More than 30 civilians thought dead in NATO bombing

An update on the incident from the weekend:

Probe of Afghan 'civilian deaths'
BBC - 2008/04/07

The Afghan government has launched an investigation into reports that up to 33 civilians were killed in a US and Afghan army operation.

The deputy governor of the eastern province of Nuristan told the BBC they died in heavy fighting at the weekend.

The US military said several insurgents were killed but that it had no reports of civilian deaths. ...

The provincial deputy governor, Mohammad Aleem, said women and children were among those killed in the operation in Dohabi district. ... (link)

Pajhwok Afghan News reported the number of civilians killed to be up to forty.

War and business

We featured (second hand) the views of Nelofer Pazira last week. Today we feature a short piece she did for CBC Television where Pazira takes a camera crew with her as she visits an arms sales show. Various corporate sales weasels try to weasel their way through short conversations with Pazira, who grew up in Afghanistan amid the violence of war and occupation.

While Pazira is not always eloquent, she manages a few great pull quotes:

It seems that we are more interested in wanting to sell these [military] products than engage in a conversation about what would be left behind when these products are taken to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

If we are thinking that possessing all of these heavy duty machinery is going to help us win the war in Afghanistan I think that is something we have to rethink.

... What I am suggesting is a different way of thinking... A different way of thinking about war is not to think of it as associated with winning, with victory, and with heroes. Because war at the end of the day is not about heroes. It is about death and destruction.

Pazira's preferred counterinsurgency approach is that of the Dutch contingent of ISAF operating in Uruzgan province, citing this New York Times article by Chris Chivers which touts the superiority of their brand of war fighting. She rather earnestly cites the glowing self-reviews made there by various NATO commanders and spokespeople.

But, to return to those weasels. Here's the most cringe-worthy performance:

Man: It's not an easy thing for a commander to decide to do... Because you know that that person is totally innocent but you've got your team and your troops here which are probably more important. Why? Because eventually you need them to protect [that innocent person] later on. So you take that chance and you say, 'I'll minimize [the risk] the best I possibly can because I'm using all this technology here.' That is going to pinpoint it and throw something through that window and just blow up that particular house or that area.

Pazira: You've had to do it?

(Grinning) Yes.

You can see the video here.

Bucharest summit in review

Veteran British journalist Patrick Seale is one of the world's leading Middle East correspondents. He writes in Beirut's Al-Hayat on the heels of NATO's Bucharest summit:

NATO needs an Exit Strategy in Afghanistan
Patrick Seale - Al-Hayat - April 4, 2008

... At their summit meeting in Bucharest this week, NATO heads of state have discussed how to boost the Alliance's war effort in Afghanistan. They should instead have debated how to reach a peace settlement with the insurgents -- and how to get out.

NATO has evidently got itself into a colossal muddle in Afghanistan. Everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong. It is far from clear why the Alliance is fighting there at all, and what it is seeking to achieve. Talk of 'victory' is a dangerous illusion.

In 2003, there were 20,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. By 2007, this number had trebled to 60,000 - and is shortly to increase further with the arrival of another 3,200 U.S. Marines and a further 1,000 French soldiers (as President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to the anger and dismay of the Socialist opposition. That he chose to make this pledge in the British Parliament, during his recent state visit to Britain, rather than in the French National Assembly has not helped his cause.)

Has this vast increase in troop levels brought added security to the country? ... Alas, quite the contrary.

... As Westerners are often targeted [by insurgent attacks], they live in fear, restrict their movements and therefore cannot help much with reconstruction and development. ...

A leading French expert on Afghanistan, Professor Gilles Dorronsoro, believes that NATO's key blunder has been the attempt to impose a Western model of modernization on Afghanistan, where it is inevitably seen as a foreign import. The goals of democracy, of a market economy and of gender equality may be embraced by a small elite in Kabul, but are rejected in much of the countryside, where they face incomprehension and hostility.

President Hamid Karzai's state is a fiction. It controls only 30 per cent of the territory - the rest is in the hands of warlords or insurgents - and has only a tenuous grip on the economy.

In Afghanistan, fundamentalist Islam is a form of nationalism. The two are indistinguishable. The West may seek to demonize the Taliban as medieval barbarians, alien to Afghan society. The truth, however, would seem to be that they are very much a home-bred product. Although originally almost exclusively Pashtun, the insurgency has now spread beyond the Pashtun areas, pointing to the Taliban's growing support.

In 2006-7, there was a notable change of sentiment in Afghanistan. The idea took hold that NATO and the Americans were losing the war. This alone should have persuaded the heads of state gathered in Bucharest this week that it was time to bring this thankless neo-colonial military adventure to a close. ...

[NATO/US airstrikes] have inevitably caused the death of hundreds of Afghan civilians and much material 'collateral damage.' Breaking into homes, ignoring local customs and showing disrespect for ordinary Afghans has also created immense anger. The result has been to bring large segments of the population over to the Taliban side. As in Iraq, far from pacifying the country, U.S. strategy has created an enemy bent on revenge.

There is much talk in Washington these days of taking the war to the Taliban in the tribal areas of West Pakistan. Already, U.S. air strikes pay no attention to the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is as if the frontier had ceased to exist. Even Barack Obama, the leading Democratic presidential candidate and a stern critic of the Iraq war, has spoken of 'cleaning out' Pakistan's tribal areas.

This is dangerous talk. Pakistan is seething with angry opposition to the NATO campaign in Afghanistan and, more generally, to U.S. President George W Bush's 'War on terror'. Some experts believe that a large-scale Western ground incursion into Pakistan's tribal areas could split the Pakistan army, bring down President Musharraf, and put an end to any security cooperation with the West.

On a visit to Islamabad in late March, John Negroponte, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, was surprised to hear that the leaders of Pakistan's new coalition government - former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari (the late Benazir Bhutto's husband) - want talks with the Taliban rather than military strikes. ... (link)

The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter is NOT one of the world's leading Middle East correspondents. He too writes on the aftermath of Bucharest:

NATO leaders lower Afghanistan expectations
By Mitch Potter - Toronto Star

BUCHAREST, April 6 ... Reading between the lines leaves little doubt that the bedraggled mission in Afghanistan is coming to the conclusion that lowering its lofty goalposts is the only way out.

French analyst Etienne de Durand – who just returned from a research mission in Afghanistan, where he spoke to Canadian, American, British and French commanders – puts it this way: "We lower the needs and raise the means. We close that gap. That is what the Bucharest summit was all about."

Explains de Durand, who is director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at the French Institute for International Relations: "From the beginning, there has been a huge gap between the ambitious objectives for Afghanistan and the means that the world provided to deal with the reality.

"But the truth is, we are not going to create a model democracy in the Hindu Kush. That is a myth and absolutely let us dispel it. ...

Estimates vary, but Afghan military manpower is a bit more than halfway toward NATO's goal of 80,000 trained troops by 2010. ... (link)

Potter might have cited the estimates he mentions to give readers a more realistic picture. One of the more authoritative estimates is that offered by ISAF's commanding general, the American Dan "Bomber" McNeill. In a September interview with Der Spiegel he relayed estimates that the Afghan National Army consists of just 22,000 soldiers (link). (For a heavy dose of criticism of Potter, see this revealing exchange between Potter and ZNet's Justin Podur.)

Potter's deferral to power is of course regular fare for readers of our national press, as CP reporter Murray Brewster illustrates:

Stephen Harper, the new face of Canada's war in Afghanistan
Murray Brewster

OTTAWA, April 6 (CP) - Somewhere along the way Stephen Harper realized that the war in Afghanistan wasn't about us, it was about them - them being the Afghans. ...

"What we've actually found is: when you argue our self interest, that's actually less appealing to Canadian public opinion than the argument that we are actually concretely helping the Afghan people with their lives," [Harper] told a panel discussion of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, an American policy group, in Bucharest.

It was a surprisingly candid admission for a prime minister with a hawkish reputation.

Some on the Conservative benches would argue that's the message they've been trying to get across all along. But the fact that they'd been hopelessly inarticulate about it was one of the main findings of the advisory commission headed by former Liberal minister John Manley.

It didn't help that former defence minister Gordon O'Connor once told an Edmonton audience that our presence in Afghanistan was about retribution for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

If Brewster were more critical - or more knowledgeable - he could have pointed out that revenge is not a legal justification for the use of force. Since the aftermath of the Second World War, it has been illegal under international law to mount armed attacks for purposes of retribution. Brewster evidently has no problem with the fact that our former Defense Minister was apparently motivated by criminal intentions.

... Insiders recount how, a few weeks ago when six female Afghan MPs visited Ottawa and sat in the public gallery of the House of Commons, Harper turned to Industry Minister Jim Prentice and gestured to the visitors.

"If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, the Taliban will return and they'll face execution," he said. (link)

Here, Brewster's lack of critical faculty prevents him from making an obvious and timely observation: that female Afghan MP Malalai Joya has herself received death threats from fellow Afghan MPs whom we are effectively supporting. A competent and critical journalist might have made the connection and not simply repeated the government's feeble scare tactic.

Malalai Joya fights back

From Agence-France Presse:

Afghan woman MP challenges parliament expulsion

KABUL, April 5 (AFP) - An Afghan woman MP controversially expelled from parliament a year ago for causing "insult" to fellow lawmakers said Saturday she had filed a petition for reinstatement.

The war-torn nation's legislature, dominated by former anti-Soviet Islamic warlords, kicked out Malalai Joya after she described fellow MPs as "worse than donkeys and cows" in a television interview last May.

"The parliament's move was not only against freedom of speech and democratic values but it was fully against the constitution," she said, adding that she will fight her way back to the house through legal action.

"It has been two months now that I have filed a petition over my expulsion from the parliament," Joya told reporters in Kabul. "My case is proceeding in courts," she added. ... (link)

Locals take up arms against foreign troops

Readers will recall from the week before last that perusal of the South Asian press often reveals civilian casualties which the Western press doesn't bother to publicize. In a similar exercise, today we find reports that Afghan civilians have not only suffered another scarcely-publicized airstrike, but that some of them have apparently taken up armed resistance against NATO forces. The revelation comes from Nuristan's Provincial Council chief Rehmatullah Rashedi:

Casualties feared in Nuristan airstrike
Abdul Moeed Hashmi

JALALABAD, Apr 6 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Officials feared heavy casualties in a ruthless bombardment of civilian houses by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Dowaba district of the troubled eastern Nuristan province.

A Paroon-based government functionary told Pajhwok Afghan News by phone NATO warplanes started pounding villages in the Shawak Valley this morning. Several people were feared dead and wounded in the airstrikes that were still ongoing.

While confirming the bombing, provincial intelligence boss Muhammad Daud Nadeem said they had not yet received a specific casualty figure. ...

Provincial Council head Rehmatullah Rashedi, describing the attack as very fierce, claimed receiving reports about the airlifting of 20 wounded civilians by ISAF forces. All the three villages in the valley had been struck, he alleged.

Foreign troop excesses had provoked the locals into taking up arms in self-defence, charged the public representative, who voiced grave concern at the suffering of the ordinary people due to inaccurate military operations.

Shawak resident Muhammad Nader, in a telephonic chat with this scribe, said the bombardment came after unidentified gunmen fired on ISAF helicopters landing in the restive area. (link)

Agence-France Presse also has this report:

US-led troops, Afghan forces inflict heavy Taliban losses

KABUL, April 6 (AFP) — US-led troops and Afghan security forces on Sunday killed a "significant" number of militants, the coalition said, a day after 15 Taliban were killed in attacks in the south.

The coalition did not give an exact toll but a local MP said the battle in eastern Nuristan province, in which warplanes were also deployed, left 20 people dead including some civilians. ...

The statement said the fighters were members of Hizb-e-Islami, an outlawed militant group loyal to the former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is said to have joined the Taliban.

It added that there were no civilian casualties. ...

Local lawmaker Rahmatullah Rashidi, however, said civilians were also killed in the coalition airstrikes.

"There have been heavy airstrikes since last evening," he said.

"According to the information I received, about 20 people including fighters and civilians have been killed," Rashidi told AFP.

He said about 40 other people including civilians had been injured. ... (link)

Bucharest from the bottom up

Over at the Dominion weblogs site, Amy Miller writes about the situation in Bucharest from the vantage point of those who want to see NATO dismantled [gingerly edited]:

26,000 security personnel
Largest NATO summit in history opens in Bucharest

[ ...] City residents were encouraged to leave town, with schools and workplaces closed for the duration of the summit. Bucharest's Police Chief publicly warned that protests against the summit would not be tolerated.

All protest permits were denied, making anti-NATO demonstrations illegal. Activists attempting to enter Romania from other European Union countries say they were denied entry with no cause given. Many local activists have been followed by the secret services, had visits to their homes, with family members receiving threats and intimidation. ...

[On April 2, the opening day of the summit] hundreds of police made a sudden attack on the legally rented convergence center that local activists had set up to house demonstrators from abroad, as well as serve as a space to organize actions.

Wearing ski masks and carrying sub machine guns a team of 80 special forces moved into the space where people were in the process of cooking and talking.

Albert, one of the 60 activists who were arrested spoke to me from the police station: "... There is nobody inside. Everybody who was inside was taken by the police. They beat everybody inside, and everbody got arrested." ... (link to Amy Milller's blog)

There is some Youtube video (link here, screenshot above) of the Romanian jendarms going about their thuggish ways this week.

Here's the mainstream press version, courtesy of the International Herald Tribune:

Romanian police question 46 anti-NATO demonstrators after scuffle

The Associated Press

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

BUCHAREST, Romania: Romanian police say they are questioning 46 anti-NATO activists about scuffles that broke out before the start of a NATO summit in Bucharest.

Police spokesman Christian Ciocan says 10 of the activists are German and the rest are Portuguese, Spanish, Czech and Romanian citizens. ...

Ciocan has told The Associated Press that the activists are not being formally detained, but investigators want to identify them.

There are unconfirmed media reports that at least one of the demonstrators was beaten during the scuffles. (link)

So what did the NATO leaders accomplish at the summit? Reportedly, much less than NATO hawks were hoping for. On NATO expansion, there was a cautious move eastward. On the addition of troops to Afghanistan, there was a commitment by French President Sarkozy to send 700-1000 more troops. Poland will send some 500 more.

Inter Press Service has more:

AFGHANISTAN: More, But of What
Analysis by Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, Apr 4 (IPS) - At the Bucharest summit, NATO adopted an undisclosed "comprehensive" security strategy in Afghanistan, which combines military with civilian efforts. The publicised discussions on Afghanistan, however, were focused on the numbers of troops. ...

At the Bucharest summit, leaders from NATO, the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), the World Bank, and donor countries committed to a long-term "comprehensive political-military plan" for Afghanistan.

The text of this document was kept confidential, but its principles were made public as a "strategic vision" which includes an effort to give a more central role in peace-building to the Afghan government and other international organisations besides NATO. The "vision" document also states the goal of having an 80,000 strong Afghan army by 2010.

But with the details undisclosed, it remains unclear whether NATO will actually be able to pull off a change of strategy.

"NATO is a military alliance. It has no economic or political capacity to speak of," Barnett Rubin from New York University, author of a widely read blog on Afghanistan told IPS. "Therefore, NATO is not the right organisation to pull this off. The emphasis on NATO reinforces the emphasis on the military aspect of the struggle, which U.S. commanders estimate is about 20 percent of the whole." ...

According to the "strategic vision" document, NATO is fighting against "extremists and terrorists such as the Taleban or al-Quaeda." But [Dr. Ana Pejcinova, a development worker who recently returned from Helmand province] says it is necessary to look behind the "extremism" tag. "The massive rise in attacks is mainly due not to the Taleban, but to numerous armed groups whose recruits have lost everything -- land, assets, families, and so on -- many from U.S. indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

"The Western conventional armies are facing [an] unconventional - and what is turning into a popular - armed movement in Afghanistan. Although every tactical battle is won by conventional hard power, the strategic goals are actually undermined by each tactical victory: winning (militarily) over locals only recruits more locals to join or support the insurgency." ... (link)

Some media reports say that France's contribution will be about 700 troops, while others say it will be about 1000. Last month, Canada's Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said that the 1000 extra troops which the Manley panel called for had to come from just one country. Regardless, virtually every commentator has stated that the French commitment will satisfy the demand. Standards change with circumstances, it would seem.

The announcement by Sarkozy, initially made in front of Britain's parliament rather than in France, is another example of Western leaders' contempt for democracy, as polls indicate that the move to bolster French forces is deeply unpopular.

From the Angus Reid Monitor:

Polling Data

Do you support or oppose Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to increase the number of French troops in Afghanistan?

Support	15%
Oppose	68%
Not sure	17%

Source: BVA / Sud-Ouest
Methodology: Face-to-face interviews with 970 French adults, conducted on Mar. 28 and Mar. 29, 2008. No margin of error was provided. (link)

Afghan Canadian says media soft on Karzai regime

The Support Our Mission blog, best known for being an ersatz grassroots campaign (see below), seems a bit taken aback by comments from Nelofer Pazira, the Afghan-Canadian star of Kandahar. It wasn't the usual speech for the Canadian War Museum, where she spoke before a crowd of fellow Carleton U. alumni:

Speaking before a crowd of at least 150 Carleton University alumni, she painted a picture of today’s Afghanistan where corruption is rife and suffering widespread. Despite billions being spent by well-intentionned Westerners, our efforts are failing to build a better country and our leaders accept a level of corruption in the Karzai administration that she says is alienating ordinary Afghans. ...

Having lived through what she hoped was the worst for her country, she came back encouraged by the seeming determination of the Western world to get right what they’d gotten so wrong in the last twenty years in Afghanistan.

Instead she found her country being run by many of the same warlords and Islamists–this time from a parliament in Kabul, instead of from the seat of their local fiefdoms–that had ruined her country in the 80s and 90s.

A Carleton University educated journalist, Pazira condemned Western media outlets for failing to adequately convey the shortcomings of the new regime. If journalists ever make it outside the base, she says, they seek out feel-good stories about girls going to school and life returning to normal. The reality, she claims, is that Afghans are exhausted and frustrated with rising corruption among the Afghan police and government officials and that Western contractors are hobbling the potential of the Afghan economy.

Pazira likened the decision to replace President Karzai’s Afghan security detail with U.S. Marines as the beginning of a perception problem on par with what Afghans experienced during the Soviet era when invading forces installed a puppet regime to carry out Moscow’s orders.

With due deference to Pazira’s knowledge and experience, I understand not all observers would accept her characterization. Nonetheless, the lecture raises questions that warrant discussion:

• Are we supporting forces of positive change in Afghanistan?
• If we must accept a level of imperfection in the process and allow time for new Afghan structures and governance to improve, where must we insist on basic standards? Where can we afford to turn a blind eye?
• We condemned the ultimately doomed Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in the 1980s. If it’s our contention that the UN’s project in Afghanistan is different today, how is it so? How do we explain this to the people directly affected? Where must we do a better job? ... (link)

The blog, a spin-off of a Facebook group called Canadians for Afghanistan, got some unsolicited press coverage some weeks back:

Ex-Tory staffer behind pro-mission group
The Ottawa Citizen - January 25, 2008

A self-described grassroots youth organization that wants Canada to continue its mission in Afghanistan was organized with help from a lobbyist who, until recently, worked for a prominent Conservative MP.

The group, Canadians for Afghanistan, introduced itself to the national media on Parliament Hill yesterday by calling on Canada to remain committed to ongoing military and humanitarian support. ...

The Canadians For Afghanistan website lists its main contact as Josh McJannett, a former Conservative staffer who worked for government whip Jay Hill until September. He had previously worked as an aide to Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer.

After leaving the Hill, Mr. McJannett became a lobbyist with Summa Strategies, an Ottawa government-relations firm that counts some defence contractors, including U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing, among its clients.

Canadians for Afghanistan was formed a few months later.

Mr. McJannett didn't speak at the press conference and, when asked where he was, one of the Canadians for Afghanistan speakers said he was "in Ottawa." In fact, Mr. McJannett was sitting in the gallery in the briefing room, metres from the podium. He declined to answer questions after the news conference, but did say he was on the steering committee. ... (link)

Aid SNAFU

The BBC's Frank Gardner recently revealed that Arab soldiers from the United Arab Emirates have been operating in Afghanistan alongside American units. Here, his film crew goes out with the Emiratis and captures a scene which is perhaps a common one:

Afghan 'trust' in Arab troops
BBC, Saturday, 29 March 2008

(This week the BBC's Frank Gardner revealed that a contingent of Arab troops from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been secretly operating alongside the Americans in Afghanistan. But getting access to them took months and was fraught with hurdles, especially as our correspondent is in a wheelchair. - BBC editors)

[S]afety concerns meant I had to stay behind on-base - "in the rear, with the gear, where there is no fear" - while our crew went off to film. ...

In the village of Qalat Baland, my companions watched as boxes of sweet, sticky dates were handed out to grey-bearded elders, and children were given school notebooks while a tall, charismatic Emirati army officer sat cross-legged in a courtyard, listening as a young boy chanted verses from the Koran by memory.

From the pictures they brought back it all looked a vision of harmony, but then I could see it began to go wrong - word spread that there was not enough to go round.

Suddenly the crowd surged, pushing and elbowing their way past the uniformed troops to get at the plastic-wrapped goodies.

The Afghan police, who had now turned up, weighed in with unrestrained brutality and it took all the Emiratis' diplomacy to restore calm before the scene descended into a riot. ... (link)

For a visual depiction of a similar scene, see the video I edited on the Afghan war here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). In it, Canadian soldiers on a Village Medical Outreach mission (which is a very rare phenomenon, despite Canadian Forces' propaganda claims) simply run out of medicines to dispense.

Kambakhsh moved to Kabul

Condemned journalism student Pervez Kambakhsh was finally moved out of Mazar-e Sharif and into Pul-e Charkhi prison, east of Kabul. The fact that the move could happen at all indicates that the recent prison riot at the facility (see here and here) has probably ended, though I've seen no comment to that effect. Though Reporters without Borders, who have been Kambakhsh's main Western advocates, are frequently cited by the mainstream press, and although the student's jailers are our allies, the Canadian press has been reluctant to cover the case. True to form, the latest announcement, though carried by the AFP newswire (here), doesn't appear to have gained any print media attention in this country.

Kambakhsh now awaits trial. His lawyers have reportedly said they will seek a pardon.

(See our previous coverage of the case here, here, here and here.)

Hard to find a Karzai supporter in Afghanistan

British journalist Chris Sands, whom we've featured before on this blog (see here), writes in the New Statesman:

Chris Sands

Afghanistan: is it too late?
The Taliban are very far from being defeated. Worse, western governments are in denial about the dangers of failing

[W]hat the west is starting to acknowledge, people here have known for some time: Afghanistan is not a success story. ...

Earlier this year I met the husband of an MP from southern Afghanistan. With him was a team of bodyguards that he had hired recently after his wife received threatening phone calls telling her never to go back to parliament. When I asked him who was responsible, he insisted it was allies of Karzai. People are frightened by all sides in this war, including government and Nato-led forces. ...

Mahfouz Khan was killed in [a suicide bombing]. At first, his brother Isatullah could only find a familiar-looking pair of legs in the morgue. Then he discovered the body. ...

"I will never blame the suicide bomber. Maybe he was in trouble or had been given bad advice. Someone had put him under pressure and told him this would be Islamic, or perhaps he was just very poor," said Isatullah. "But I blame my government. If we had a proper government that could deploy good police on our borders how could these people cross into our cities? There is no real government and no real police. Everyone in the government is a killer."

It is now hard to find an Afghan who genuinely supports Karzai. From Kabul to Kandahar, people complain that his administration is incompetent and corrupt. Their loyalty is to tribal elders, religious leaders or militia commanders, not to a regime they believe to be the tool of the Americans. ...

Violence is also rising in the north, where warlords are tightening their grip on power. ...

Many people hate the Taliban, but that does not mean they like Britain, the US, Nato or the Karzai government. In the words of a former Northern Alliance commander, a one-time ally of the US: "Now when any foreigner is killed every Afghan says, 'Praise be to God.'" (link)