U.S – NATO Offensive Unravels in Afghanistan: The Longest Foreign War in U.S. History
Mar 11, 2010 afghan war
Global Research, March 8, 2010
The Pentagon offensive against the Afghan city of Marjah was public-relations media hype from the very first day. The sole purpose of the offensive in Marjah was to convince the U.S. population and increasingly tepid NATO allies that this imperialist war is winnable.
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now the longest foreign war in U.S. history, on both the air and the ground. The Pentagon described the Marjah offensive as the biggest military operation in more than eight years of occupation, but now calls it a prelude to a larger assault on the city of Kandahar.
In U.S. counterinsurgency warfare, such an offensive means dropping heavily armed troops in an area seeking to draw enemy fire. The troops then call in air support, long-range artillery fire, machine-gun fire, rockets, white phosphorous bombs and anti-personnel bombs. The latter cover the ground with bomblets that emit thousands of razor-sharp fragments.
Tens of thousands of civilians were driven from the villages of Helmand Province, and the town of Marjah was partially evacuated. But thousands of Afghans were unwilling to leave their homes and animals in the cold of winter for the hunger, instability and flimsy shelter of refugee camps. Many are too poor to leave. They ended up as targets of Pentagon weapons.
The Marjah offensive’s stated goal was to introduce a ready-made, U.S.-created local regime, staffed by an Afghan puppet administration totally dependent on U.S. power. With cynical and racist arrogance, NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “We got a government in a box ready to roll in.” (New York Times, Feb. 12)
Afghan casualties unrecorded
Throughout this war, the Pentagon and corporate media have never counted and scarcely mentioned Afghan civilian deaths, injuries and trauma from bombings, fires and destruction. Tens of thousands more die of starvation, cold and infections in crowded refugees camps, swollen cities and isolated villages.
During the U.S. offensive in Marjah, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached the milestone of 1,000. This total confirms that youth are paying the price of the lack of education and job opportunities in the U.S. In addition, suicides among returning soldiers now exceed combat deaths and injuries are about four times the deaths.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point warned of sharp increases in U.S. troop casualties in the months ahead. “What I want to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect.” (Army Times, Jan. 7)
As the two-week offensive officially ended in Marjah, bombs exploded in one of the most secure areas of Kabul. Some reporters described it as a sophisticated and well-coordinated operation in the heavily guarded capital. A car bomb targeted housing of employees from countries connected to the occupation, apparently with the aim of undermining international support for the Afghan war.
During the offensive came the announcement on Feb. 21 that the Netherlands coalition government had fallen apart, due to heated opposition of a coalition party to keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. This sealed the planned withdrawal of 2,000 Dutch troops from NATO forces in Afghanistan, as of next August.
The Netherlands was the first NATO member to announce that it is quitting. The announcement was a big setback for the U.S. and NATO, and has prompted wide media speculation of other possible NATO withdrawals from the deeply unpopular war.
A Los Angeles Times editorial on Feb. 24 stated that the Dutch “withdrawal is likely to raise concerns about a fracturing of the international commitment to Afghanistan, and about the Afghan government’s ability to provide security in the long term . … The Dutch decision should serve as a warning to the Obama administration.”
The majority of the people in almost all the NATO countries opposes the war and wants their troops out. This has become a major issue in domestic politics and elections in many countries. Canada has announced the withdrawal of its forces by the summer of 2011.
Anti-war mood undermines NATO militarism
Following the Dutch announcement, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech at the National Defense University told NATO officers and officials that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader goals. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment. … Right now the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.” (New York Times, Feb. 24)
Gates also reminded NATO officials that, not counting U.S. forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were scheduled to increase to 50,000 this year — from 30,000 last year.
The total 43-country International Security Assistance Force, including U.S. soldiers, is presently at 140,000 troops in Afghanistan.
As journalist Rick Rozoff summed up a year ago: “The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the 60 years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and 12 other European and Caucasus nations linked to NATO. …
“The 12 European NATO partners who have sent troops in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent’s five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The European NATO and partnership deployments count among their number troops from six former Soviet Republics — with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic states … including airbases and troop and naval deployments in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean (where the Japanese navy has been assisting).” (rickrozoff.wordpress.com, March 25, 2009)
Military units from Australia, New Zealand, Jordan, Colombia and South Korea are also stationed in Afghanistan.
Afghans have a right to resist
Despite all these occupation forces, Afghanistan has become an imperialist quagmire with no stability, no security and no end in sight.
The resistance in Afghanistan has gained ground and broad support as it becomes clear to the whole population that U.S./NATO forces have brought only racist arrogance, corruption, repression and greater poverty. While occupation forces label all resistance as terrorism and Taliban-inspired, increasingly Afghans see resistance as a right and a patriotic or religious duty. It is essential in the period ahead that the anti-war movement supports the right of the Afghan people to resist this criminal occupation and increases the effort to bring all troops home now.
Tags: afghan war, afghanistan, cia, Marjah, U.S. History, war, war on terror
American Al Qaeda terrorist Adam Gadahn arrested, Pakistan claims
Mar 8, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
Pakistani officials claimed Sunday they nabbed Adam Gadahn, the treasonous Californian Al Qaeda leader who has long been on Washington’s most wanted list.
But high-level U.S. officials said they could not verify the report – and there were growing indications it could be a mixup.
President Obama did not mention what would be a welcome blow against terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden when he made a statement to reporters about the Iraqi election yesterday. He ignored a shouted question about Gadahn.
“We are checking with Pakistani authorities to confirm one way or the other,” said FBI spokesman William Carter.
A Pakistani official told Agence France-Presse that “we thought it could have beena big catch, but it appeared it’s not Gadahn.”
The confusing swirl of reports began in Karachi, where The Associated Press and several news outlets quoted Pakistani officials announcing the arrest of Bin Laden’s American mouthpiece.
An English-language paper ran a photo of a man said to be Gadahn being taken away with a bag on his head. Later reports suggested the arrested man might not be Gadahn but a Taliban commander with a similar name.
Gadahn, 31, is the first American to be charged with treason since World War II. If convicted, he would face the death penalty.
Stories about Gadahn’s arrest came just hours after he appeared in a new Internet video urging American Muslims to go on shooting sprees like Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s at Fort Hood, Tex., last year.
Gadahn’s arrest would be the latest in a series of successes in the new partnership between Pakistan’s once-balky intelligence services and the CIA.
Known in Al Qaeda videos as “Azzam the American” or Azzam al-Amereeki, Gadahn was born in Oregon to a Jewish family.
His hippie father converted to Christianity before his son was born, changing the family name from Pearlman to Gadahn, after an Old Testament warrior.
Adam Gadhan was home-schooled in Southern California on a goat farm without running water. Once an avid fan of Death Metal music, he converted to Islam at 17 and moved to Pakistan in 1998 at 20.
Intelligence officials say he joined up with Al Qaeda after 9/11 and attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
By 2004, he was a senior Al Qaeda operative and became Bin Laden’s top propagandist, appearing in numerous Internet videos calling for the destruction of America. In a 2008 video he tore up his U.S. passport on camera and urged Americans to launch domestic terrorist attacks.
He is believed to report directly to Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Gadahn was branded a traitor in 2006 by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, Calif. He would be tried in a federal court, like California native John Walker Lindh and ex-Chicago gang member Jose Padilla.
With James Gordon Meek in Washington
Tags: Adam Gadahn, afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Gadahn arrested, Pakistan, Qaeda terrorist Adam Gadahn, terrorist, war on terror
9/11 a big lie, pretext to occupy Afghanistan: Ahmadinejad
Mar 7, 2010 News & Events
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insists the capitalist system, established by Israelis, is on verge of collapse, adding that the 9/11 was a set-up to occupy Afghanistan and wage a so-called ‘war on terror.’
The president described the September 11, 2001 destruction of the twin World Trade Center buildings in New York as a preconceived “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure” and emphasized that the 9/11 incident was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan.”
“Depredation, bullying and killing the reality of humanity are the outcomes of the capitalist way of thinking,” Ahmadinejad said on Saturday.
He deplored crimes by arrogant powers, saying, “They carry out heinous killings and acts of terror in the world under the guise of [defending] human rights.”
“The US attack and NATO expedition into the region were merely aimed at saving liberal democracy and the capitalist thought,” said the president.
Ahmadinejad said the September 11, 2001 attacks were part of a “scenario and a complicated intelligence move” and added, “The September 11 incident was a big lie aimed at finding the pretext to fight terrorism but it prepared the ground for adventurism in Afghanistan.”
The Iranian president pointed to the arrest of the leader of the Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi, and said his capture was a disgrace for the intelligence services of the US and Israel.
Rigi was captured by Iranian security forces on February 23. He was aboard a passenger jet flying to Kyrgyzstan from the UAE when his plane was grounded in the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.
A few hours after Rigi’s arrest, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi said that the notorious villain was at a US base 24 hours prior to being captured by Iranian forces, adding that the Americans had issued an Afghan passport for him.
In his confessions, Rigi revealed details about his ties with some intelligence agencies such as the CIA and said that he had closely cooperated with the security services of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tags: 9/11, afghanistan, Israelis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
A U.S.-Trained Pakistani Is Said to Support the Taliban
Mar 4, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: March 4, 2010
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.
A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.
In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Despite Pakistan’s recent arrest of several high-level Taliban commanders, men like Colonel Imam sit at the center of the questions that linger around what Pakistan’s actual intentions are toward the Taliban.
American and NATO officials suspect that retired officers like Colonel Imam have served as a quasi-official bridge to Taliban leaders and their rank and file as well as other militant groups.
Now retired, Colonel Imam (his real name is Brig. Sultan Amir) lives in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, just yards from the Pakistani Army headquarters.
In the interviews, Colonel Imam denied any continued link to the Taliban. But he admitted that some “freelancers” — meaning former Pakistani military or intelligence officials — might still be assisting the insurgents.
If Colonel Imam personifies the double edge of Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban, he also embodies the deep connection Pakistan has to the Afghan insurgents, and possibly the key to controlling them.
Once a promising protégé for the United States, he underwent Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1974, learning in particular the use of explosives, and he went on to do a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division.
On his return to Pakistan, he taught insurgent tactics to the first Afghan students who fled the country’s Communist revolution in 1978, among them future resistance leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood. He then worked closely with the C.I.A. to train and support thousands of guerrilla fighters for the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Army throughout the 1980s.
Once the Soviets were pushed out, the Taliban emerged and Colonel Imam, then serving as a Pakistani consular official in Afghanistan, provided critical support to their bid to rule the country, Western officials said.
By his own account, he was so close to the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, that he visited him in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and left only when the American bombing campaign began later in 2001. He says he has not returned since. His parting advice to Mullah Omar, he said, was to fight on, but stick to guerrilla tactics.
Today, Colonel Imam speaks highly of the Americans he worked with. But he predicts failure for the United States in Afghanistan. While his views are clearly colored by his ardor for the Taliban cause, they also carry the weight of someone who knows his subject well.
The Taliban cannot be defeated, he said, and they will not be weakened by the recent capture of senior commanders, including the No.2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The Taliban movement is so devolved, he said, that commanders on the ground make most of their own decisions and can raise money and arrange for weapons supplies themselves.
“The Taliban cannot be forced out, you cannot subjugate them,” he said. “But they can tire the Americans. In another three to four years, the Americans will be tired.”
He criticized President Obama’s decision last year to send more American troops into Afghanistan. “They are doing what you should never do in military strategy, reinforcing the error,” he said.
“They will have more convoys, more planes, more supply convoys, and the insurgents will have a bigger target,” he added. “The insurgents are very happy.”
The plan by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, to win over the Afghan people while pressing the Taliban militarily could have worked in 2003 or 2004, when the Taliban were weak and had less support, but now the Taliban had a presence in virtually every province, he said.
He also said the idea of paying members of the Taliban to change sides would not work and only bogus figures would come forward. “It is shameful for a superpower to bribe,” he said.
Meanwhile, he has nothing but praise for Mullah Omar, who is suspected of hiding in Pakistan today. Of all the thousands of men he trained, he said, religious students like Mullah Omar were the most “formidable” opponents because of their commitment.
The Taliban had been tainted in recent years by bad characters joining the movement and committing crimes, and Mullah Omar was now cracking down on them, he said.
He pointedly criticized the Pakistani Taliban who turned to fight the Pakistani Army in Swat last year and unleashed a wave of bombings in Pakistan’s cities. They were “troublemakers” that should be “neutralized,” he said.
Yet for Afghanistan, the solution was to negotiate with the Taliban leadership, he said. Mullah Omar wants peace and is capable of compromise, he said.
He was also the only leader who could keep Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan or in abeyance, including Osama bin Laden, he said. Mullah Omar’s popular support was such that Mr. bin Laden would have to listen, he said.
Mullah Omar had refused to hand over Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 2001 because he calculated that if he did, it would be only the first of many demands placed on him, he said.
Tags: afghanistan, taliban, war, war on terror
Pakistan Has Caught More Taliban Than You Think
Feb 25, 2010 Pakistan, pakistan politics
FP
Since Oct. 7, 2001, when the first U.S. B-52 bombers began bombarding Taliban installations around Kabul, the United States and its allies have been waiting for Pakistan to demonstrate its sincerity in the war being fought on Afghan soil. The arrest of nine Taliban militants in the Pakistani city of Karachi, including the Afghan Taliban’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, may indicate a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s relations with the NATO states fighting in Afghanistan.
Despite former President Pervez Musharraf’s repeated public commitment to the war on terror, the U.S. intelligence community has remained wary of its Pakistani interlocutors — the military and the mighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s main spy agency — because of their longstanding complicity with Afghanistan’s Taliban factions. Its suspicions kept falling on the ISI for allegedly protecting Afghan Taliban leaders such as Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the eldest son of veteran jihadist leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.
The arrest of Baradar, known as the Taliban’s master strategist, might put an end to these rumors. This success was followed by a deluge of arrests of other Taliban and jihadi leaders, likely on evidence provided by Baradar. These include Ameer Muawiya, an associate of Osama bin Laden responsible for foreign al Qaeda militants in Pakistan’s border areas, and Akhunzada Popalzai, also known as Mohammad Younis, a former Taliban shadow governor in Afghanistan’s southern Zabul province and ex-police chief of Kabul. Earlier this week, the Pakistani police also picked up Maulvi Kabir, a former governor of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, from a town about 20 kilometers east of Peshawar.
Pakistan also captured a number of other significant figures in the raid that netted it Baradar. Others captured in Karachi include Hamza, a former Afghan army commander in Helmand province during Taliban rule; Abu Riyad al-Zarqawi, a liaison with Chechen and Tajik militants in Pakistan’s border area; and Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mohammad, former shadow governors for Kunduz province and Baghlan province, respectively.
The arrest of over a dozen key Taliban commanders amounts to a serious blow to the insurgency in Afghanistan. Intriguingly, while Pakistani officials claim Baradar was captured in Karachi, some sources insist the arrest took place several days earlier in Baluchistan, the Pakistani southwestern province along the border with Afghanistan. But regardless of where Baradar was picked up, the utility of the intelligence gained from his capture and the motives of Pakistan in going after the Afghan Taliban, this development is significant in many ways.
First, Baradar has become the latest in a long string of Taliban stalwarts captured by Pakistani and U.S. authorities. The ISI, possibly working in conjunction with the CIA, was responsible for the killing of key Taliban commanders Mullah Dadullah and Akhtar Mohammad Osmani in 2006. The 2007 arrest of Mullah Obaidullah, the former Taliban defense minister and Baradar’s predecessor, was also apparently the result of a joint operation — not so different from the arrest, in 2003, of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. The expanding list of Pakistani successes underscores the ever-increasing army-to-army cooperation and intelligence sharing between the two countries.
Intelligence officials in Islamabad also point to the Feb. 17 drone strike in North Waziristan as further evidence of growing intelligence cooperation between the United States and Pakistan. The attack killed Muhammad Haqqani, the 30-year-old son of Jalaluddin Haqqani and the younger brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is leading the Haqqani network in the area. U.S. officials have long accused Pakistan of protecting the Haqqanis, and this strike could be proof that the two allies are increasingly on the same page on this issue.
Perhaps the most important reason for the improved ties between these two allies is the personal rapport that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen and Centcom chief Gen. David Petraeus have cultivated with Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani and the head of the ISI, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
Since assuming his position as Army Chief from Musharraf in November 2007, Kayani has quietly endeavored to distance himself from his predecessor, relieving Musharraf’s allies of sensitive duties and charting a new course in the Army’s relationship with the United States. He has increasingly provided U.S. military commanders with operational details and critical information concerning regional developments.
Tags: Af Pak, afghanistan, cia, Kiyani, Mullah Obaidullah, obama, Pak Army, Pakistan, taliban, war on terror
Operation Breakfast redux: Destabilizing of Pakistan
Feb 18, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By Pratap Chatterjee
Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the “enemy” to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids.
The computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters, whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting.
Far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, and no reporters dared to go, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky over remote villages had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: “The ball game is over.”
The campaign was called “Operation Breakfast”, and while it may sound like the Central Intelligence Agency’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named “Lunch”, “Snack” and “Supper” and they went under the collective label “Menu”. They were authorized by president Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) “Bamboo Pentagon”, a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.
Like President Barack Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity. “We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices,” Nixon said.
Return to the Killing Fields
In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy”, comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that US military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.
A more provocative – and perhaps more ominous – analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries”.
Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way. In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group of communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk – until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As the raids intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a US-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.
The grim end of that old story is well known.
Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snoul, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after seizing power in 1975.
Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living alone in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.
All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of US troops the following year. “We thought the Americans had come to help us,” said Choenung Klou. “But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women.”
He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. “They would stay at people’s houses, take our hammocks and food,” he said. “We didn’t like them and we were afraid of them.”
Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.
“If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion,” Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. “If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor.”
Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the US Embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.
Unraveling Pakistan
Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large. Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.
In the Afghan capital Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L’Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene’s quiet American, these “consultants” described a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.
At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilotless drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan. They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.
In 2009, on the orders of Obama, the US unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than president George W Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in intensity. By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if this time around no one is using the code phrase “the ball game is over”, Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be just over the horizon.
Tags: afghanistan, cia, Destabilizing of Pakistan, drone attacks, moosad, Operation Breakfast, Pakistan, Raw, US, USA, war on terror
The Timeless Face of Terror
Feb 1, 2010 war on terror
terrorists are no more representatives of their religion than Nazis or Communists were of Christianity. Kati Marton on calling a spade a spade.
I have spent the last two years studying the face of Terror. No, not the bearded, turbaned image of an Al Qaeda cave dweller, but another version, one that unspooled as I translated my family’s secret police file in the archives of the Hungarian Communist Party. The two faces are really not that different.
The communists, like Al Qaeda, started with a utopian dream of righting wrongs and empowering the powerless. Even the Nazis saw themselves in such a light: They would restore jobs and honor to their humbled countrymen. For all these movements, a more perfect world beckoned at the end of the rainbow. This is how they attracted their fanatical followers even as they used terror and fear to gain power.
It is Muslims who are the primary victims of Al Qaeda’s terror in the name of their religion.
I first saw the true face of fear when, as a six-year old whose parents had just been arrested, I was taken by uniformed agents of the state to the house of my mother’s best friend for shelter. But when that lady saw those agents of terror, she refused to open her front door, and my sister and I were left homeless.
Such regimes succeed because most people are not killers, and because most of us simply cannot imagine the unimaginable—the extreme brutality of these movements. Most of us cannot wrap our minds around factories whose sole product is death, or planes carrying men, women, and children suddenly turned into missiles.
Our mistake is not to see these dangers from the outset. We have to do a better job of calling terrorists what they are: enraged killers who are winning the propaganda war. For much too long, we have allowed cold-blooded murderers to label themselves and what they stand for.
But Al Qaeda is no more a descendent of the great Abrahamic religions than the communists who arrested, imprisoned, and tortured my parents were committed to creating a peoples’ paradise in Eastern Europe. If the Vatican was less than forceful in separating Christianity from the horrors of the fascists, so, too, are Islamic leaders too timid in stating that their religion does not condone or reward the killing of the innocent.
In newly opened communist secret police files, I learned for the first time that my father, Communist Hungary’s last independent journalist, was forced to stand facing a wall while two agents shouted obscenities at him for endless hours. Thus was he broken and forced to “confess” that he was a CIA agent. In desperation he tried to commit suicide. But first he tried to smuggle a letter to my mother instructing her to divorce him, marry a westerner, and make sure his children forgot him. This was the result of one of the twentieth century’s bold experiments on humans—and all in the name of the great utopian vision of a workers’ state, conjured up by a pair of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Marx and Engels.
The Nazis, too, had their grandiose labels and their promises. My grandparents did not survive that wave of insanity. For their crime of being less than 100 percent pure Hungarians (whatever that is), they were shoved into airless trains that took them to the gas chambers.
I wait for the great religious humanists of our day to say loudly and clearly that the underwear bomber has as little to do with Islam as the secret police officer who browbeat my father into a confession did with Marx’s utopia. It is true that when the Nazis were using the cover of Christianity in their persecution of Jews, the Vatican’s reaction was much too restrained. Today, it is Muslims who are the primary victims of Al Qaeda’s terror in the name of their religion. I cannot forget Mohammed Atta’s final instruction before he launched the 9/11 massacre: No pregnant woman, the killer prescribed, should be allowed near his grave, as that would “defile” his final resting place. Can any religion claim such a man as its own?
Arthur Koestler, a countryman of mine, himself seduced by the false god of communism, once noted, “a dispassionate observer from a more advanced planet, who could take in human history from Cro-Magnon to Auschwitz would come to the conclusion that our race is a very sick biological product.”
Our challenge is to prove Koestler wrong. We can start by not allowing cold-blooded killers to deceive us about who they are: murderers wearing different uniforms.
Kati Marton’s latest book, Enemies of the People – My Family’s Journey to America, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
Tags: afghanistan, Alqaeda, taliban, US, war
My children were tortured, this trial is a sham: Aafia
Jan 20, 2010 News & Events, pakistan politics
Pakistani citizen Aafia Siddiqui has told jurors at her trial that she was held in a secret prison in Afghanistan, her children were tortured, and the case against her is a sham.
On Tuesday, Siddiqui was thrown out of the New York courtroom where her trail is being held after shouting the remarks at the jurors.
The MIT-educated neuroscientist is currently on trial, facing charges of trying to kill US soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan in 2008 and connections with Al-Qaeda operatives.
She was ejected from her federal court trial after her second outburst, Bloomberg reported.
“Since I’ll never get a chance to speak,” she said in the courtroom. “If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured…”
She insisted that she knew nothing about a plan to carry out terrorist attacks on targets in New York, The New York Daily News reported.
“Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets of New York,” she said. “I was never planning to bomb it. You’re lying.”
Siddiqui vanished in Karachi, Pakistan with her three children on March 30, 2003. The next day it was reported in local newspapers that she had been taken into custody on terrorism charges.
US officials allege Aafia Siddiqui was seized on July 17, 2008 by Afghan security forces in Ghazni province and claim that documents, including formulas for explosives and chemical weapons, were found in her handbag.
They say that while she was being interrogated, she grabbed a US warrant officer’s M-4 rifle and fired two shots at FBI agents and military personnel but missed and that the warrant officer then fired back, hitting her in the torso.
She was brought to the United States to face charges of attempted murder and assault. Siddiqui faces 20 years in prison if convicted.
However, human rights organizations have cast doubt on the accuracy of the US account of the event.
Many political activists believe she was Prisoner 650 of the US detention facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, where they say she was tortured for five years until one day US authorities announced that they had found her in
Tags: Aafia, Aafia Siddiqui, afghanistan, Al-Qaeda
Taliban Bombing Caught on Tape
Jan 19, 2010 News & Events, war on terror
CBS News RAW: An Iranian Press TV crew caught the moment when one of the Taliban explosions hit Kabul. Taliban militants launched attacks on key government targets
Tags: afghanistan, Bombing caught, taliban, war on terror
Shopping in Kabul: Life goes on in war zone capital
Jan 15, 2010 News & Events
KABUL: The security check at the entrance to a French restaurant in Kabul can be both cursory and confusing.
“Anybody got a weapon?” the guard asks as a small group crowds into a holding chamber — called a “cage” — before being admitted into the restaurant complex.
“Yes, I’ve got a gun,” says one man.
“OK,” says the guard, and waves everybody through.
A diner in the upmarket Heetal Plaza Hotel, meanwhile, might find a thickset man chomping a hamburger at the next table, with a large pistol in a holster on his hip.
But while Kabul is the capital of a country at war, it doesn’t always feel that way as the sun glints off distant snow-capped peaks and street life reflects a vibrancy uncowed by three decades of conflict.
Guns, guards and soldiers are everywhere.
But so are markets and shoppers, who risk their lives crossing chaotic roads crammed with everything from trotting donkey carts to smart four-wheel drives and menacing military vehicles.
In the labyrinth of dusty streets and back alleys, deep potholes determine the side of the road drivers choose to use, leading to skilful weaving of traffic which would do credit to an Afghan carpet-maker.
Walk through Chicken Street — of hippy-trail fame before the Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day 1979 — and it is possible to forget there is a war on.
Shops offering jewellery, furs, Afghan scarves and hats vie for attention alongside butchers and money changers plying their trades at stalls in the street itself.
Heavily bearded men in flowing, baggy clothes — wrapped in scarves and turbans against the nose-numbing cold — chat and make deals. But women are scarce.
Of the few who venture out, some wear the all-enveloping blue burqas derided in the West as symbols of the extreme subjugation of women under the former Taliban regime.
But many of them carry babies and beg, suggesting the face-concealing burqa may sometimes play a bigger role in hiding shame than in conforming to Taliban dress codes years after the Islamists were ousted by the US-led invasion in 2001.
Despite the threat of kidnap, whether by Taliban or criminal gangs, a brief stroll down Chicken Street by a Westerner is likely to be disturbed by little more than the enthusiastic attention of street urchins.
But the sudden roar of a fleet of military helicopters overhead is a reminder that Afghanistan has had little relief from conflict in the past 30 years.
Despite that, like urbanites around the world, many love their city.
“I’ve lived all my time in Kabul,” says Mohammad Siddique, 48, a driver for an international company who describes himself as “a living history” of the years of conflict.
“I saw a lot of war, but I never moved from Kabul, and I like my city.”
Doug Wankel, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration chief of operations, who lived in Kabul for two years before the Soviet invasion of 1979, returned in 2004 and has lived here ever since.
“I like the Afghan people, they are very strong, proud and independent. They make good friends and you can rely on them,” says Wankel, now managing partner of security firm Spectre Group International.
Windows in his home were blown out by the most recent suicide attack in Kabul, opposite the Heetal Plaza Hotel on December 15, which killed eight people and wounded 40 others.
“It’s a cost of doing business in Afghanistan — but it’s still worth it,” he told AFP.
Despite the devil-may-care attitude of Kabul’s citizens, they face a rapidly escalating war.
The number of civilians killed in the conflict jumped last year to 2,412, making 2009 the deadliest year for ordinary Afghans since the US-led invasion, the United Nations said.
Last year was also the deadliest for foreign forces fighting the Taliban, with 520 troop deaths, up from 295 for the year before, as the insurgency has escalated and spread.
But carnage is nothing new for Afghanistan and Kabul.
In the courtyard of the Gandamack Lodge, named after a battle in 1842, an ancient cannon stands as a reminder of Britain’s disastrous and bloody invasion of Afghanistan more than 150 years ago.
source dawn
Tags: Afghan, afghanistan, Kabul, Shopping in Afghanistan, Talibans, USA, war on terror
