Afghanistan War Weekly: August 8, 2010

With Congress on vacation and the floods in Pakistan dominating the news from South Asia, this has been a slow week for Afghanistan War reporting. Luckily we have some excellent essays to fill our space: Tom Engelhardt on civilian casualties; interviews with ace reporters Nir Rosen and Anand Gopal; a good essay about what’s happening in Kandahar by Rajiv Chandrasekaren, author of a book about Baghdad under US occupation; and an important short video about civilian casualties from Rethink Afghanistan.

In addition to the immense human tragedy now underway, the floods in Pakistan, the most severe in the country’s recent history, may well further destabilize the already shaky civilian government. Aljazeera/English will have continuous coverage of events in Pakistan beginning tomorrow. The station can be accessed by going to www.livestation.com and following the easy-to-follow instructions.

Several other important issues are addressed by articles linked below, including the on-going disputes between Karzai and US/NATO over civilian casualties and Afghan government corruption; General Petraeus’s surprisingly limited revisions to the “rules of engagement” (when it’s OK to shoot and bomb people); more on WikiLeaks and the useful info therein; and the uprising in Kashmir against Indian military occupation.

I would appreciate receiving suggestions about good articles to link here, and also comments (pro & con) that would help to make this newsweekly better. My email is fbrodhead@aol.com. This “issue” and some previous editions of the Afghanistan War Weekly are posted on the websites of United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org) and War is a Crime (www.afterdowningstreet.org/aww).

----Frank Brodhead, Concerned Families of Westchester (NY)

FEATURED ESSAYS

Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch [August 2010]

---- Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars, you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement. After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175282/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_out%2C_damned_spot!/

Dismembering Afghanistan

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus [August 6, 2010]

---- Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; Defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the better part of valor in Kandahar. They lost the war because they should never have invaded in the first place; because they never had a goal that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite. The face of that defeat was everywhere this past month. http://original.antiwar.com/hallinan/2010/08/06/dismembering-afghanistan...

How NGOs Became Pawns in the War on Terror

By David Rieff, The New Republic [August 3, 2010]

---- Between the end of the Vietnam war, during which, the Quaker American Friends Service Committee apart, the mainline U.S. relief groups were largely instrumentalized to provide the 'hearts and minds' dimension to U.S. counterinsurgency operations, and September 11, 2001, it was not unreasonable to assume that there had been at least some shift toward an interaction between governments and NGOs that was both more nuanced and more ambiguous. But in late 2001, after the invasion of Afghanistan, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech to NGO representatives, articulated a view of their role, at least in conflict zones where U.S. forces were fighting and areas where the country had a strong national interest, that were straight out of the civil affairs-oriented counterinsurgency strategy pioneered by General Edward Lansdale in the Philippines in the 1950s and Vietnam in the early '60s. The NGOs, Powell said, were a tremendous "force multiplier" for the U.S. military, and, by extending the reach of the U.S. government, would do much to help accomplish the intervention's goals. http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/ngos-in-the-field/49360.html?ItemID=738

USEFUL FACTS ABOUT THE WAR
US Casualties

Sixty-six US soldiers were killed in July, the highest monthly total since the war began. Five US soldiers and 6 soldiers from other Coalition have been killed so far in August. This brings the total US deaths in Afghanistan to 1,217, and the total Coalition deaths to 1,987. The number of US soldiers wounded in June 2010 (the last month for which information is available) was 517, bringing the total since the war began in 2001 to 6,773. To learn more go to www.icasualties.org.

The Cost of the War

According to the website www.costofwar.com, expenditures on the Afghanistan war have reached $322 billion, and the total for both wars is $1.062 trillion. For a useful resource on the costs of war, go to “Bring Our War $$ Home” at www.bringourwardollarshome.org/index.html

Public opinion on the war in Afghanistan

Linked below are the two most recent polls about US public opinion. A useful website that lists and links the major public opinion polls about the war is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_public_opinion_on_the_war_in_...

---- CBS Poll for July 9 – 12, 2010. The majority 58% of Americans want their troops withdrawn from the nine-year U.S. war in Afghanistan within the next one or two years. Only a minority 35% of Americans are willing to have U.S. troops stay longer than two years from now. One third, 33%, of Americans think large numbers of U.S. troops should be withdrawn in less than a year, another 23% think that should be done within one or two years, and 2% want an immediate withdrawal. The majority 54% of Americans want a timetable to be set for withdrawal from Afghanistan, while 41% do not. Only 26% of Americans think U.S. troops should remain for as long as it takes. The majority 62% of Americans think the war is going badly for the the United States, up from 49% in May, while 31% still believe it is going well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_public_opinion_on_the_war_in_...

---- ABC Poll for July 16, 2010. Support for the war in Afghanistan has hit a new low and President Obama's approval rating for handling it has declined sharply since spring  results that portend trouble for the administration as the violence there grows. With Obama's surge under way – and casualties rising – the number of Americans who say the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting has declined from 52 percent in December to 43 percent now. And his approval rating for handling it, 56 percent in April, is down to 45 percent. Potentially complicating matters, the public by 51-37 percent opposes a negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban that would allow Taliban members to hold government offices if they agreed to stop fighting. That kind of deal commands far higher support in Afghanistan itself – 65 percent in an ABC News/BBC/ARD poll there in December. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-loses-ground-afghanistan-wars-inten...

MORE ON WIKILEAKS
Q & A: Nir Rosen on Afghanistan and WikiLeaks

By Joel Meares Columbia Journalism Review [August 2010]

---- If anyone should be unsurprised by material in the WikiLeaks war logs dump, it’s reporter Nir Rosen—the New York-based freelance magazine writer and Fellow at NYU’s Center on Law and Security.

CJR: What was your first reaction to the WikiLeaks dump and the way the media handled it?

NR: I think it’s a big deal. For people who are familiar with the region or with the war, it’s true that there’s nothing significantly new in terms of the big picture. Anyone familiar with it knows that in general it’s not going well, that Pakistan is both an ally and an opponent, and that the Afghan government is corrupt. So the argument people are making—that there’s nothing new—is true on one level, but it also makes it all the more outrageous. The most shocking thing is that the people who say they knew all this weren’t more shocked before. http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/q_a_nir_rosen_on_afghanistan_a.php

Five Passages from the WikiLeaks "Afghan Diary" That Bring the Bizarre, Tragic Reality of War to Life

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet [August 7, 2010]
---- The mass of 91,000 raw files is perhaps best read (or heavily skimmed) as a very long work of experimental combat non-fiction, with each chapter a narrative bark of unedited, acronym-packed military speak. Over the course of hours, the sheer redundancy of the material -- a drumbeat of tribal skirmishes, dead civilians, and firefights among Afghan cops, soldiers, and militias -- powerfully conveys with incredible compression the daily grind of chaos and violence that is Afghanistan. The WikiLeaks memos make even the shortest wire dispatch read like an Op-Ed. They are bullets by bullet-point. Below are five memos that gave this reader pause, each for different reasons. They don't represent the most shocking or important details buried in the cache, but are representative of the tiny rough gems you might find perusing the leaks. They are highly compressed true war stories that will lead different people to different conclusions, including none at all. http://www.alternet.org/story/147755/

FB – The WikiLeaks documents are searchable. Here is one interesting example: a list of demonstrations by Afghan citizens, as recorded in the Wiki files. http://www.diarydig.org/search/?category=Demonstration&sort_dir=desc&sor...

(Video) Media: The ongoing WikiLeaks saga

From AlJazeeraEnglish [August 07, 2010] – First 8 minutes of segment

---- The truth is out there, but what does it all mean? On this episode of The Listening Post, we turn our attention to figures involved in the WikiLeaks Afghan war logs and the debate over what the US government should do about it. http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish#p/u/14/HNt7T_JTIkk

THE WAR IN KABUL
Introduction

Billions of US dollars for reconstruction and development projects have been lost or stolen. A House of Representatives subcommittee has put a “hold” on some $4 billion in aid funds until auditors figure out just what’s going on. The US attempt to control corruption has been met with a counterattack by the Karzai people. This is important because the appearance/reality of corruption weakens support for the war, as well as doing nothing for “reconstruction” or whatever. On the other hand, corruption is the lifeblood of the Karzai regime, and US attempts to limit the flow threatens the government’s power.

Antigraft Units, Backed by U.S., Draw Karzai’s Ire

By Rod Nordland and Dexter Filkins, New York Times [August 7, 2010]

---- President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has promised to root out corruption, but after one of his own top aides was arrested by American-supported antigraft units recently, he fired back by investigating the investigators and apparently seeking control over their actions. He convened a commission ultimately reporting that the anticorruption investigators were violating the human rights of suspects they arrested. Aides to the president also complained that they violated the nation’s sovereignty because of the American role in the investigations. The controversy set up yet another serious divide between American officials and Mr. Karzai at a time when the Obama administration has made combating corruption in the Afghan government a major policy goal. Congress is withholding $4 billion in financing to Afghanistan over a case closely related to the arrest of Mr. Karzai’s aide. At issue are two powerful anticorruption organizations set up in the Ministry of the Interior, initially with the president’s approval, known as the Major Crimes Task Force and the Sensitive Investigative Unit. American agencies, including the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration, are extensively involved in the units.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/world/asia/07afghan.html?ref=world&pag...

See also: Joshua Partlow and Greg Miller, “Karzai calls for probe of U.S.-backed anti-corruption task force,” Washington Post [August 5, 2010] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/04/AR201008... and Karen DeYoung, “US worried by Hamid Karzai’s attempt to assert control over corruption probes,” Washington Post [August 6, 2010]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR201008...

Afghanistan's ranks of civil servants under siege

By Deb Riechmann and Amir Shah, Associated Press

---- The Taliban have issued a new code of conduct ordering fighters to protect civilians — as long as they don't side with the Afghan government or NATO coalition. If they do, the punishment is death.

The 69-page directive, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press in southern Afghanistan, follows an acceleration in Taliban attacks on Afghan officials — a campaign that threatens the NATO goal of bolstering local government to help turn back the insurgents. The new code confirms what is becoming increasingly apparent: The ranks of Afghanistan's civil servants are under siege.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21Mfo...

THE WAR ON THE GROUND
Afghanistan: an interview with war correspondent Anand Gopal

By Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch [August 4, 2010]

---- [FB – Anand Gopal is one of our best correspondents in Afghanistan.]

RJ: How has the war changed in the last year?

Anand Gopal: The insurgency has changed quite a bit in the last year. It is more splintered movement, partly due to Coalition Force assassinations of commanders, and partly due to the arrest of the Taliban's leader Mullah Beradar. Hundreds of commanders have been killed, but the Taliban has no trouble finding recruits to fill their shoes. The new commanders are younger and (often) more radical than their predecessors. At the top, after Pakistan's arrest of Beradar (who was the day-to-day leader of the movement) in February has led to a power struggle between different insurgent leaders. None of this, however, has diminished the group's effectiveness as a fighting force on the ground, http://counterpunch.org/jacobs08042010.htm

Taliban flee to desert as Nato storms stronghold

By Kim Sengupta, The Independend [UK] [August 4 2010]

Map of Nad Ali area ---- British troops in Afghanistan yesterday entered an insurgent stronghold targeted in a major Nato offensive unopposed after Taliban fighters abandoned their defensive positions. Soldiers just "kept going" when attacks they faced outside the town of Saidabad suddenly stopped. Around 1,600 residents of the town, about one-fifth of the population, had remained, but there were no signs of fighters. Operation Tor Shezada – "Black Prince" in the Dari language – is the first of a series of campaigns through which Nato commanders seek to inflict a military defeat on the insurgency as politicians in the West clamour for troops to be pulled out. Intercepted Taliban messages prior to the advance indicated the insurgents, facing hundreds of British and Afghan troops descending from the north, and US Marines to the south, had decided to live to fight another day. It is believed that some of the 180 fighters, who had been carrying out raids against the Americans in Marjah and the British in Nad-e-Ali, have headed west into the "Dasht" desert area. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/taliban-flee-to-desert-as-n... [See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10825573 for a map of this operation.]

Troops strive to hold the line in Pech valley

By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes [August 4, 2010]

---- In this wild and outlaw region of rugged mountains, where fighting is a way of life, insurgents fire down onto U.S. bases dotting the river valley not from a single peak or ridgeline, but from two or three at a time.

American soldiers are in a complex and unrelenting battle in stunning but brutal terrain. Insurgents command the high ground, and counterinsurgency tactics employed elsewhere in the country are fruitless among an insular population that sees no benefit in central government. Just six weeks before the 101st Division’s 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment arrived in the Pech River Valley in late May, U.S. forces pulled out of the adjacent Korengal Valley, leaving it open to become what officers here describe as a new Taliban command and control center set up in the very base that U.S. forces abandoned. Now American commanders are struggling to assess the value of trying to hold this isolated valley in the hostile Kunar province. Many wonder if it wouldn’t be better to pull out of the Pech, too.

http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/afghanistan/troops-strive-to-hol...

THE SLOW-MOTION OFFENSIVE IN KANDAHAR
In Kandahar, U.S. tries the lessons of Baghdad

By Rajiv Chandrasekaren, Washington Post [August 3, 2010]

[FB- Rajiv Chandrasekaren is the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an interesting book about the US occupation in Baghdad and the clowns who tried to run the empire.]

---- This city is starting to feel a lot like Baghdad. Tall concrete blast walls, like those that surround the Green Zone, are seemingly everywhere. Checkpoints supervised by U.S. soldiers have been erected on all major roads leading into the city. Residents are being urged to apply for new identification cards that require them to have their retinas scanned and their fingerprints recorded. As U.S. and NATO commanders mount a major effort to counter the Taliban's influence in Kandahar, they are turning to population-control tactics employed in the Iraqi capital during the 2007 troop surge to separate warring Sunnis and Shiites. They are betting that such measures can help separate insurgents here from the rest of the population, an essential first step in the U.S.-led campaign to improve security in and around Afghanistan's second-largest city. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR201008...

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
Afghans Say NATO Strikes Killed Civilians

By Rod Nordland, New York Times [August 6, 2010]

---- NATO officials acknowledged preliminary reports that four to a dozen or more civilians were killed in a coalition airstrike Thursday in Nangarhar Province. Afghan accounts put the civilian deaths as high as 32.

At the scene, in the village of Hashim Khail Wadi in the Khogyani district, a reporter for The New York Times counted 12 fresh graves. Residents said that they had just buried civilian victims of the bombing and that a total of 32 people had been killed there and in another village nearby, Nakrro Khail, in the Sherzad district. The victims were said to be in a house in Nakrro Khail and at a ford in Hashim Khail Wadi, where vehicles were blocked by a flood and the drivers had parked, waiting to cross, when the vehicles were rocketed by planes. The attack took place about 4 a.m., the residents said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world/asia/06afghan.html?ref=world

See also: Sayed Salahuddin, “Karzai orders probe into Afghan civilian deaths reports,” Reuters [August 5, 2010] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6741KP20100805; and Amir Shah, “NATO admits some civilians killed in Afghanistan clash,” The Associated Press [August 6, 2010] http://www.northjersey.com/news/100098254_NATO_admits_some_civilians_kil...

(Video) NATO Forces in Afghanistan Can't Deny They Killed Civilians in Sangin Anymore

From Brave New Foundation [August 6, 2010] – 3 minutes

---- NATO is still denying a massacre of civilians in Sangin, Helmand Province, last month. But on Friday the presidential palace in Afghanistan issued a report finding that 39 civilians were killed in the fighting. Civilian casualties are the main cause of dissatisfaction on the part of most Afghans with the NATO & US troops in their country, and the Sangin finding signals an unwillingness of President Hamid Karzai to play the issue down down or sweep it under the rug.http://rethinkafghanistan.com/

Petraeus renews limits on airstrikes in Afghanistan

By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers [August 8, 2010]

---- Afghanistan commander Army Gen. David Petraeus has renewed orders to American troops to refrain from calling in artillery or air power when battling Taliban forces unless they're certain that no civilians are present. The Aug. 1 order, Petraeus' first since he assumed command early this summer from ousted Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was an effort to fine-tune a McChrystal directive that had angered some U.S. troops, who said the restrictions on the use of artillery and air power exposed them to greater danger. Petraeus' order, unclassified portions of which were released Wednesday, seemed unlikely to mollify that complaint, however. Many U.S. troops in Afghanistan had hoped that Petraeus would give them more room to use air power, the one area in which the U.S. military dominates the Taliban. Petraeus, however, indicated little change from McChrystal's stance on the issue. http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/04/1761755/petraeus-renews-limits-on-...

Germany to Pay $5,000 Each for Civilians Killed in Kunduz Attack

By Jason Ditz, Antiwra.com [August 06, 2010]

---- After several months of negotiations, the German government has finally come to terms with a compensation deal that most of the families of the 102 civilians killed in a September 2009 Kunduz air strike appear to be satisfied with. Under the deal the German military will pay $5,000 each, or a total of about half a million dollars, to he families of the victims. They emphasize, however, that the payment is not an acknowledgment of guilt for the killings, but was purely voluntary. http://news.antiwar.com/2010/08/06/germany-to-pay-5000-each-for-civilian...

PAKISTAN/INDIA - THE UPRISING IN KASHMIR
Introduction

Since the birth of independent Pakistan and India in 1947, the disputed territory of Kashmir has been a focus of conflict between the two countries. Wars for the control of Kashmir took place in 1947-48 and then again in 1965. (A third war between the two countries, in 1971, was the result of East Bengal’s separation from Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh.) Pakistan and India regard each other as the “main enemy,” and the engagement of each country in the affairs of Afghanistan is subordinate to this rivalry. The Kashmir uprising against India’s oppressive military occupation, therefore, spills over into the war in Afghanistan, as well as threatening another war between India and Pakistan, whom India blames for the Kashmir unrest.]

Kashmir burns again as India responds to dissent with violence

Andrew Buncombe, The Independent [UK] [August 7, 2010]

---- Once again, Kashmir is burning. Buildings and barricades have been set alight and its people are enflamed. The largest towns are packed with heavily-armed police and the hospital wards are full of young men with gunshot wounds. Around 50 people have been killed since June, more than 31 in the last week alone, and dozens more have been wounded. The dead include young men, teenagers and even a nine-year-old boy, reportedly beaten to death by the security forces after he tried to walk to the local shop. The Indian government is in no mind to give Kashmir its freedom. Since 1947, when the formerly independent state's princely ruler, the Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh, controversially chose to join India rather than Pakistan, Delhi has vigorously defended the state against both Pakistan-backed militants and peaceful campaigners. The militancy, which gathered pace in 1989 and has now largely quietened, has claimed the lives of at least 60,000 people and resulted in the creation of one of the most highly militarised places on the planet. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kashmir-burns-again-as-indi...

See also: Barbara Crossette, ”Kashmir on Fire Again as Indian Troops Shoot to Kill,” The Nation [August 4, 2010] http://www.thenation.com/article/153875/kashmir-fire-again-indian-troops... and Lydia Polgreen, “Kashmiris Storm the Street, Defying Curfew,” Christian Science Monitor

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/world/asia/05kashmir.html?_r=1