mujahideen are winning the war because of their devotion to their Islamic duties, and because of the brave Afghan people’s historical contempt for foreign presence in its home land. If, instead of dwelling on philosophical speculation, the U.S. politicians and military generals, had actually studied the history of Afghanistan, they would have come to the conclusion, that the Afghan people have seen enough foreign invasions to know, that no army has ever entered its lands to bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, and nor have they ever withdrawn due to some benevolent feeling of committing to an arbitrary timeline. Foreign armies have always invaded our lands, driven by their greed to plunder our resources and utilize our strategic geographical location to further their expansionist plans. And these armies have only left once they were bled to death by the brave Mujahideen of Afghanistan, whose bravery and steadfastness in battle has become proverbial.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan declared the war against the invading armies because it was their religious duty to do so. The brave warriors of Afghanistan enthusiastically responded to this call, fuelled by their devotion to their religious duty and their intrinsic hatred of the foreigners. The invading army, through its indignant violations of all religious norms, and their incessant brutality against the innocent Afghan civilians has alienated the entire Afghan populace against it. Today, it is hard to find any Afghan civilians who have not suffered at the hands of the invading infidels. The brave Afghan people have sworn to continue fighting in defence of their religious duties and their home country. To the Mujahideen, it doesn’t matter whether the invading forces stay for another 1 year or for the next 50 years, they will continue to harass the enemy, giving it no respite, until either it decides to leave our country, or it is bled to death by a thousand cuts. The longer the invading forces stay in Afghanistan , the more traumatic would be their experience and the more painful its torment. The invading army thinks that increasing its troop numbers to 150 000 would somehow miraculously destroy the morale of the Mujahideen. If only they knew that the Soviets had over 500 000 troops in Afghanistan but to no avail. As the Afghan proverb says: "These are our mountains and we are its dwellers". Whether the invading enemy forces leave in 1 year or in 10 years, we will continue to fight them until they exit our lands, because long after these invaders have left, we would still be here, free and independent.

:: Article nr. 69275 sent on 29-aug-2010 14:54 ECT

August 28, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — Seven U.S. troops have died in weekend attacks in Afghanistan's embattled southern and eastern regions, while officials found the bodies Sunday of five kidnapped campaign workers for a female candidate in the western province of Herat.

Two servicemen died in bombings Sunday in southern Afghanistan, while two others were killed in a bomb attack in the south on Saturday and three in fighting in the east the same day, NATO said. Their identities and other details were being withheld until relatives could be notified.

The latest deaths bring to 42 the number of American forces who have died this month in Afghanistan after July's high of 66. A total of 62 international forces have died in the country this month, including seven British troops.

Fighting is intensifying with the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to bring the total number of international forces in Afghanistan to 120,000 — 100,000 of them American. Most of those new troops have been assigned to the southern insurgent strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces where major battles are fought almost daily as part of a gathering drive to push out the Taliban.

The five campaign workers had been snatched Wednesday by armed men who stopped their two-vehicle convoy as it was traveling through remote countryside. Five others traveling in the vehicles had earlier been set free, according to a man who answered the phone at the home of candidate Fawzya Galani and declined to give his name.

Residents of Herat's Adraskan district reported finding the bodies early Sunday and they were later transported to the local morgue, district chief Nasar Ahmad Popul said.

No one has claimed responsibility for the killings, although Taliban insurgents have been waging a campaign of murder and intimidation in hopes of sabotaging the Sept. 18 parliamentary polls.

Galani may be a particular target of insurgents because she is one of only a few female candidates for the 249 seats in the lower house.

In a similar attack in Herat, male parliamentary candidate Abdul Manan was shot and killed on Saturday on his way to a mosque by an assassin traveling on the back of a motorcycle.

A number of other candidates and their aides have been killed, injured or threatened around the country.

While streets in the capital Kabul are festooned with campaign posters, many Afghans say they don't plan to vote, either because of safety concerns or cynicism over ineffective government and widespread corruption.

Electoral officials cut the number of nationwide voting sites for the elections by nearly 1,000 to 5,897 because of security concerns.

Meanwhile on Sunday, two suicide bombers attempted to climb over the back wall of a compound housing the governor of the far western province of Farah, but were spotted by guards and shot, provincial police Chief Mohammad Faqir Askir said.

The men's vests exploded, although it wasn't clear if they detonated them themselves or if it was because they were hit by bullets, Askir said.

The explosions blasted a hole in the wall and blew out windows in the compound, but there were no reports of deaths or injuries, he said.

NATO said eight insurgents were killed in joint Afghan-NATO operations Saturday night in the province of Paktiya, including a Taliban commander, Naman, accused of coordinating roadside bomb attacks and the movement of ammunition, supplies and fighters.

Automatic weapons, grenades, magazines and bomb-making material were found in buildings in Zormat district along the mountainous border with Pakistan. Afghan leaders frequently complain that Pakistan is doing to little to prevent cross-border incursions and shut down insurgent safe havens in its territory.

Just south in Khost province, U.S. and Afghan troops raised the death toll among insurgents to more than 30 in simultaneous attacks Saturday by around 50 fighters on Forward Operating Base Salerno and nearby Camp Chapman, where seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack in December.

Insurgents wore replica American uniforms and at least 13 had strapped themselves into suicide bomb vests.

The early morning raids appeared to be part of an insurgent strategy to step up attacks in widely scattered parts of the country as the U.S. focuses its resources on the battle around Kandahar.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said two Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded in the fighting, although NATO said there had been no deaths among the defenders. Four U.S. troops were wounded, NATO officials said.

U.S. and Afghan officials blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based faction of the Taliban with close ties to al-Qaida. In follow-up operations Sunday, a Haqqani commander involved in the attacks and two other insurgents were detained in Khost's Sabari district, NATO said.

NATO also said it launched an airstrike in the northern province of Kunduz on three insurgents, including a commander with the Taliban-allied Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan responsible for recruiting foreign fighters and leading attacks. At least one of the three was killed and another wounded, the alliance said.

NATO has stepped up efforts to provide security to allow an election whose outcome will be generally accepted as credible, hoping that will help stabilize the nation's fractious politics that are helping fuel the violence.

Yet frictions have continued to mar the relationship between the government of President Hamid Karzai and its international partners, largely over the knotty question of endemic official corruption.

On Saturday, the government criticized U.S. media reports that numerous Afghan officials had allegedly received payments from the CIA — including one who reportedly took a bribe to block a wide-ranging probe into graft.

A presidential office statement did not address or deny any specific allegations, but called the reports an insult to the government and an attempt to defame people within it.

The statement came the same day as a top graft-battling Afghan prosecutor said he had been forced into retirement.

Deputy Attorney General Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar has complained that the attorney general and others are blocking corruption cases against high-ranking government officials. He said Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko wrote a retirement letter for him earlier in the week and that Karzai accepted it.

:: Article nr. 69245 sent on 28-aug-2010 13:38 ECT

August 27, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA is making payments to a significant number of officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

Citing current and former U.S. officials, the paper said the payments were long-standing in many cases and intended to help the agency maintain a source of information within the Afghan government.

Some Karzai aides were CIA informants and others received payments to ensure their accessibility, the Post said, citing a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CIA payments have continued despite concerns that the agency is backing corrupt officials, the report said.

The Post said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano disputed the official's characterization, saying, "This anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both."

Corruption and governance in Afghanistan are being scrutinized in Washington as U.S. President Barack Obama plans a strategy review in December, a month after mid-term Congressional elections will be held and amid sagging support for the war.

The Washington Post also cited a former CIA official as saying that the CIA payments to Afghan officials were necessary because "the head of state is not going to tell you everything" and because Karzai often seems unaware of moves that members of his own government make.

Obama pressured Karzai earlier this year to do more to root out corruption, which Washington says complicates efforts to win over the population to the effort by foreign and Afghan forces to fight a widening insurgency.

In addition to cleaning up Afghan governance, Obama's war strategy hinges on building up the country's army and police forces to take over security responsibility.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that one of Karzai's key national security advisors who is under investigation for allegedly soliciting bribes was on the CIA payroll.

Karzai's half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a businessman and political power broker in Kandahar has been widely accused of amassing a vast fortune from the drug trade, intimidating rivals and having links to the CIA, charges he strongly denies.

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Source: Reuters US Online Report World News

:: Article nr. 69181 sent on 26-aug-2010 10:39 ECT

August 25, 2010

Hundreds of civilians have tried to storm a Nato base in north-western Afghanistan after Spanish trainers there killed a police recruit from the area.

Residents of Qalay-e Naw, the provincial capital of Badghis province, gathered at the gate to the military camp, throwing stones and demanding that the troops leave their country, before moving on to provincial government offices.

Some witnesses reported that a part of the base had been set on fire, but this could not be confirmed.

The militant rally was sparked by rumours that a local police recruit had been shot dead in the Nato base there.

Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba confirmed that an Afghan recruit had been shot dead - after he turned his gun on members of the Civil Guard who had been training him.

Mr Perez said that the trainee killed two of the paramilitary policemen along with their interpreter.

Majid Khan Shkib, a member of the provincial council, surmised that militants in the remote area had infiltrated the local police force.

The demonstration in Badghis was the third to target a Nato base in 11 days.

On Monday thousands of civilians rallied outside the sprawling US military facility and concentration camp at Bagram over the arrest of an Islamic scholar accused of attacking occupation forces.

And on August 15 protesters gathered outside the base over the alleged expropriation of villagers' land for the construction of new military facilities.

Infiltrator shootings

July 20: Two US contractors and two Afghan soldiers are killed when an Afghan soldier who trained others at a base outside Mazar-e-Sharif sprays them with bullets during a weapons exercise.

July 13: An Afghan soldier kills three British service members with gunfire and a rocket-propelled grenade in the dead of night. The Taliban claim that he was a militant sympathiser taken in by guerillas after the assault.

May 19: A US army trainer is killed by a suicide bomber in an Afghan army uniform.

November 4: An Afghan policeman kills five British soldiers at a checkpoint in

BAGHLAN, Afghanistan, Aug. 21, 2010 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of people came to the streets of Baghlan-e-Jadid district on Saturday and denounced what they described the arbitrary killing and arresting civilians by NATO-led troops. "Some 900 to 1,000 people came to the streets today to express their protest over killing one person and arresting two others in Baghlan-e-Jadid district last night," deputy to provincial council Assadullah Shahbaz told Xinhua.

The protestors said that the NATO troops raided a house Friday night, killing a civilian and taking away two others.

Chanting anti-government and anti-NATO slogans, the protestors warned to hold demonstrations in the future if killing civilians is not investigated.

Meantime, an official, Abdul Rasoul, rejected the claim, saying one of the arrested persons is a Taliban commander.

However, police said investigation is underway to find the fact.

"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" was former non-Sen. Al Franken's 2003 examination of the lies and distortions of right-wing pundits and politicians.

Such a book, if it were written today, should certainly include a fair and balanced look at some of the lying liars still running our foreign policy: in particular, at Mr. David Petraeus. (Mr. Franken might not be the best candidate for writing such a book today, given that he voted recently against Senator Feingold's amendment requiring the president to establish a timetable for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, even as Democratic leaders like Senator Durbin supported Feingold's amendment.)

Harsh words about Petraeus? Yes. Justified? Absolutely.

Consider: Petraeus has been leading a campaign of "domestic information operations" to browbeat Congress and the American people to accept limiting the size of, and possibly even a delay of, the drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 that President Obama promised when he acceded to the military's demand for a "surge" of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan last fall.

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In a recent interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," Petraeus " implied that he might recommend against any withdrawal of US forces next summer, causing the White House to reaffirm its commitment to the July 2012 deadline in response, saying, "The date is not negotiable."

"Certainly, yes," [Petraeus] said when the show's host, David Gregory, asked him if, depending on how the war was proceeding, he might tell the president that a drawdown should be delayed.

These words make Petraeus a "lying liar." Because asking for more time if the "surge" didn't work within 18 months is exactly what Petraeus promised not to do when the "surge" was decided.

As Newsweek reported, in an excerpt from Jonathan Alter's book "The Promise" (all emphasis mine):

Obama was moving ... toward conclusions and eventually presidential orders. This would not be a five- to seven-year nation-building commitment, much less an open-ended one. The time frame the military was offering for both getting in and getting out must shrink dramatically, he said. There would be no nationwide counterinsurgency strategy; the Pentagon was to present a "targeted" plan for protecting population centers, training Afghan security forces, and beginning a real - not a token - withdrawal within 18 months of the escalation.

On Sunday, November 29, having made his decision, the president decided to hold a final Oval Office meeting with the Pentagon brass and commanders in the region who would carry out his orders. He wanted to put it directly to the military: Gates, Mullen, Cartwright, Petraeus and national security adviser Jim Jones, without any of the others. Obama asked Biden to come back early from Thanksgiving in Nantucket to join him for the meeting.

As they walked along the portico toward the Oval Office, Biden asked if the new policy of beginning a significant withdrawal in 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn't be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes.

[...]

Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, "David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"

"Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame," Petraeus replied.

"Good. No problem," the president said. "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"

"Yes, sir, in agreement," Petraeus said.

"Yes, sir," Mullen said.

[...]

The president then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda, and build the Afghan Army. "I'm not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don't agree with me that we can execute this, say so now," he said. No one said anything.

"Tell me now," Obama repeated.

"Fully support, sir," Mullen said.

"Ditto," Petraeus said.

[...]

If conditions didn't stabilize enough to begin an orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces (or if they deteriorated further), that would undermine the Pentagon's belief in the effectiveness of more troops. The commanders couldn't say they didn't have enough time to make the escalation work because they had specifically said, under explicit questioning, that they did.

As far as I am aware, Petraeus has never disputed Mr. Alter's account of these events.

And as far as I am aware, no reporter has asked Petraeus during his current media tour about the contradiction between his current advocacy for delaying the withdrawal and his "Yes, sir" under explicit questioning that he would not ask for more time. I look forward to being corrected on this point.

No doubt, some will respond cynically to the blatant contradiction between what Petraeus is saying now and what he said in November. "So, Petraeus is a lying politician - what else is news?" But the point is that while Petraeus acts like a lying politician, he is treated by the mainstream media as if he were beyond politics, above criticism, merely a professional military man giving his neutral, unbiased, impartial professional military advice. That lack of scrutiny makes Petraeus a more dangerous liar than a politician.

A friend claims he has a reliable method for getting kicked off a jury. When the judge asks him if he is more likely to believe the testimony of a policeman over that of any other citizen, my friend will say that he is less likely to believe the testimony of a policeman, explaining that policemen, compared to other citizens, are almost never prosecuted for perjury, so they have less disincentive to lie under oath, and a person evaluating a policeman's testimony compared to other testimony should take that into account.

The same considerations apply to Petraeus' treatment by the media. Because they subject him to less scrutiny than they do to ordinary politicians, even when he is making political statements - and the decision to withdraw or not to withdraw troops is fundamentally a political decision, not a military one - Petraeus has less disincentive to lie than other politicians.

This week, the number of US deaths in the Afghanistan war since President Obama took office surpassed the number of deaths under President Bush (download a web counter here; spread the news here.)

This should be the occasion for a fundamental rethink of what we are doing in Afghanistan, including a debate on establishing a timetable to complete a military withdrawal. The last thing we need to be doing now is handing over decision making to an unelected leader named Petraeus. If his clear statement in November that he would not ask for more time cannot now be trusted, why should we now trust anything else he has to say about questions that are fundamentally political, especially the drawdown?

Meanwhile, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is appealing to NBC to have a guest on "Meet the Press" to talk about the war besides Petraeus and his disciples. You can support FAIR's effort here.

August 20, 2010

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghan police said Friday that 30 security guards had been killed in a clash with Taliban fighters and that another 15 had been wounded.

"The Taliban attacked and during the fighting, which lasted the whole day, 30 guards were killed, around 15 were injured and some others were taken by the Taliban," said the deputy police chief of southern province Helmand.

The clashes took place in Helmand's volatile Sangin district on Thursday, Kamaludin Sherzai told AFP.

Officials earlier said they believed that around 12 guards had been killed when the heavy gunbattles broke out between insurgents and guards working for a road construction company in Sangin.

Helmand provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi said a dozen bodies were evacuated Friday to a hospital in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.

"We know that they were killed during yesterday's fighting with the Taliban. We don't know whether they are guards or workers," he said.

The Taliban claimed involvement in Thursday's attack.

"We launched an attack on the road construction company along the Sangin and Gereshk road," Zabihullah Mujahed, a rebel spokesman, said by telephone, referring to the region where authorities said the fighting took place.

"We took more than 30 checkposts along the road and killed more than 50 guards," he said, speaking from an undisclosed location.

The Taliban are known to exaggerate the impact of their operations.

Helmand, along with neighbouring Kandahar, is one of the most unstable regions of Afghanistan, where Taliban-linked insurgents have been fighting the Kabul government for almost nine years.

The United States and NATO have 141,000 troops in the country trying to quell the intensifying war, with many new deployments heading south.

Abdul Mohammad, an employee of the road construction company, said he accompanied the bodies to the hospital.

He described the fighting as "fierce" and said at least another 20 bodies had been either left behind or removed from the battle scene.

"Yesterday the Taliban attacked us. We requested help from Afghan and foreign forces but no one helped. Lots of people were killed, I think more than 20 other bodies were left in the area or have been taken elsewhere," he said.

It’s increasingly clear that the ground-war version of the Global War on Terror has featured its own growing assassination wing.  Striking numbers of special operations forces have by now been assigned to what can only be termed assassination missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  We don’t yet know the full scope of these activities, but it was no mistake that our last Afghan war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, emerged from a world of counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency.  He made his reputation in the shadows as a "manhunter," overseeing the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command which, among other things, ran what journalist Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

McChrystal received kudos in the U.S. media for the counterinsurgency strategy he implemented in Afghanistan and for restricting U.S. troops from calling in air and artillery support when civilians might be in the vicinity.  However, he surrounded himself with former special operations officers, surged in thousands of special operations troops, and cranked up the activities of special ops assassination teams.  Now, new war commander General David Petraeus, who has a reputation as the guru of counterinsurgency, is overseeing a further escalation of counter-terror operations in that country.

In other words, the U.S. military is now in the "man-hunting" business in a big way in Afghanistan and globally.  Thanks to the massive recent release of secret U.S. military documents by the website Wikileaks, we know far more about what was largely a secret set of activities in Afghanistan (though Anand Gopal did a riveting report on special ops "night raids" for TomDispatch in January), and in particular about a previously unknown manhunting unit called Task Force 373.  TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, author of Halliburton's Army, who has spent much time reporting on the American war in Afghanistan, digs deep into what can now be known about this secretive task force, the doctrine it swears by, and the missions it carries out. Tom

The Secret Killers 
Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373 
By Pratap Chatterjee

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these "manhunting" operations and the units assigned to them "capture/kill" teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest.  Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military "capture/kill" team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name "Carbon," had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency ("protecting the people") and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.

For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plush assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected. In an article for Foreign Service Journal published a couple of months before the meeting, he wrote, "I felt like I never really knew what was going on, where I was supposed to be, what my role was, or if I even had one. In particular, I didn't speak either language that I needed: Pashtu or military."

It had been no less awkward for Phillips. Just a month earlier, he had personally handed over "solatia" payments -- condolence payments for civilian deaths wrongfully caused by U.S. forces -- in Governor Sherzai's presence, while condemning the act of a Taliban suicide bomber who had killed 19 civilians, setting off the incident in question. "We come here as your guests," he told the relatives of those killed, "invited to aid in the reconstruction and improved security and governance of Nangarhar, to bring you a better life and a brighter future for you and your children.  Today, as I look upon the victims and their families, I join you in mourning for your loved ones."

Hall and Phillips were in charge of a portfolio of 33 active U.S. reconstruction projects worth $11 million in Nangarhar, focused on road-building, school supplies, and an agricultural program aimed at exporting fruits and vegetables from the province.

Yet the mission of their military-led "provincial reconstruction team" (made up of civilian experts, State department officials, and soldiers) appeared to be in direct conflict with those of the "capture/kill" team of special operations forces (Navy Seals, Army Rangers, and Green Berets, together with operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division) whose mandate was to pursue Afghans alleged to be terrorists as well as insurgent leaders.  That team was leaving a trail of dead civilian bodies and recrimination in its wake.

Details of some of the missions of Task Force 373 first became public as a result of more than 76,000 incident reports leaked to the public by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website, together with analyses of those documents in Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the New York Times. A full accounting of the depredations of the task force may be some time in coming, however, as the Obama administration refuses to comment on its ongoing assassination spree in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A short history of the unit can nonetheless be gleaned from a careful reading of the Wikileaks documents as well as related reports from Afghanistan and unclassified Special Forces reports.

The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the "Joint Prioritized Effects List" (JPEL) were considered "capture/kill" targets in Afghanistan. A total of 757 prisoners -- most likely from this list -- were being held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (BTIF), a U.S.-run prison on Bagram Air Base as of the end of December 2009.

Capture/Kill Operations

The idea of "joint" teams from different branches of the military working collaboratively with the CIA was first conceived in 1980 after the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw, when personnel from the Air Force, Army, and Navy engaged in a disastrously botched, seat-of-the-pants attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran with help from the Agency. Eight soldiers were killed when two helicopters collided in the Iranian desert. Afterwards, a high-level, six-member commission led by Admiral James L. Holloway, III recommended the creation of a Joint Special Forces command to ensure that different branches of the military and the CIA should do far more advance coordination planning in the future.

This process accelerated greatly after September 11, 2001.  That month, a CIA team called Jawbreaker headed for Afghanistan to plan a U.S.-led invasion of the country. Shortly thereafter, an Army Green Beret team set up Task Force Dagger to pursue the same mission. Despite an initial rivalry between the commanders of the two groups, they eventually teamed up.

The first covert "joint" team involving the CIA and various military special operations forces to work together in Afghanistan was Task Force 5, charged with the mission of capturing or killing "high value targets" like Osama bin Laden, senior leaders of al-Qaeda, and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the head of the Taliban. A sister organization set up in Iraq was called Task Force 20. The two were eventually combined into Task Force 121 by General John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command.

In a new book to be released this month, Operation Darkheart, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer describes the work of Task Force 121 in 2003, when he was serving as part of a team dubbed the Jedi Knights.  Working under the alias of Major Christopher Stryker, he ran operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency (the military equivalent of the CIA) out of Bagram Air Base.

One October night, Shaffer was dropped into a village near Asadabad in Kunar province by an MH-47 Chinook helicopter to lead a "joint" team, including Army Rangers (a Special Forces division) and 10th Mountain Division troops.  They were on a mission to capture a lieutenant of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notorious warlord allied with the Taliban, based on information provided by the CIA.

It wasn't easy. "They succeeded in striking at the core of the Taliban and their safe havens across the border in Pakistan. For a moment Shaffer saw us winning the war," reads the promotional material for the book. "Then the military brass got involved. The policies that top officials relied on were hopelessly flawed. Shaffer and his team were forced to sit and watch as the insurgency grew -- just across the border in Pakistan."

Almost a quarter century after Operation Eagle Claw, Shaffer, who was part of the Able Danger team that had pursued Al Qaeda in the 1990s, describes the bitter turf wars between the CIA and Special Forces teams over how the shadowy world of secret assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be run.

Task Force 373

Fast forward to 2007, the first time Task Force 373 is mentioned in the Wikileaks documents. We don’t know whether its number means anything, but coincidentally or not, chapter 373 of the U.S. Code 10, the act of Congress that sets out what the U.S. military is legally allowed to do, permits the Secretary of Defense to empower any "civilian employee" of the military "to execute warrants and make arrests without a warrant" in criminal matters. Whether or not this is indeed the basis for that "373" remains a classified matter -- as indeed, until the Wikileaks document dump occurred, was the very existence of the group.

Analysts say that Task Force 373 complements Task Force 121 by using "white forces" like the Rangers and the Green Berets, as opposed to the more secretive Delta Force. Task Force 373 is supposedly run out of three military bases -- in Kabul, the Afghan capital; Kandahar, the country’s second largest city; and Khost City near the Pakistani tribal lands.  It’s possible that some of its operations also come out of Camp Marmal, a German base in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Sources familiar with the program say that the task force has its own helicopters and aircraft, notably AC-130 Spectre gunships, dedicated only to its use.

Its commander appears to have been Brigadier General Raymond Palumbo, based out of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Palumbo, however, left Fort Bragg in mid-July, shortly after General Stanley McChrystal was relieved as Afghan war commander by President Obama. The name of the new commander of the task force is not known.

In more than 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files, Task Force 373 is described as leading numerous "capture/kill" efforts, notably in Khost, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces, all bordering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan. Some reportedly resulted in successful captures, while others led to the death of local police officers or even small children, causing angry villagers to protest and attack U.S.-led military forces.

In April 2007, David Adams, commander of the Khost provincial reconstruction team, was called to meet with elders from the village of Gurbuz in Khost province, who were angry about Task Force 373's operations in their community. The incident report on Wikileaks does not indicate just what Task Force 373 did to upset Gurbuz’s elders, but the governor of Khost, Arsala Jamal, had been publicly complaining about Special Forces operations and civilian deaths in his province since December 2006, when five civilians were killed in a raid on Darnami village.

"This is our land," he said then. "I've been asking with greater force: Let us sit together, we know our Afghan brothers, we know our culture better. With these operations we should not create more enemies. We are in a position to reduce mistakes."

As Adams would later recall in an op-ed he co-authored for the Wall Street Journal, "The increasing number of raids on Afghan homes alienated many of Khost's tribal elders."

On June 12, 2007, Danny Hall and Gordon Philips, working in Nangarhar province just northeast of Khost, were called into that meeting with Governor Sherzai to explain how Task Force 373 had killed those seven local Afghan police officers.  Like Jamal, Sherzai made the point to Hall and Philips that "he strongly encourages better coordination… and he further emphasized that he does not want to see this happen again."

Less than a week later, a Task Force 373 team fired five rockets at a compound in Nangar Khel in Paktika province to the south of Khost, in an attempt to kill Abu Laith al-Libi, an alleged al-Qaeda member from Libya. When the U.S. forces made it to the village, they found that Task Force 373 had destroyed a madrassa (or Islamic school), killing six children and grievously wounding a seventh who, despite the efforts of a U.S. medical team, would soon die. (In late January 2008, al-Libi was reported killed by a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone strike in a village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan in Pakistan.)

Paktika Governor Akram Khapalwak met with the U.S. military the day after the raid. Unlike his counterparts in Khost and Nangarhar, Khapalwak agreed to support the "talking points" developed for Task Force 373 to explain the incident to the media. According to the Wikileaks incident report, the governor then "echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could've been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area."

However, no military talking points, no matter in whose mouth, could stop the civilian deaths as long as Task Force 373’s raids continued.

On October 4, 2007, its members called in an air strike -- 500 pound Paveway bombs -- on a house in the village of Laswanday, just six miles from Nangar Khel in Paktika province (where those seven children had already died). This time, four men, one woman, and a girl -- all civilians -- as well as a donkey, a dog, and several chickens would be slaughtered. A dozen U.S. soldiers were injured, but the soldiers reported that not one "enemy" was detained or killed.

The Missing Afghan Story

Not all raids resulted in civilian deaths.  The U.S. military incident reports released by Wikileaks suggest that Task Force 373 had better luck in capturing "targets" alive and avoiding civilian deaths on December 14, 2007. The 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne) was asked that day to support Task Force 373 in a search in Paktika province for Bitonai and Nadr, two alleged al-Qaeda leaders listed on the JPEL. The operation took place just outside the town of Orgun, close to U.S. Forward Operating Base (FOB) Harriman. Located 7,000 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains, it hosts about 300 soldiers as well as a small CIA compound, and is often visited by chattering military helicopters well as sleepy camel herds belonging to local Pashtuns.

An airborne assault team code-named "Operation Spartan" descended on the compounds where Bitonai and Nadr were supposed to be living, but failed to find them. When a local Afghan informant told the Special Forces soldiers that the suspects were at a location about two miles away, Task Force 373 seized both men as well as 33 others who were detained at FOB Harriman for questioning and possible transfer to the prison at Bagram.

But when Task Force 373 was on the prowl, civilians were, it seems, always at risk, and while the Wikileaks documents reveal what the U.S soldiers were willing to report, the Afghan side of the story was often left in a ditch.  For example, on a Monday night in mid-November 2009, Task Force 373 conducted an operation to capture or kill an alleged militant code-named "Ballentine" in Ghazni province. A terse incident report announced that one Afghan woman and four "insurgents" had been killed. The next morning, Task Force White Eagle, a Polish unit under the command of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, reported that some 80 people gathered to protest the killings. The window of an armored vehicle was damaged by the angry villagers, but the documents don’t offer us their version of the incident.

In an ironic twist, one of the last Task Force 373 incidents recorded in the Wikileaks documents was almost a reprise of the original Operation Eagle Claw disaster that led to the creation of the "joint" capture/kill teams. Just before sunrise on October 26, 2009, two U.S. helicopters, a UH-1 Huey and an AH-1 Cobra, collided near the town of Garmsir in the southern province of Helmand, killing four Marines.

Closely allied with Task Force 373 is a British unit, Task Force 42, composed of Special Air Service, Special Boat Service, and Special Reconnaissance Regiment commandos who operate in Helmand province and are mentioned in several Wikileaks incident reports.

Manhunting

"Capture/kill" is a key part of a new military "doctrine" developed by the Special Forces Command established after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw. Under the leadership of General Bryan D. Brown, who took over the Special Forces Command in September 2003, the doctrine came to be known as F4, which stood for "find, fix, finish, and follow-up" -- a slightly euphemistic but not hard to understand message about how alleged terrorists and insurgents were to be dealt with.

Under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Bush years, Brown began setting up "joint Special Forces" teams to conduct F4 missions outside war zones.  These were given the anodyne name "Military Liaison Elements." At least one killing by such a team in Paraguay (of an armed robber not on any targeting list) was written up by New York Times reporters Scott Shane and Thom Shanker. The team, whose presence had not been made known to the U.S. ambassador there, was ordered to leave the country.

"The number-one requirement is to defend the homeland. And so sometimes that requires that you find and capture or kill terrorist targets around the world that are trying to do harm to this nation," Brown told the House Committee on Armed Services in March 2006. "Our foreign partners… are willing but incapable nations that want help in building their own capability to defend their borders and eliminate terrorism in their countries or in their regions." In April 2007, President Bush rewarded Brown's planning by creating a special high-level office at the Pentagon for an assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.

Michael G. Vickers, made famous in the book and film Charlie Wilson's War as the architect of the covert arms-and-money supply chain to the mujaheedin in the CIA’s anti-Soviet Afghan campaign of the 1980s, was nominated to fill the position. Under his leadership, a new directive was issued in December 2008 to "develop capabilities for extending U.S. reach into denied areas and uncertain environments by operating with and through indigenous foreign forces or by conducting low visibility operations."  In this way, the "capture/kill" program was institutionalized in Washington.

"The war on terror is fundamentally an indirect war… It's a war of partners… but it also is a bit of the war in the shadows, either because of political sensitivity or the problem of finding terrorists," Vickers told the Washington Post as 2007 ended. "That's why the Central Intelligence Agency is so important… and our Special Operations forces play a large role."

George W. Bush's departure from the White House did not dampen the enthusiasm for F4.  Quite the contrary: even though the F4 formula has recently been tinkered with, in typical military fashion, and has now become "find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze," or F3EA, President Obama has, by all accounts, expanded military intelligence gathering and "capture/kill" programs globally in tandem with an escalation of drone-strike operations by the CIA.

There are quite a few outspoken supporters of the "capture/kill" doctrine. Columbia University Professor Austin Long is one academic who has jumped on the F3EA bandwagon. Noting its similarity to the Phoenix assassination program, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the U.S. war in Vietnam (which he defends), he has called for a shrinking of the U.S. military "footprint" in Afghanistan to 13,000 Special Forces troops who would focus exclusively on counter-terrorism, particularly assassination operations. "Phoenix suggests that intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm can have a powerful effect on even extremely large and capable armed groups," he and his co-author William Rosenau wrote in a July 2009 Rand Institute monograph entitled" "The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency."

Others are even more aggressively inclined. Lieutenant George Crawford, who retired from the position of "lead strategist" for the Special Forces Command to go work for Archimedes Global, Inc., a Washington consulting firm, has suggested that F3EA be replaced by one term: "Manhunting." In a monograph published by the Joint Special Operations University in September 2009, "Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare," Crawford spells out "how to best address the responsibility to develop manhunting as a capability for American national security."

Killing the Wrong People

The strange evolution of these concepts, the creation of ever more global hunter-killer teams whose purpose in life is assassination 24/7, and the civilians these "joint Special Forces" teams regularly kill in their raids on supposed "targets" have unsettled even military experts.

For example, Christopher Lamb, the acting director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, and Martin Cinnamond, a former U.N. official in Afghanistan, penned an article for the Spring 2010 issue of the Joint Forces Quarterly in which they wrote: "There is broad agreement… that the indirect approach to counterinsurgency should take precedence over kill/capture operations. However, the opposite has occurred."

Other military types claim that the hunter-killer approach is short-sighted and counterproductive. "My take on Task Force 373 and other task forces, it has a purpose because it keeps the enemy off balance. But It does not understand the fundamental root cause of the conflict, of why people are supporting the Taliban," says Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department contractor who resigned from the government last September. Hoh, who often worked with Task Force 373 as well as other Special Forces "capture/kill" programs in Afghanistan and Iraq, adds: "We are killing the wrong people, the mid-level Taliban who are only fighting us because we are in their valleys. If we were not there, they would not be fighting the U.S."

Task Force 373 may be a nightmare for Afghans.  For the rest of us -- now that Wikileaks has flushed it into the open -- it should be seen as a symptom of deeper policy disasters.  After all, it raises a basic question: Is this country really going to become known as a global Manhunters, Inc.?

Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist, TomDispatch regular, and senior editor at CorpWatch who has worked extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia, including nine trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has written two books about the war on terror: Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009). He recommends using DiaryDig to better understand the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary. A good glossary of military acronyms can be found by clicking here. You can contact him via email at pchatterjee@igc.org.

Copyright 2010 Pratap Chatterjee