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http://consortiumnews.com/2011/06/09/th ... war-myths/

Three Deadly War Myths

Exclusive: The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have involved myths pleasing to Official Washington — about its own wisdom and the evil of the enemy – but these false narratives have caused President Barack Obama and other U.S. policymakers to base decisions on illusion rather than reality. Robert Parry examines three of these deadly myths.

By Robert Parry

June 9, 2011

When a nation as powerful as the United States bases policy on bogus history, it can become a grave danger to others and to itself. Yet, that is what now goes on daily in Official Washington, with senior officials routinely citing false narratives and elite journalists accepting myths as truth.

Take for example one of the favorite “lessons” from the recent past: that in 1989, as soon as the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the United States foolishly turned its back on that central Asian nation setting the stage for the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in 2001.

This “history” was cited again on Wednesday by President Barack Obama’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan C. Crocker. In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Crocker said the supposed U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan in 1989 had “disastrous consequences” and “we cannot afford to do so again.”

In other words, Crocker implied, the United States must stick with its current counter-insurgency war and the “nation-building” that goes with it, even if that requires the continued commitment of a large military force and the expenditure of billions of dollars each month.

The New York Times reported Crocker’s comments about the alleged 1989 abandonment without challenge, indeed, the Times hailed his testimony an “unvarnished assessment.” As for the senators, the Washington Post described Crocker’s confirmation hearing as “a virtual love-fest.”

No one wanted to suggest that Crocker might be lying. After all, he, along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, walk on water as far as Official Washington is concerned. The trio is credited with another favorite Washington myth, the “successful surge” in Iraq, where Crocker served as ambassador while Petraeus was the military commander and Gates ran the Pentagon.

Official Washington also has bought into a third deadly myth, the certainty that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has American blood on his hands for his purported role in blowing Pan Am 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, a terrorist attack that killed 270 people.

All three of these dubious certainties are cited in the major U.S. news media as flat fact – and thus a factor in determining war policy – even though they are either untrue or in serious doubt.

Tom Hanks’s History

Regarding Crocker’s testimony about the Afghan abandonment, it is simply accepted in Washington’s power circles that the United States did cut off assistance to the Afghan mujahedeen immediately after the Soviet army departed on Feb. 15, 1989. That “history” has even been popularized by Tom Hanks in the movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War” – and who would question Tom Hanks?

Defense Secretary Gates hammered home the same point in late 2009 as he sold the case for the “surge” of 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. On a flight to the war zone, he told a group of credulous reporters “that we are not going to repeat the situation in 1989.″

But one has to assume that Gates and Crocker know the real history, that the United States did not terminate its covert support for the Afghan mujahedeen immediately after the Soviets left. In fact, we know for a fact that Gates is aware of the real history because he recounted it in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows.

Here’s what the history actually shows: In 1988, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev promised to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan and sought a negotiated settlement. He hoped for a unity government that would include elements of Najibullah’s Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalist rebels.

Gates, who was then deputy CIA director, opposed Gorbachev’s plan, disbelieving that the Soviets would really depart and insisting that – if they did – the CIA’s mujahedeen could quickly defeat Najibullah’s army.

Inside the Reagan administration, Gates’s judgment was opposed by State Department analysts who foresaw a drawn-out struggle. Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead and the department’s intelligence chief Morton Abramowitz warned that Najibullah’s army might hold on longer than the CIA expected.

But Gates pushed the CIA analysis of a rapid Najibullah collapse and prevailed in the policy debates. In his memoir, Gates recalled briefing Secretary of State George Shultz and his senior aides about the CIA’s prediction prior to Shultz flying to Moscow in February 1988.

“I told them that most [CIA] analysts did not believe Najibullah’s government could last without active Soviet military support,” wrote Gates.

After the Soviets did withdraw in early 1989 – proving Gates wrong on that point – some U.S. officials felt Washington’s geostrategic aims had been achieved and a move toward peace was in order. There also was concern about the Afghan mujahedeen, especially their tendencies toward brutality, heroin trafficking and fundamentalist religious policies.

However, the new administration of George H.W. Bush – with Gates having moved from the CIA to the White House as deputy national security adviser – rebuffed Gorbachev and chose to continue U.S. covert support for the mujahedeen, funneled primarily through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI.

Yet, instead of the CIA-predicted fast collapse, Najibullah’s regime used its Soviet weapons and advisers to beat back a mujahedeen offensive in 1990. Najibullah hung on. The war, the violence and the disorder continued.

Gates finally recognized that his CIA analysis was wrong. In his memoir, he wrote: “As it turned out, Whitehead and Abramowitz were right” in their warning that Najibullah’s regime might not collapse so quickly.

Acknowledging a Fact

But Gates’s memoir also belies the fiction that he told the reporters in December 2009 about the immediate U.S. pullback in Afghanistan once the Soviets left in February 1989. In his memoir, Gates acknowledged that the U.S. government did not depart Afghanistan immediately.

“Najibullah would remain in power for another three years [after the Soviet pull-out], as the United States and the USSR continued to aid their respective sides,” Gates wrote. “On Dec. 11, 1991, both Moscow and Washington cut off all assistance, and Najibullah’s government fell four months later. He had outlasted both Gorbachev and the Soviet Union itself.”

In other words, covert U.S. support to the Afghan rebels continued for almost three years. The United States did not simply pull the plug in Afghanistan; instead it pressed ahead seeking a clear-cut military triumph.

Yet, with the false presentation of this history – by Gates in 2009 and by Crocker in 2011 – the real historical lessons also have been lost.

Those lessons are, first, that as difficult and repugnant as it may be, give-and-take negotiations and power-sharing with adversaries may represent the best possible outcome for a war-torn country like Afghanistan. And, second, an insistence on “victory” can result in a far worse outcome.

Yet, instead of absorbing those historical lessons, Gates, Crocker and other war hawks have used the myth of the premature Afghan pullout to guide the nation onto the same disastrous path that was followed in Afghanistan nearly two decades ago – seeking victory through warfare.

Similarly, the myth of the “successful surge” in Iraq has clouded the judgment of Official Washington on Afghanistan, creating political pressure on President Obama and other decision-makers to pursue the supposedly victorious course charted in Iraq.

But the “surge” myth in Iraq is almost as flimsy as the “pullout” myth regarding Afghanistan.

Many of the key factors that led to the gradual decline in violence in Iraq predated the 2007 “surge,” including the policy of paying off Sunni tribal leaders not to shoot at Americans, the Sunni disillusionment with al-Qaeda extremism, the killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the de facto ethnic cleansing of the major cities.

In other words, the Washington consensus crediting the “surge” and its architects for the eventual drop in Iraqi killing missed the more complex reality and may actually have contributed to more death and destruction by causing the Iraq “surge” myth to be applied to the Afghan War.

The “surge” myth also obscured a real lesson from Iraq, that once the United States agreed to pull out its troops, the violence against U.S. soldiers dropped dramatically. It only has spiked recently amid suggestions from U.S. policymakers that they would be open to revising the status-of-forces-agreement to allow some U.S. military personnel to stay past the end of 2011.

SNIP (The rest fits better in the Libya thread.)

90% of Petraeus’s Captured ‘Taliban’ Were Civilians

by Gareth Porter, June 13, 2011

During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, Gen. David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces: in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355 rank-and-file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle- or high-ranking Taliban.

The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus’s command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.

Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data.

Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.

The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban rank and file” were not Taliban fighters at all.

Checking on the claims of the number of Taliban commanders and rank and file killed is impossible, but the claims of Taliban captured could be checked against official data on admission of detainees added to Parwan.

An Afghan detained by U.S. or NATO forces can only be held in a Forward Operating Base for a maximum of 14 days before a decision must be made about whether to release the individual or send him to Parwan for longer-term detention.

IPS has now obtained an unclassified graph by Task Force 435, the military command responsible for detainee affairs, on Parwan’s monthly intake and release totals for 2010, which shows that only 270 detainees were admitted to that facility during the 90-day period from May through July 2010.

That figure also includes alleged Taliban commanders who were sent to Parwan and whom Petraeus counted separately from the rank and file figure. Thus, more than four out of every five Afghans said to have been Taliban fighters captured during that period had been released within two weeks as innocent civilians.

When Petraeus decided in mid-August to release the figure of 1,355 Taliban rank and file allegedly captured during the 90-day period, he already knew that 80 percent or more of that total had already been released.

Major Sunset R. Belinsky, the ISAF press officer for SOF operations, conceded to IPS last September that the 1,355 figure applied only to “initial detentions.”

Task Force 435 commander Adm. Robert Harward confirmed in a press briefing for journalists Nov. 30, 2010, that 80 percent of the Afghans detained by the U.S. military during the entire year to that point had been released within two weeks.

“This year, in this battle space, approximately 5,500 individuals have been detained,” Harward said, adding the crucial fact that “about 1,100 have come to the detention facility in Parwan.”

Harward did not explain the discrepancy between the two figures, however, and no journalist attending the Pentagon briefing asked for such an explanation.

Petraeus continued to exploit media ignorance of the discrepancy between the number of Taliban rank and file said to have been “captured” and the number actually sent to the FDIP.

In early December, ISAF gave Bill Roggio, a blogger for The Long War Journal Web site, the figure of more than 4,100 “enemy fighters” captured from June 1 through Nov. 30, along with 2,000 rank-and-file Taliban killed.

But during those six months, only 690 individuals were sent to Parwan, according to the Task Force 435 data—17 percent of the 4,100 Taliban rank and file claimed captured as “Taliban.”

The total of 690 detainees also includes an unknown number of commanders counted separately by Petraeus and a large number of detainees who were later released from Parwan. Considering those two factors, the actual proportion of those claimed as captured Taliban who were found not to be part of the Taliban organization rises to 90 percent or even higher.

Three hundred forty-five detainees, or 20 percent of the 1,686 total number of those who were detained in Parwan from June through November, were released upon review of their cases, according to the same Feb. 5, 2011, Task Force document obtained by IPS. The vast majority of those released from the facility had been sent to Parwan in June or later.

Detainees are released from Parwan only when the evidence against them is so obviously weak or nonexistent that U.S. officers cannot justify continuing to hold them, despite the fact that the detainees lack normal procedural rights in the “non-adversarial” hearing by the Task Force’s Detainee Review.

The deliberate confusion sowed by Petraeus by referring to anyone picked up for interrogation as a captured rank-and-file Taliban was a key element of a carefully considered strategy for creating a more favorable image of the war.

As Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier wrote in a Sept. 3, 2010, news analysis after an interview with Petraeus, he was very conscious that “demonstrating progress is difficult in a war fought in hundreds of small, scattered engagements, where front lines do not move and where cities do not fall.”

SOF raids, however, could be turned into a dramatic story line. “The mystique of elite, highly trained commandos swooping down on an unsuspecting Taliban leader in the dead of night plays well back home,” wrote Dozier, “especially at a time when much of the news from Afghanistan focuses on rising American deaths and frustration with the Afghan government.”

Petraeus made sure the impact of the new SOF narrative would be maximized by presenting the total of Afghans swept up in SOF raids as actual Taliban fighters.

The deceptive nature of those statistics, as now revealed by U.S. military data, raises anew the question of whether the statistics released by Petraeus on killing of alleged Taliban were similarly skewed.

(Inter Press Service)

How Pakistan Punked America

For most of the Cold War and during the “war on terror,” Pakistan has manipulated U.S. presidents as part of its own great game as the Islamic republic circumvented U.S. laws to build a nuclear arsenal and to support some of the world’s most notorious terrorists, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman recalls.

By Melvin A. Goodman

June 14, 2011

During the worst days of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union learned that their third-world clients had great leverage over their benefactors.

The Soviets could not get assistance to the Palestinians in Lebanon without paying off Syria. The Soviets became increasingly involved in Africa because the Cubans shamed Moscow into greater support for Angola and Ethiopia.

A succession of U.S. administrations has learned that Israel has more influence over U.S. policy than Washington would like to acknowledge. Until the United States agreed to a “one China” policy, Taiwan had far too much leverage over the actions of the United States in East Asia.

And for the past 60 years, the tail has wagged the dog in U.S.-Pakistani relations.

The US-Pakistani relationship is one of the most complicated bilateral relationships in the world. Since the start of the Cold War, the United States has needed support from the Islamabad government and, as a result, has ignored Pakistani perfidy.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States needed secret bases in Pakistan for U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union and, therefore, disregarded Pakistani military dictatorships.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States needed logistical support for its secret opening to China and overlooked human rights violations in Pakistan.

In the 1980s, Pakistan served as a conduit for U.S. assistance to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen forces and, therefore, ignored Pakistan’s secret development of nuclear weapons.

For the past ten years, the United States has needed Pakistan as a conduit for supplies to U.S. military forces in Afghanistan as well as a base for CIA drone aircraft that are used against al-Qaeda elements in Pakistan. As a result, the Bush and Obama administrations have ignored Pakistan’s support for state terrorism.

U.S. unwillingness to challenge Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions allowed the proliferation of nuclear technology in the third world.

The CIA learned as early as 1979 that Pakistan was operating a clandestine uranium facility. President Jimmy Carter did not react to this intelligence and President Ronald Reagan asserted that “nuclear proliferation was none of our business.”

This foreshadowed a closer military relationship with Pakistan even when Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, ordered the hanging of the civilian president he had expelled from office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections.

From 1981 to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the United States relied on Pakistan to bleed the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan. During this period, the CIA continued to collect intelligence on Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, but the White House looked the other way.

In 1986, CIA deputy director Robert Gates ordered the CIA’s directorate of intelligence to provide no intelligence on Pakistani nuclear activities to the Senate and House intelligence committees. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s Bargain, Charlie Wilson’s War.”]

Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued exemptions to Pakistan in order to circumvent the Pressler Amendment that required an end to military assistance for Pakistan’s crossing of the nuclear threshold.

A waiver from President Bush in 1989 permitted the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan although it was known that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, was supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

In the past decade, there has been no country that has sponsored more state terrorism than Pakistan.

Radical Islamists in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate have been training and funding Islamic terrorist organizations for the past three decades, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba that conducted the December 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, as well as the Afghan Taliban, which seized the Afghan capital in 1994. The attack on a Pakistani naval base in Karachi late last month indicates that terrorist organizations have infiltrated the Pakistani military as well.

The full story of Osama bin Laden’s secret hideout in a military community close to the Pakistani capital may never be known, but it certainly begs serious questions about Pakistani cooperation with even al-Qaeda.

So, what is to be done? The United States is on a fool’s errand in Afghanistan and must pursue a diplomatic and political strategy there in order to extricate itself.

A smaller U.S. footprint in Afghanistan would make the United States far less dependent on Pakistan. Moreover, U.S. support to the Afghan military ($13 billion) is beginning to rival the size of Afghanistan’s gross national product ($16 billion).

The United States is building an Afghan military that Afghans will never afford.

Pakistan continues to be one of the major recipients of U.S. largesse, receiving more than $20 billion in U.S. aid since the 9/11 attacks. Very little of that aid has gone to economic development that Pakistan so sorely needs; nor has it gone to battling terrorism and Islamic forces on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

Instead most of this money has gone to a Pakistani military force that is an obstacle to U.S. success in Afghanistan. We cannot end military support to Pakistan as long as we need its support in identifying the terrorists who have sanctuary there.

It is also time for Afghanistan and Pakistan to build their own governments with their own resources. The U.S. role in creating huge military establishments in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been an obstacle to good governance in both places.

In any event, no counterinsurgency has been successful against an insurgency like the Taliban with a sanctuary such as Pakistan offers. As long as the Afghan Taliban is our enemy and Pakistan’s ally, there will be no success for the United States.

Finally, the United States must end its heavy reliance on the military instrument in the conduct of foreign policy in general.

U.S. military occupation in the Islamic world has been the greatest recruitment tool of the Islamic extremists. It was U.S. military aid that helped to create a sanctuary for anti-Soviet extremists in the 1980s; we are now fighting those same extremists.

The “Arab Spring” demonstrated the inability of military assistance to have a beneficial impact on democratic change in the Middle East. A heavy U.S. military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, moreover, has weakened U.S. economic and diplomatic security; it must be reduced and eventually eliminated.

Melvin A. Goodman had a 42-year government career including service with the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department and the U.S. Army. His latest book was Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is the author of the forthcoming National Insecurity: The Threat of American Militarism. This story previously appeared at Truthout.org.

8bitagent wrote:Pakistan cut off its bases for CIA drone use
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43587402/

Next Up: Pakistan
Ominous signs of a major new war
by Justin Raimondo, July 11, 2011

I see someone besides myself has noticed all the “leaking” going on in the upper echelons of Washington over our rocky relationship with Pakistan. Suddenly Islamabad is on the verge of being classified as part of the Axis of Evil, with the head of the joint chiefs, Admiral Mullen, openly accusing the Pakistanis of “sanctioning” the killing of a journalist, and allying with a faction of the Taliban. Since when does a military man – the titular uniformed head of the US armed force, no less – speak out on such sensitive political matters? Why, when he has the full backing of the White House – which obviously has plans for the Pakistanis.

The new accusations add fuel to the fire started by the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad lair, where he had been hiding for years. The Pakistan-haters in the administration – of which there seem to be plenty – were quick to draw the conclusion that he’d been hiding with the knowledge and cooperation of the Pakistani military – because of the hideout’s proximity to an elite military academy. Which is odd, since it is well known that al-Qaeda operatives were living in the US for years, undetected, as they planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Heck, FBI agents in the field warned Washington after one of the terrorists took flight training lessons and was reported for suspicious activities – to no avail. What if someone in Pakistan had reported similarly suspicious activity in Abbottabad to the local authorities, and no action had been taken – in the view of the anti-Pakistan crowd, wouldn’t that constitute prima facie proof of Islamabad’s guilt?

The ultimate prize for US imperialism in the Middle East – the jewel in the crown of the emerging American empire – is Iran, long the chief target of the War Party’s attention. Yet they don’t have either the resources or the political support for such an attack, and so the strategy, for the time being, is encirclement. First, Iraq and Afghanistan, buttressing the substantial US military presence in the Gulf – and now, Pakistan. (Azerbaijan, to the north, has replaced Kyrgyzstan as the main way station funneling supplies to American troops in the region.)

Shorn of its obstreperous military leaders, who entertain delusions of autonomy, Pakistan will be fully integrated into the American orbit – and Iran will be surrounded on all sides.

While keeping the heat on for a direct attack on Iran, the powerful pro-Israel lobby – the driving force behind the anti-Iran crowd – is biding its time, confident they’ll win in the end. In the meantime, they are carefully building up momentum for the final push toward war, and a key part of that is agitating for a complete break in US-Pakistan relations.

The Lobby’s fingerprints are all over the latest anti-Pakistani agitprop. It was one Simon Henderson, described as the resident “expert” on Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), who recently released an alleged letter from a top official of the North Korean regime “proving” Pakistan supplied Pyongyang with nuclear technology. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, former research director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as an “academic” adjunct to AIPAC, the primary conduit of pro-Israel propaganda in the US.

That this letter is a forgery seems almost beyond doubt: after all, why would a North Korean write a letter to a Pakistani in English? And, come to think of it, why would such a letter be written at all, given its highly incriminating content? Yet – as recent history shows – when it comes to disseminating US government propaganda, such outlets as the Washington Post and the New York Times don’t have very high standards. Nobody really cares if any of this is credible, let alone true: the idea is to hurl such a barrage of accusations that a general impression of Pakistan’s perfidy will be created. Where there’s smoke…

Signs of Iran’s warming relations with Pakistan culminated in the agreement to build a gas pipeline that will transport Iranian gas to Pakistani ports, throwing the hard-pressed regime in Tehran an economic lifeline. The pipeline is expected to be operational in six months. This does much to explain the recent flurry of anti-Pakistan rhetoric coming out of Washington.

As I have said repeatedly, US foreign policy is all about domestic politics. AIPAC is one of the strongest and most feared of the Washington lobbies. It exerts a dominant influence on US foreign policy in the “Near East” (one might ask WINEP: “Near to what?”) and has been relentlessly beating the drums for war with Iran. In this election year, President Obama – already beleaguered – can hardly afford to ignore their complaints that he isn’t moving decisively on the Iran front.

A war weary public can hardly be expected to begin clamoring for the invasion and occupation of a country several times larger and more populous than Iraq, yet that is hardly enough to deter the Obama administration from laying the groundwork for an attack. That’s what the sudden backstabbing of Pakistan is all about.

From what I can discern, the Obama-ites have continued a program initiated by the Bush regime in Iranian Baluchistan, supporting the Jundallah armed grouping which carries out attacks on Iranian civilians and government officials. Could it be the Pakistanis are finally giving in to Iranian demands and no longer allowing this US-backed terrorist band to operate from bases in their territory? Islamabad has long held this prospect over the heads of its erstwhile allies in Washington.

A suitable pretext will have to be established, naturally, before Washington can make any overt moves: perhaps the Pakistani military will be deemed a “threat” to “Pakistani democracy” – such as it is. In any case, the prospect of yet another military coup in Islamabad is hardly shocking – in which case, one scenario might involve the US military coming to the “aid” of President Asif Ali Zardari (popularly known by his nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent”). Another set up for US intervention could conceivably involve an alleged “terrorist threat” to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal: it’s well known the Americans have contingency plans in place already. Or – the easy route – would be to simply declare al-Qaeda had migrated en masse to Pakistan, and increase our military presence gradually but exponentially, which is the course we are presently on.

At this point, war with – or in – Pakistan seems almost inevitable: the question is not if, but when.

American Dream wrote:http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/03/taliban-truce-and-coming-storm-in-south.html

Taliban Truce and the Coming Storm in South Asia

...

This is rich though unsurprising, given the Americans' love affair with a man once described as the world's most powerful drug trafficker. And considering alleged ties between President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali and the heroin trade, perhaps a deal with Hekmatyar isn't as crazy as it seems at first blush.

According to The New York Times, "several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter."

Brother of Afghan president killed: official
Tue Jul 12, 2011 3:30am EDT

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Ahmad Wali Karzai, a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and one of the most powerful men in southern Afghanistan, was killed on Tuesday, an official and a family member confirmed.

"I confirm that Ahmad Wali was killed inside his house," said Zalmay Ayoubi, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, where Ahmad Wali Karzai lived and was head of the provincial council.

A cousin of Ahmad Wali Karzai, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to Reuters that he had been killed.

Jeff wrote:

American Dream wrote:http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/03/taliban-truce-and-coming-storm-in-south.html

Taliban Truce and the Coming Storm in South Asia

...

This is rich though unsurprising, given the Americans' love affair with a man once described as the world's most powerful drug trafficker. And considering alleged ties between President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali and the heroin trade, perhaps a deal with Hekmatyar isn't as crazy as it seems at first blush.

According to The New York Times, "several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter."

Brother of Afghan president killed: official
Tue Jul 12, 2011 3:30am EDT

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Ahmad Wali Karzai, a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and one of the most powerful men in southern Afghanistan, was killed on Tuesday, an official and a family member confirmed.

"I confirm that Ahmad Wali was killed inside his house," said Zalmay Ayoubi, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, where Ahmad Wali Karzai lived and was head of the provincial council.

A cousin of Ahmad Wali Karzai, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to Reuters that he had been killed.

http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/i ... ZE20110712

http://counterpunch.org/hallinan07282011.html

July 28, 2011

Anatomy of a Hit
Killing Our Guy in Kandahar

By CONN HALLINAN


The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar July 12 is one of those moments when the long and bloody Afghanistan war suddenly comes into focus. It is not a picture one is eager to put up on the wall.

Karzai, a younger half brother (because their father had multiple wives) of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was the Kabul government's viceroy in southern Afghanistan. What his nickname, "the king of Kandahar," translates into is "warlord." He controlled everything from the movement of drugs to the placement of car sales agencies. Want to open a Toyota dealership? See "AWK," as he was also known, and come with a bucket load of cash.

AWK's power, according to the Financial Times, "lay in a mafia-style network of oligarchs and loyal elders, funded, according to U.S. media reports, by heroin trafficking." He was also on the CIA's payroll. No truck moved through the south without paying him a tax. No United Nations or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) projects could be built without his okay. In case someone didn't get the message, his Kandahar Strike Force Militia explained it to them. Next to AWK, Al Capone was a small-time pickpocket.

And he was our guy.

So was Jan Mohammed Khan, assassinated July 17, a key ally and advisor to the Afghan president, and a man so corrupt that the Dutch expeditionary forces forced his removal as the governor of Uruzgan Province in 2006.

The entire U.S. endeavor in Afghanistan—from the initial 2001 invasion to the current withdrawal plan—has relied on a narrow group of criminal entrepreneurs, the very people whose unchecked greed set off the 1992-96 Afghan civil war and led to the victory of the Taliban.

AWK was a member of the Popalzai tribe, which along with the Alikozai and Barakzai tribes, has run the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand since the early 1990s, systematically excluding other tribes. According to the Guardian's Stephen Gray, "The formation of the Taliban was, in great measure, a revolt of the excluded."

When the Americans invaded, "AWK and the Barakzai strongman and former Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai not only seized control of NATO purse-strings by acquiring lucrative contracts, but they also manipulated U.S. intelligence and Special Forces to gain help with their predatory and retaliatory agenda," says Gray, harassing and arresting Taliban members until they fled to Pakistan.

AWK not only poured money into the coffers of the Kabul government, he insured a second term for his brother by stuffing ballot boxes in the 2009 election, and he was a key actor in identifying targets for U.S. night raids. It is the success of these night raids in killing off Taliban leaders that has allowed the Obama Administration to claim a measure of victory in the Afghan war and to lay the groundwork for a withdrawal of most American troops by 2014.

With U.S. polls running heavily against the war—59 percent oppose it—and with more than 200 votes in Congress for speeding up the withdrawal timetable, the White House wants the war to be winding down as the U.S. goes into the 2012 elections.

For the Afghan central government and the Obama administration, then, AWK was probably the most powerful and important warlord in the country.

As in chess, there are winners and losers when a major piece falls.

The assassination has dealt a serious blow to the Americans. The rosy picture of progress painted by the U.S. Defense and State departments is shot to hell, literally. The Taliban have demonstrated that all the hype on "improved security" is about as real as an opium dream. Even if the assassination was due to a personal quarrel rather than a Taliban hit, few will believe that is so, particularly after Khan's assassination just five days later.

While the Kabul government has appointed another Karzai in AWK's place, there is almost certainly going to be a bloody intercine battle among surviving Kandahar power brokers. A major infight will end up robbing Kabul of much needed funds and further isolate the government. The only hope for the Karzai government now is to ramp up talks with the Taliban while Kabul still has some power and influence.

And that fact puts Pakistan in the driver's seat, because there will be no talks without Islamabad. The Americans need these talks as well, so don't pay a lot of attention to the White House's huffing and puffing over aid.

In any case, the decision to cut some $800 million in aid to the Pakistani military has been less than a major success. Pakistan Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar told Express TV that "If Americans refuse to give us money, then okay…we cannot afford to keep the military out in the mountains for such a long period."

Pakistan currently has tens of thousands of troops on the 1,500-mile Pakistan-Afghan border, fighting an insurgency that did not exist until the American invasion drove the Taliban into the Tribal Areas and the Northwest Territories. From Pakistan's point of view it is fighting its own people, and losing up to 3,000 soldiers and civilians a year, because of Washington's policies in the region.

One loser is India, even though in the long run peace in Afghanistan will allow New Delhi to reap the rewards of a Central Asia gas pipeline. In the short run, however,Indian diplomacy in the region has badly misfired. India intervened in Afghanistan— providing more than a billion dollars in aid—in order to discomfort Pakistan.

But in 2009 New Delhi withdrew its support for the Karzai government because India was convinced the Americans were about to jettison the Afghan President. That never happened, but Karzai decided that his long-term survival lay in making peace with the Taliban, which in turn meant warming up ties with Islamabad.

In the meantime, Pakistan—fearful of India and suspicious of the U.S.—tightened its ties with China (discomforting the Indians even more). In fact, in the end, China may be the big winner. Beijing runs a huge copper mine and seems to have no trouble getting its ore out of the country, which suggests there is a deal among China, Pakistan and the Taliban to keep the roads open. China is also building a railroad, as well as exploring for iron ore and rare earth elements.

There are other potential winners here as well. Iran has traditionally been involved in northern Afghanistan, where it has roots among the Tajiks, who speak a language similar to Iran's Farsi. Iran also has close ties to the Shiite Hazaras and pumps aid into western Afghanistan. Iran's help will be essential if the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks are to join in any peace agreement.

Whatever the final outcome, the U.S./NATO adventure has been an unmitigated disaster. With Europeans overwhelmingly opposed to the war, there is a stampede for the exit by virtually every country but Britain and the U.S. In the end, Afghanistan may well end up the graveyard of NATO.

The major losers, of course, are the Afghans. So far this has been the deadliest year for civilians since 2001. Most of those deaths come via roadside bombs, but casualties from NATO air attacks are up. In spite of hundreds of billions of dollars in aid, Afghanistan is still grindingly poor and stunningly violent. After almost a decade of war the words that spring to mind are Macbeth's: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."


Conn Hallinan can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net

Aug 6, 9:18 AM EDT

Afghan president: 31 Americans killed in crash By Solomon Moore, Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A military helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan, killing 31 U.S. special operation troops and seven Afghan commandos, the country's president said Saturday. An American official said it was apparently shot down, in the deadliest single incident for American forces in the decade-long war.

The Taliban claimed they downed the helicopter with rocket fire while it was taking part in a raid on a house where insurgents were gathered in the province of Wardak late Friday. It said wreckage of the craft was strewn at the scene.

NATO confirmed the overnight crash took place and that there "was enemy activity in the area." But it said it was still investigating the cause and conducting a recovery operation at the site. It did not release details or casualty figures.

"We are in the process of accessing the facts," said U.S. Air Force Capt. Justin Brockhoff, a NATO spokesman.

But a senior U.S. administration official in Washington said it was apparently shot down by insurgents. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the crash is still being investigated.

The toll would surpass the worst single day loss of life for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001 - the June 28, 2005 downing of a military helicopter in eastern Kunar province. In that incident, 16 Navy SEALs and Army special operations troops were killed when their craft was shot down while on a mission to rescue four SEALs under attack by the Taliban. Three of the SEALs being rescued were also killed and the fourth wounded. It was the highest one-day death toll for the Navy Special Warfare personnel since World War II.

With its steep mountain ranges, providing shelter for militants armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, eastern Afghanistan is hazardous terrain for military aircraft. Large, slow-moving air transport carriers like the CH-47 Chinook are particularly vulnerable, often forced to ease their way through sheer valleys where insurgents can achieve more level lines of fire from mountainsides.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday gave the first public word of the new crash, saying in a statement that "a NATO helicopter crashed last night in Wardak province" and that 31 American special operations troops were killed. He expressed his condolences to President Barack Obama.

The helicopter was a twin-rotor Chinook, said an official at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was receiving his information from an Afghan officer in Kabul.

The crash took place in the Sayd Abad district of Wardak province, said a provincial government spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid. The volatile region borders the province of Kabul where the Afghan capital is located and is known for its strong Taliban presence.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that Taliban fighters downed the helicopter during a "heavy raid" in Sayd Abad. He said NATO attacked a house in Sayd Abad where insurgent fighters were gathering Friday night. During the battle, the fighters shot down the helicopter, killing 31 Americans and seven Afghans, he said, adding that eight insurgents were killed in the fight.

There have been at least 17 coalition and Afghan aircraft crashes in Afghanistan this year.

Most of the crashes were attributed to pilot errors, weather conditions or mechanical failures. However, the coalition has confirmed that at least one CH-47F Chinook helicopter was hit by a rocket propelled grenade on July 25. Two coalition crew members were injured in that attack.

Meanwhile, in the southern Helmand province, an Afghan government official said Saturday that NATO troops attacked a house and inadvertently killed eight members of a family, including women and children.

NATO said that Taliban fighters fired rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire at coalition troops during a patrol Friday in the Nad Ali district.

"Coalition forces responded with small arms fire and as the incident continued, an air strike was employed against the insurgent position," said Brockhoff. He added that NATO sent a delegation to meet with local leaders and investigate the incident.

Nad Ali district police chief Shadi Khan said civilians died in the bombardment but that it was unknown how many insurgents were killed.

Helmand, a Taliban stronghold, is the deadliest province in Afghanistan for international troops.

NATO has come under harsh criticism in the past for accidentally killing civilians during operations against suspected insurgents. However, civilian death tallies by the United Nations show the insurgency is responsible for most war casualties involving noncombatants.

In south Afghanistan, NATO said two coalition service member were killed, one on Friday and another on Saturday. The international alliance did not release further details.

With the casualties from the helicopter crash, the deaths bring to 365 the number of coalition troops killed this year in Afghanistan and 42 this month.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ ... 6-06-27-19