The Afghan anti-war movement grows

Coverage of Afghanistan's burgeoning anti-war movement is sadly quite scarce, though we have seen in this space some of the more interesting reporting (see here for example). Lately, however, there have been developments which shed some interesting light on the (mostly) non-violent Afghan anti-war movement.

The Afghanistan Solidarity Party (ASP) has a platform dedicated to "women’s rights, democracy, and secular society, a disarming of the country, and freedom of the press," according to a spokesperson interviewed by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls. Formed in 2004, the ASP has its roots in Maoist parties of the past, though it may be mentioned that Maoism in Afghanistan was often simply a label for anti-Soviet Marxists and socialists. In a manner typical of Afghan political parties, the ASP operates as a coalition of six parties and forms a part of a larger association of like-minded secular parties oriented toward democracy. It reports being active in most of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

The party's pursuit of a human rights-centered value system has earned it many members. The internationally respected former Afghan foreign minister Dadfar Spanta, once a member of Germany's Green Party, joined the ASP a while after its founding.

As well, the ASP has won the admiration of widely-known Afghan activist Malalai Joya. When asked by an Italian audience last year about what groups they could financially support, Joya recommended RAWA, the Afghan Women's Mission and the ASP.

Indeed the ASP has gained a wide variety of supporters. Canada's own liberal war-boosters the Canada-Afghan Solidarity Committee have helped raise money for them. CASC's Terry Glavin, a pro-war fanatic if there ever was one, wrote in 2008:

It's heartening to see the Afghanistan Solidarity Party making a comeback after key party leader and co-founder Lal Mohammad was beheaded by the Taliban three years ago. ...

These are precisely the kind of Afghans the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee wants Canadians to know more about, and to support, politically, morally and materially. (link)

At the time the ASP was involved in the kind of mobilizing that Western war advocates can easily get behind. The party headed up a large demo in Kabul that year in support of Pervez Kambakhsh, the student journalist who has since been freed from death row. The CASC, however, will no doubt be disappointed to hear that the ASP is now mobilizing against the US-led occupation of their country.

Here you can see a Youtube video of an ASP protest in Herat this past May condemning Iran's hanging of several Afghan nationals living in Iran. The video shows a woman lifting her burka to speak into a megaphone, some minor property damage inflicted upon the Iranian embassy as well as what appears to be tussling with police. Participants are evidently a fairly broad mixture of people from secular and religious walks of life.

The Herat protest was part of several which the ASP organized in various cities. You can see photos of those demos here. All of them featured rhetoric aimed at the United States as well as Iran, and ASP banners denouncing the American-led occupation were prominent.

On July 30, a significant event occurred on the streets of Kabul, near the American embassy. A DynCorp SUV was involved in a collision with a civilian vehicle, killing one and seriously injuring two more. Accounts differ as to what followed, as US officials deny that the security contractors opened fire on the gathering crowd. In any case, a spontaneous protest broke out among those present, resulting in rioting as two DynCorp vehicles, the first having been joined by another, were set on fire. While most reports say that demonstrators set them on fire, AFP has an interesting account:

It was unclear how the vehicles were set alight, as some security firms torch cars they are forced to abandon as a matter of policy, a security contractor in Kabul said, speaking on condition of anonymity. (link)

The DynCorp employees reported injuries from the rioting. Press photos show young Afghans joyously stomping on a burning American SUV as others wield clubs and throw rocks at the wreck.

The ASP soon organized a protest to harness the anti-occupation sentiment. On August 1, hundreds of Kabulis hit the streets behind ASP banners and placards of various anti-occupation themes, one of which featured the iconic media image of young protesters smashing a DynCorp truck. The photos from the demo appear to show young men using face coverings to hide their identities (see here and here in particular).

Here's the story in the Afghan press:

Kabul residents protest against foreign troops
By Abdul Qadir Siddiqui

KABUL, Aug 1 (Pajhwok) Hundreds of men and women protested against foreign troops on Sunday in Kabul and demanded their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The demonstration started at around 10am from Shah Do Shamshera area of Kabul toward Deh Aghanan square, where the protesters chanted "death to the invaders", "death to the countries which interfere in the affairs of Afghanistan" and "killers of Afghans should leave Afghanistan."

The demonstration follows the deaths on Friday of four civilians [later said to be one killed, several injured - DM] whose car apparently pulled out in front of an armoured vehicle belonging to an American Embassy contractor and was crushed. The accident drew large crowds who threw stones and set the contractors vehicles on fire.

The protesters also chanted slogans against Pakistan and Iran, two other countries they accuse of interfering in Afghanistans affairs.

They condemned the acts of US and its alliance in Afghanistan, said chairman of Afghanistan Solidarity Party, Daud Razmak, who led the demonstration. ... (link)

And the Washington Post has more on the August 1 protest:

"Many times NATO troops and these cars have killed our innocent people. They never care whether we are Afghans or animals," said Samia, 26, an activist from Kabul who took part in the demonstration.

Samia, who like many Afghans goes by only one name, said that she did not want the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan but that NATO has only aggravated the situation over the past decade and fed a parasitic and dependent Afghan government.

"We want NATO troops and American troops to leave Afghanistan. Even with their huge army, they couldn't do anything in the past 10 years. And in the future, they won't be able to do anything." (link)

Petraeus' first move: proxy forces

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that a couple of years ago, I was regularly running long compilations of civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces (see, for example, here and here). Deadly incidents occurred every few days for months on end. More than once did the tally of civilians killed by western troops exceed that of civilians killed by the Taliban.

Evidence of such carnage has been thinner for over a year now, suggesting two possibilities: Either there were fewer civilians killed by occupation forces, or the incidents continued at the same rate while there was less reporting of them. Few doubt that General McChrystal's new stricter rules of engagement, aimed at winning Afghan hearts and minds, had resulted in less danger to the Afghan public. Soldiers were often quoted lamenting that their hands were tied by the new rules.

It is now widely known that General McChrystal's replacement, General Petraeus, has decided to reverse the earlier order, returning the rules of engagement to their former character.

In contrast, another of McChrystal's policy innovations has been treated with more interest. His efforts to introduce militias are being intensified by his successor:

Petraeus's first act is to establish militias to fight the Taliban
General persuades a reluctant President Karzai to sign up to tactics imported from Iraq

Kim Sengupta - The Independent

HELMAND, July 16 - Armed militias of the type used to fight the insurgency in Iraq are to be introduced to Afghanistan in what is seen as a controversial part of the new strategy of General David Petraeus to counter the tide of Taliban attacks.

The setting up of the groups – who will provide up to 10,000 fighters – is the first major initiative by General Petraeus after taking over command of Western forces in the Afghan campaign following the sacking of his fellow American, General Stanley McChrystal.

The move, has, however, faced resistance from Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, who fears that the groups would become power bases for regional strongmen. ...

The militias are to be deployed in less inhabited areas, which have seen a drawdown of Western forces in accordance with General McChrystal's decision to concentrate on more populated centres. ... (link)

Militias, of course, are seen as a potential problem in and of themselves.

Your guide to WikiLeaks' Afghan war logs

On Monday, as most readers are probably aware, WikiLeaks released an enormous trove of US military reports from Afghanistan.

First, the local angle: There is some Canadian content, though very little. One incident report claims that an air attack by friendly forces killed four Canadian troops on September 3, 2006 during Operation Medusa. At the time, those deaths were officially reported to be caused by Taliban fire, and indeed there is a small amount of literature describing those soldiers' last moments. The Canadian military denies the report.

Next, a little bubble bursting: The purported Pakistani intelligence-Taliban link is not as strong as some of the hyped articles have it. The New York Times' coverage has opted to focus on the Pakistan angle, citing intelligence reports from the WikiLeaks cache which report that Pakistan's ISI is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban:

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders. (link)

The key word in that run-on sentence is "suggest," as in the evidence does not prove that the ISI supports the Taliban. Indeed, the evidence for the connection is rather poor, according to Declan Walsh, a Guardian reporter with plenty of experience in Afghanistan and who was part of the Guardian team for the WikiLeaks report. The reports:

fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. (link)

American diplomat Peter Galbraith, formerly stationed in Afghanistan, is more credulous. While he admits that some evidence is poor (noting "surely the ISI did not plot to poison Kabul-bound beer, an enormously complex operation with limited pay off since US troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Afghanistan") he observes that the documents "show a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban."

What follows is a summary of the highlights of the revelations of the Afghan war diary, mostly taken from the Guardian team's analysis.

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

Nick Davies and David Leigh
The Guardian - Sunday 25 July 2010

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. ...

The war logs also detail:

- How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

- How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

- How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

- How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date. ...

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots ...

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties." ... (link)

Declan Walsh on the Pakistani ISI:

At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply. ...

But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. ...

[A] retired US officer said some [Afghan] NDS officials "wanted to create the impression that Pakistani complicity was a threat to the US". And more broadly speaking, "there's an Afghan prejudice that wants to see an ISI agent under every rock". ... (link)

Walsh also writes on what the leaked files show about the Afghan insurgency's weaponry for attacks against US/NATO aircraft:

The US military covered up a reported surface-to-air missile strike by the Taliban that shot down a Chinook helicopter over Helmand in 2007 and killed seven soldiers, including a British military photographer, the war logs show.

The strike on the twin-rotor helicopter shows the Taliban enjoyed sophisticated anti-aircraft capabilities earlier than previously thought, casting new light on the battle for the skies over Afghanistan.

Hundreds of files detail the efforts of insurgents, who have no aircraft, to shoot down western warplanes. The war logs detail at least 10 near-misses by missiles in four years against coalition aircraft, one while refuelling at 11,000ft and another involving a suspected Stinger missile of the kind supplied by the CIA to Afghan rebels in the 1980s.

But if American and British commanders were worried about the missile threat, they downplayed it in public – to the extent of ignoring their own pilots' testimony. The CH-47 Chinook was shot down on 30 May 2007 after dropping troops at the strategic Kajaki dam in Helmand...

Later that day Nato and US officials suggested the helicopter, codenamed Flipper, had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade – effectively, a lucky hit. ...

But US pilot logs show they were certain the missile was not an RPG and was most likely a Manpad – the military term for a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. ... (link)

The Guardian's Nick Davies looks at a heretofore obscure American unit called Task Force 373, used for targeted assassinations and captures. Interestingly, he also summarizes an incident where official statements contained lies about the deaths of civilians, again showing US-led deception efforts:

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. ...

[O]n 4 October [2007], [TF 373] confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday [in Paktika province]. The Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had been firing.

The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.

The coalition put out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without giving any numbers or details...

In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back, suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home, senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities … [and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting". Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no protest" over the incident. ...

The logs include references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list, which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been involved in kill/capture missions...

Some of these "non 373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to kill the target...

Other Jpel targets were traced and then bombed from the air. ... (link)

Readers will notice in the above that nothing is said about the involvement of Canadian special forces.

Declan Walsh on Afghan-Pakistani tensions on the border:

Afghanistan war logs: Secret war along the Pakistan border
Americans caught in middle of flare-ups over disputed colonial boundary and attacks by Taliban from within tribal zone

Declan Walsh - The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010

The Taliban are not the only enemy along the fraught borderlands of the Afghan war. Secret intelligence files reveal severe tensions between putative allies who can be drinking tea one day and fighting each other the next.

The war logs detail hundreds of cross-border clashes along the lawless frontier with Pakistan, far more than previously reported. The most violent salvos came from US troops disregarding Pakistani sovereignty to fire on Taliban fighters sheltering in its tribal belt. ... (link)

Finally, the Guardian's David Leigh on the little-discussed role of the CIA:

Afghanistan war logs: Secret CIA paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths
Innocent Afghan men, women and children have paid the price of the Americans' rules of engagement

David Leigh - The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010

Shum Khan was a deaf and dumb man who lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he "ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion".

The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for "other government agency") shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded "escalation of force" provisions of the US rules of engagement. ...

But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false. ...

In another case the logs show that on the night of 30 August 2008, a US special forces squad called Scorpion 26 blasted Helmand positions with multiple rockets, and called in an airstrike to drop a 500lb bomb. All that was officially logged was that 24 Taliban had been killed.

But writer Patrick Bishop was embedded in the valley nearby with British paratroops at their Sangin bases. He recorded independently: "Overnight, the question of civilian casualties took on an extra urgency. An American team had been inserted on to Black Mountain … From there, they launched a series of offensive operations. On 30 August, wounded civilians, some of them badly injured, turned up at Sangin and FOB Inkerman saying they had been attacked by foreign troops. Such incidents gave a hollow ring to ISAF claims that their presence would bring security to the local population." ...

The US also realised very quickly that a Polish squad had committed what appeared to have been a possible war crime. On 16 August 2007 the Poles mortared a wedding party in the village of Nangar Khel in an apparent revenge attack shortly after experiencing an IED explosion. ... (link)

The Taliban's counter-surge

With Obama's troop surge now half a year old, we can begin to see its effects on the Afghan Taliban. A couple of items in this week's news reveal a bolstered, rather than cowed, insurgency.

From the CBC:

A dramatic increase in the number of homemade bomb attacks is part of an "alarming trend" in Afghanistan, a UN report released Saturday said.

The report to the UN Security Council said bombings and assassinations have soared in the past four months amid ramped-up military operations in the Taliban-dominated south.

The number of attacks involving improvised explosive devices increased by 94 per cent over the same period in 2009, while assassinations of Afghan officials rose by 45 per cent. ... (link)

In other signs that the insurgency is not diminishing in force, officials admit that the northern province of Baghlan is thick with Taliban:

'All districts in Baghlan may fall into Taliban hands'
By Habib Rahman Sherzai

PUL-I-KHUMRI, June 16 (Pajhwok) - Baghlan provincial council members have warned of falling all the districts into the hands of Taliban, who are already in control of almost 11 districts in the northern province.

A fragile government's writ was prevailing in Barka, Tala Barfak, Farang, Khost and Dahna-i-Ghori districts, the council members told Pajhwok Afghan News. They added the remaining 11 districts were under complete control of the Taliban insurgents. ...

Residents have also confirmed the presence of Taliban in some of the districts. The Taliban have been in control of most parts of Barka district, they say.

A resident of the district, Abdul Ghayor, 50, said Taliban resolved their problems and imposed their own laws. The Afghan government could only control the district, he added. (link)

June 12 - StopWar Vancouver AGM and anti-war conference

This Saturday, you're invited to join members of Vancouver's StopWar.ca Coalition for a day of workshops, presentations and discussion.


StopWar.ca AGM and Anti-War Conference

Saturday, June 12, 2010, 11 am – 4:30 pm
At the Maritime Labour Centre (111 Victoria Drive)

Join us for a conference on June 12th to discuss the escalated war in
Afghanistan and the Harper government’s role in warmaking, occupation
from Haiti to Palestine.

StopWar advocates for an end to the war on Iraq, for Canadian troops to
be brought home from Afghanistan, and for a Just Peace in the Middle
East. StopWar opposes any attack against Iran by the United States or
Israel.

Formed in 2002, StopWar.ca is a broad-based peace coalition based in the
Lower Mainland of British Columbia, endorsed by over 160 organizations
and prominent individuals. StopWar is a member of the Canadian Peace
Alliance. We carry out our activities in a cooperative way, and we are
always looking for new activists and volunteers. General meetings are on
the first Wednesday of every month, 5:30 pm at the Maritime Labour
Centre, 111 Victoria Drive, Vancouver (entrance by parking lot).

AGM Schedule

11 am-12:30 pm - Annual General Meeting of StopWar.ca Coalition

12:30-1:30 pm - Lunch break

1:30-2:30 pm - Plenary session on the war in Afghanistan

2:30-4:00 pm - Concurrent workshops on Latin America & Palestine

4:00 pm - Report Back Plenary

For more information email stopwar@resist.ca

US troops kill Afghan civilians 'chosen randomly'

One American soldier based out of Fort Lewis in Washington state has been arrested while others are under investigation for the alleged murder of civilians in Kandahar province earlier this year. All the soldiers are with the US Army's 5th Stryker Brigade, which deployed to Kandahar in July of 2009. The unit suffered a large number of casualties, which observers have seen as a catalyst for anger which resulted in the alleged outrage.

Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reports on some of the details for NPR's All Things Considered:

We're told at least several soldiers from the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Washington, were involved. And here's what we know so far. I'm told that civilian deaths occurred during a patrol or it may have been on more than a single patrol. One source tells me the victims were chosen randomly, and there's no indication there was any type of enemy action - any firefight here - before the civilian deaths. ...

[T]his all came to light when a soldier approached his chain of command and told them about the civilian deaths.

Now, this soldier went back to his unit and he was beaten up by his fellow soldiers, so this suggests there may be some sort of cover-up here. Now, the soldier again went back to his chain of command, to his officers, to tell them what happened to him, and that's when other soldiers started coming forward. ... (link)

Agence France-Presse adds some details:

The soldier was beaten after telling authorities about illicit drugs and then, while recovering in hospital, recounted his comrades' alleged role in the deaths of three Afghan civilians, said two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The soldier was "beaten within an inch of his life," one of the officials told AFP. ... (link)

This is not the first time that occupation troops in Afghanistan have been accused of the deliberate killing of civilians. Back in 2007, Polish NATO soldiers were arrested for the Nangar Khel massacre, in which eight civilians were killed. The case was still before the military court this past winter. According to the most recent publicized testimony, it appears that the unit's mid-level commanders ordered the village targeted in retaliation for perceived local support for an earlier deadly Taliban attack on a NATO patrol. Afterward, those commanders first falsely claimed that Taliban fighters were present in the village. When their underlings were not willing to go along with the fiction, those mid-level commanders blamed their commander.

Kandahar hostile to foreign troops

One of the frequently recurring themes of this blog has been the unreported current of Afghan public opinion which sees the NATO/US mission in their country as an unwanted occupation. This current is undoubtedly substantial and may, as we've seen, constitute the majority view, at least in some regions of the country (see here, for example).

It's not that major media outlets have not reported these developments, but their coverage is typically shallow and generates little echo or commentary. Thus, the story dies soon after it is reported. Below, I excerpt reports from the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times which all acknowledge the reality of public opposition to the foreign occupation. True to tradition, there was no reflection in those papers about what it means to be carrying out a war against the wishes of local people.

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung warns of the risks of the Kandahar operation which is taking shape at this moment:

Results of Kandahar offensive may affect future U.S. moves

MAY 23 - The Obama administration's campaign to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan's second-largest city is a go-for-broke move that even its authors are unsure will succeed.

The bet is that the Kandahar operation, backed by thousands of U.S. troops and billions of dollars, will break the mystique and morale of the insurgents, turn the tide of the war and validate the administration's Afghanistan strategy.

There is no Plan B. ...

U.S. civilian officials are simultaneously trying to wrest control from local power brokers and to correct imbalances that favor one tribal group. They plan to set up 10 administrative districts, each with a representative council and money to spend.

Success has been only vaguely defined, and progress will be monitored through what the military calls "atmospherics reporting," including public opinion polls and levels of commerce in the streets. A senior military official said the central question, which the administration will pose and answer for itself, is: "Are we moving toward a solution in Kandahar that the people support?"

Public descriptions of the balance between the offensive's military and civilian aspects have fluctuated in response to Afghan sensibilities in a region that is arguably more hostile to foreign intervention and the government in Kabul than to the Taliban. ... (link)

The Guardian's John Boone writes from Kandahar, also about the upcoming NATO offensive in that city:

A recent public opinion survey in Kandahar conducted for the US army found that despite their efforts to remain above the fray, most of the 1,994 people questioned sympathised with the insurgents' reasons for taking up arms against the government. Some 94% of respondents did not want foreign forces to start a new operation. ...

Despite the dire state of security in the city and its surrounding areas, there is widespread opposition among locals to a major military offensive, which, like the February operation in Marjah, has been well publicised in advance. ... (link)

And Richard Oppel, Jr. writes for the NYT on the "threat" that foreign forces pose:

NATO Apologizes for Killing Unarmed Afghans in Car

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 21 (NYT) - NATO apologized Wednesday for shooting to death four unarmed Afghan civilians this week in Khost Province and acknowledged that it had wrongly described two of the victims as “known insurgents.” ...

But in some parts of the country, American and NATO convoys are already considered by Afghans to be as dangerous a threat as Taliban checkpoints and roadside bombs, raising questions about whether the damage can be reversed to any real degree.

“People hate the international forces,” said Bakhtialy, a tribal elder in Kandahar who, like many Afghans, goes by one name.

“Their presence at the moment is too risky for ordinary people. They are killing people, and they don’t let people travel on the road.” ... (link)

Finally, the National Post has some revealing news about the state of Kandahar City:

"The Taliban are in control in Kandahar and the areas geographically adjacent to Kandahar city. They control it completely," said Hy Rothstein, a retired U.S. Special Forces Colonel who teaches at the U.S. Navy's Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"Those areas are fortified. There are IED belts (improvised explosive devices) and a population that is not going to provide the type of information the coalition needs in any serious way because the Taliban remain and their shadow government remains strong. ...

Recent visitors to Kandahar say the city is overwhelmed with anxiety. Residents fear being caught up in the NATO offensive and are worried by rumours Taliban leaders in Pakistan have drawn up "kill lists" of people marked for death.

The United Nations recently shut its Kandahar office and removed foreign staff from the city because of the surge in violence. ... (link)

Militias: NATO's proxy forces

As the nearly nine-year war in Afghanistan has progressed, it has undergone a sometimes shifting development. In previous years, we saw a steady rise in US (and British and French) air attacks (called 'Close Air Support') on insurgents clustered in rural compounds. More recently, while the air attacks have basically continued at the same rate as before, the US military has shifted its rhetoric (and, somewhat, its practice) toward "engaging the civilian population," to use the terminology preferred by counterinsurgency fantasists. For many Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's south, this has translated into heightened danger, as more contact with civilians has meant more night raids, which outrage the population.

Below, the Guardian's Stephen Grey reports on another emerging trend of the war: US-backed militias. Recent months have seen a variety of security armed groups attain some form of recognition from US military authorities, including militias which are more or less tribal and others which may be warlord-led. (In a future post, we will take a look at these various militias as well as new police and military forces.)

Afghan prosecutor issues arrest warrant for US army officer over police killing
Stephen Grey - The Guardian

KANDAHAR, May 16 - An Afghan prosecutor has issued an arrest warrant for an American special forces commander over allegations that a police chief was murdered by a US-trained militia.

Brigadier General Ghulam Ranjbar, the chief military prosecutor in Kabul, has accused the US of creating an outlaw militia which allegedly shot dead Matiullah Qateh, the chief of police in the city of Kandahar.

The militia, which Ranjbar claimed is armed and trained by US special forces, also allegedly killed Kandahar's head of criminal investigations and two other officers, when they attempted to free one of their members from a courthouse. ...

[Ranjbar] accused American officials of refusing to hand over evidence or to permit his investigators to interview the special forces commander, known to Afghans only as "John or Johnny", who he alleges sanctioned the raid. ...

Ranjbar said an investigation found that the force that killed Qateh operated from Camp Gecko, in the hills outside Kandahar, a base for both US special forces and the CIA. ...

He claimed that suspects arrested for the courthouse raid had confessed to being part of a 300-strong militia unit run by "Johnny". ...

[A]ccording to the Afghan account, the militia known locally as the "Kandahar Strike Force", or the "Kandahar Special Group", arrived at the courthouse last June with US-supplied uniforms, vehicles and weapons. They demanded the release of a comrade held for a traffic offence. When police were called to the scene by terrified court officials, the militia opened fire, killing Qateh, and three other policemen. ...

The involvement of the Camp Gecko militia is politically sensitive because of its alleged close ties to Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. ... (link)

Writing from Kandahar, journalist Dion Nissenbaum reports on an Afghan government plan to consolidate private security firms (which often closely resemble warlord-led militias) in southern Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Ahmed Wali Karzai appears to have his fingers in this one, too:

The pending proposal from the Afghan Interior Ministry calls for consolidation of about two-dozen small, lightly regulated security companies under the command of a Kandahar-based security mogul known simply as Ruhullah.

Ruhullah told McClatchy the deal would allow him to create a 2,500-person security firm to provide protection for NATO supply convoys in southern Afghanistan. This would make his firm by far the biggest of its kind in Afghanistan. ...

Some analysts worry that Ahmed Wali Karzai could use the new force to thwart any attempt during the U.S.-backed drive in Kandahar to supplant him ...

In an interview last week at his Kandahar compound, Ruhullah said he got his start in security after the U.S. invasion in 2001, when he started providing protection for CNN and CBS crews covering the conflict.

"I am the one who laid the foundation for security firms in southern Afghanistan," Ruhullah said.

Since then, security specialists say Ruhullah established a powerful security network that now controls long stretches of the convoy supply routes in southern Afghanistan.

Afghan and American government officials said that Ahmed Wali Karzai personally lobbied U.S. policymakers and top Afghan officials to approve the deal. ...

Abdul Manan Farahi, head of the Interior Ministry's counterterrorism department that regulates private security companies, challenged the perception that the new company would become part of Ahmed Wali Karzai's political empire. He said the plan calls for a new leader to take control every six months and includes a diverse collection of security contractors from different tribes that consider Karzai a rival. ...

"The main profits will go to a few people," said one Kandahar security contractor who asked that his identity be kept secret out of fear of retaliation from Ahmed Wali Karzai. "Anyone who has good relations with Ahmed Wali will get the good contracts." ... (link)

Allegations of Wali Karzai's wickedness are thick on the ground, including accusations that he is drug kingpin and CIA asset. What is undisputed is his vast influence in Kandahar, where he is head of the provincial council and often referred to as the effective governor. In March, Time Magazine's Tim McGirk wrote that his "sources insist that Wali Karzai in the past has threatened to call down NATO air strikes or arrange night raids by U.S. special forces on tribal elders who defied him."

Remote control civilian killers

The New York Times' Dexter Filkins relates a glimpse of the sanitized butchery in the State-side control rooms for the drone war. It seems that drone operators watching computer screens a half a world away from Afghanistan ignored evidence that civilians were about to be killed in their attack:

Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths

KABUL, May 29 (NYT) - The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike in February on a group of innocent men, women and children. ...

The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan Province ...

In this case, the military Predator operators in Nevada tracked the convoy for three and a half hours, but failed to notice any of the women who were riding along, the report said.

According to military officials in Washington and Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters on the case, intelligence analysts who were monitoring the drone’s video feed sent computer messages twice, warning the drone operators and ground command posts that children were visible.

The report said that drone operators reported that the convoy contained only military-age men. “Information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed by the Predator crew,” General McHale wrote.

Immediately after the initial attack, the Kiowa helicopter’s crew spotted brightly colored clothing at the scene, and, suspecting that civilians might have been in the trucks, stopped firing.

After the attack, the Special Operations team turned over the bodies to local Afghans. Even so, General McHale said, officers on the ground failed to report the possibility of civilian casualties in a timely way. ... (link)

Note that military officers evidently attempted to avoid publicizing the civilian casualties.

Taliban flex muscle amid US troop surge

The recent Taliban-claimed attack in Kabul that claimed the life of a Canadian Forces colonel, and which the National Post says marks a "new turn" in the war, was quickly followed by a Taliban attack on nearby Bagram airbase, a major American installment. The pair of attacks has prompted some observers to declare that the Taliban's Spring offensive has begun.

Mustafa Qadri writes for the Guardian's site that the Taliban are seen as freedom fighters by many Afghan Pashtuns:

Taliban: the indistinguishable enemy

MAY 16 - They may be repressive fanatics who enslave women and give sanctuary to al-Qaida, but the US-led occupation of Afghanistan has transformed the Taliban into Pashtun freedom fighters. There are two principal reasons for this.

First, despite our best attempts, the foreign troops and the state they prop up are viewed as outsiders who have come not to liberate the country but subjugate it.

Second, so long as our presence in Afghanistan is primarily military, our relationship to ordinary Afghans will be based primarily on violence. Armies, by their very nature, must intimidate and coerce the population into accepting their authority. Despite the talk of winning hearts and minds and civilian surges, much of what we do in Afghanistan creates fear and hostility. ...

The problem for foreign powers in a foreign land is their limited interest in the welfare of the people whose lands they occupy. There can be no sustainable resolution of the current violence, however, unless and until the locals take the lead in looking for political solutions. (link)

Julian E. Barnes reporting for the Los Angeles Times discusses recent indications that the Taliban-led insurgency is not disappearing in the face of President Obama's military surge. The surge, which is expected to peak in September, is in fact the fourth troops increase which the Afghanistan war has seen. All of the previous ones have resulted in heightened violence.

Afghan Taliban getting stronger, Pentagon says
A Pentagon assessment, while expressing confidence in U.S. strategy, says the movement has flourished despite repeated assaults.

WASHINGTON, April 29 (L.A. Times) - A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants' heartland.

The report, requested by Congress ... concludes that Afghan people support or are sympathetic to the insurgency in 92 of 121 districts identified by the U.S. military as key terrain for stabilizing the country. Popular support for Karzai's government is strong in only 29 of those districts, it concludes. ...

A senior Defense official who briefed reporters on the report said violence increased last year in part because of the additional U.S. troops. ...

The report also notes that insurgents' tactics are increasing in sophistication and the militants have also become more able to achieve broader strategic effects with successful attacks. ... (link)

And an Associated Press report cites the Red Cross in shedding some light on the extent of insecurity in southern Afghanistan. Note that insurgents are not the only source of insecurity, as personal and tribal rivalries also commonly break out into armed clashes. These rivalries are often fueled by the accoutrements of the US-led war and occupation of Afghanistan.

UN refugee chief: Security worse in Afghanistan, foreign staff can't access half of country

GENEVA, May 5 (AP) - Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated in recent months to the extent that foreign staff of the U.N.'s refugee agency are unable to travel to half of the country, its top official said Wednesday.

The agency has to rely on local staff or Afghan partner organizations to reach tens of thousands of displaced people and returning refugees it is trying to aid, said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.

"There was a worsening security situation in the recent past," he told reporters in Geneva. "Access of our international staff to the territory is now limited to about 50 percent."

Last month the United Nations announced it had relocated several foreign employees from the southern city of Kandahar to Kabul and told more than 200 Afghan workers to stay home after security threats.

Guterres said aid workers have become targets for violence in part because the distinction between the foreign military and humanitarian groups has been blurred. ... (link)