In the Marjah offensive of the Afghanistan war, a reporter hears echoes of the Soviet war.

By Edward Girardet, / Chrisitan Science Monitor Correspondent / March 18, 2010

Lashkargar, Afghanistan

It was early summer, 1982. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was gathering momentum against the mujahideen, the country’s disparate but increasingly widespread resistance movement. I’d just trekked for 10 days across rugged mountains from neighboring Pakistan to the beleaguered Panjshir Valley, an assertive thorn against the Red Army’s might barely 40 miles north of Kabul.

I was traveling with a half-dozen mujahideen guerrillas accompanying a French medical team being sent to replace a group of volunteer doctors working clandestinely among the civilian population.

 My purpose was to report on the largest Soviet-led offensive against the mujahideen to that date. More than 12,000 Soviet and Afghan troops would attempt to crush 3,000 fighters led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, known as the “Lion of Panjshir” and one of the 20th century’s most effective guerrilla commanders.

Last month’s NATO-led operation in Marjah in Helmand Province – the largest offensive of the current war – put me in mind of the Panjshir. There are clear lessons from the nearly decade-long Soviet occupation that the international community might heed in its ninth year of war in Afghanistan, with the biggest battle campaign now under way.

 The Panjshir push was roughly the same size as the Marjah offensive – called Operation Moshtarak – and involved 10,000 to 12,000 coalition and Afghan troops. In the Soviet war, Western journalists reported primarily from the guerrilla side. But in contrast to most of today’s media, embedded with NATO troops, we had constant access to ordinary Afghans. We walked through the countryside sleeping in villages, with long evenings spent drinking tea and talking with the locals. Frank conversation doesn’t happen when one party wears body armor or is flanked by heavily armed soldiers: Afghans will only tell you what they think you want to hear. Or, even more crucial, what suits their own interests. Hence the highly questionable veracity of opinion polls in Afghanistan today.

Similar to the Marjah offensive, the Soviets warned the population of the impending attack with propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts. They appealed to the Panjshiris to support the government in return for cash and other incentives, such as subsidized wheat. Their tactic was to force the guerrillas out, but allow the civilians to remain. To make their point, the communists lambasted the guerrillas as criminals supported by foreign interests in the tribal areas across the border in Pakistan, a tactic similar to those used by the Americans against the Taliban today.

 APPROACHING THE PANJSHIR THAT SUMMER of 1982, we skirted the massive Bagram Air Base, today run by the Americans but then a hugely fortified Soviet bastion blistering with helicopter gunships and MiGs. On reaching the outer edges of the mighty Hindu Kush, we encountered groups of refugees hiding among the gorges. Days earlier, Massoud had evacuated the area’s 50,000 or more people, somewhat less than the population affected by the Marjah campaign. He did this to minimize civilian casualties and to give his fighters free rein.

 Before dawn the morning after we arrived, we could hear the ominous drone of helicopters. As the throbbing grew louder, tiny specks appeared on the horizon, gunships sweeping over the jagged snowcapped peaks like hordes of wasps. Soon the hollow thud of rockets and bombs were pounding guerrilla positions. Intermittently, pairs of MiG-23 jets and the new highly maneuverable SU-24 fighter bombers shrieked across the skies dropping their loads.

 With two journalist colleagues, I climbed to a 7,000-foot vantage over the valley. Dozens of front-line guerrillas, looking like Cuban revolutionaries with their long hair and beards, lounged among the rocks in the bright sun watching the spectacle. Grinning, they handed us glasses of tea, oblivious of helicopters roaring barely 500 meters overhead. Massoud’s strategy was to empty the valley, let the Soviets in, and have fighters hit the occupation foIt was reminiscent of a 19th-century painting of picnickers casually watching a distant battle. We counted no fewer than 200 helicopter sorties that morning, while scores of tanks and armored personnel carriers ground their way up the riverbed, the only way to penetrate the valley because guerrillas had mined the road. Unlike the current anti-NATO insurgency, however, the use of improvised explosive devices was limited; while suicide bombers, a relatively recent tactic introduced by Al Qaeda, were never used by the mujahideen.

 There seemed to be many simultaneous operations: Across the valley, M-24 gunships circled like sharks to attack guerrilla positions. Farther on, trucks mounted with rockets fired into mountainsides. Just below, a Soviet machine gun leveled off bursts against guerrillas among the boulders above. Nearby, shirtless Red Army soldiers took breaks sunning on looted carpets spread on the flat roofs of houses, while others redeployed, jogging single file through shrapnel-torn mulberry trees.

The Soviet/Afghan force quickly took the valley, proclaiming victory. The reality was far different. Massoud’s experienced guerrillas suffered few casualties and, within days, launched assaults against the entrenched Red Army troops. Afghan government soldiers, too, poorly paid and disheartened, slipped out at night with their weapons to join the resistance.

 Massoud eventually made a truce with the Soviets. This enabled the Red Army a “take and hold” policy with several garrisons in the Panjshir. Some civilians returned, while the guerrillas established their own concealed bases in mountains beyond. The truce was much criticized by rival groups of mujahideen, but it was part of a long-term strategy: Massoud had no intention of collaborating with the regime. Occupation troops first had to leave before any unity government could be formed. It’s the same refrain today by the Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, and other opposition groups.

 For years, Massoud kept the Soviets tied down while focusing on other areas and building a highly proficient regional force denying the communists swaths of countryside. The mujahideen – like the Taliban now – always felt they had time on their side. All they needed to do was wear down the Red Army. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets commanded 120,000 troops in Afghanistan, compared with the 150,000 coalition high expected by next fall with completion of the US troop surge. When the Soviets, who suffered at least 15,000 deaths and thousands of injured, pulled out in February 1989, they had little to show but widespread destruction of much of the country. Three years later, the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul crumbled. Today, it’s as if the Soviets had never been there.

 Unlike NATO forces, who now make pointed efforts to protect civilians, the Soviets and their Afghan cohorts often deliberately targeted local populations. Throughout its war, however, the Red Army held little more than the main towns. The countryside remained largely in the hands of the mujahideen. Similarly, today, 70 percent of the country is ranked as “insecure” by the United Nations.

THE parallels of the panjshir with today just keep rolling. Today’s insurgents fight much like the mujahideen; and, in fact, many now call themselves mujahideen. Many commanders earned their battle spurs during the Soviet war. Their fighters hide among the locals and, often, are the locals. If things get tough, they deploy elsewhere.

 Like Marjah, a deliberate joint NATO-Afghan operation, the Soviets made a point of involving Afghan partners and constantly extolled the effectiveness of the Kabul regime in the hope that Afghan security forces would assume the brunt of the war. In reality, the Soviets were running the show just as US, British, and other forces are today.

 Ironically, the Soviets did succeed in creating an effective Afghan fighting force. Following the Red Army withdrawal, the communists fought hard and well against fundamentalist mujahideen supported by the Pakistani military in eastern Afghanistan. The communist regime finally fell for political, not military, reasons. There’s little doubt that Afghan security capabilities can be improved today, but can the Kabul regime achieve acceptance?

 Red Army commanders were very aware that they couldn’t trust “their” Afghans. Massoud’s mujahideen enjoyed full details of planned operations before launch. Many government, military, and police officials, including senior commanders, secretly collaborated with the resistance, just as pro-Taliban and other insurgent collaborators have infiltrated most ministries of the current administration.

The Soviets also succeeded in building a highly effective network of informers and often thwarted resistance operations based on this intelligence. But they never gained the upper hand. The more effective guerrilla commanders always seemed to keep two steps ahead of the game. (Twice, while reporting for the Monitor during the 1980s, I was nearly captured by Soviet heliborne troops after being informed upon by local Afghans.)

 Moscow’s attempts to establish hard-core militia fronts by purchasing their allegiance also faltered. The old adage of “you can only rent an Afghan, you can never buy him” remained the rule of thumb. Many militia had “just in case” arrangements with the mujahideen, just as today numerous police and military units collaborating with NATO forces have their own deals with the insurgents.

While the coalition may claim the Marjah offensive routed the Taliban, it will probably have little impact on the long-term fighting capability of the opposition, even if NATO holds terrain captured.

 To claim success shows a poor understanding of Afghanistan. Only a small proportion of the insurgents are actually fighting. The majority of sympathizers will have buried their weapons or simply blended in among the civilians. Others are in the process of deploying elsewhere, just as Massoud used the interim to organize fighting fronts throughout the north. There’s no way that all these areas can be controlled militarily.

 Many of the Western governments operating in Afghanistan focus on their own zones, such as the Dutch in Uzurugan and the Germans in Kunduz. Most officers come for six-month deployments, a period in which no one can even begin to understand this country. It is this lack of understanding about Afghan culture and thought that is the biggest problem today. Crucial, too, is the need for a long-term approach for the next 30 years. Talk of exit strategy only plays into the hands of insurgents biding their time.

 The Western missions, barricaded in Kabul compounds, are out of touch with what’s happening on the ground. So are their intelligence operations. They spend billions on recovery or security initiatives, yet are reluctant to invest in credible information efforts.

 As the Marjah operation demonstrates, there is still the belief that the problem can be resolved by clearing out the insurgents militarily, and holding the territory while installing new top-down structures – “a government in a box.”

 For most Afghans I’ve talked to on recent trips to Kabul and eastern, central, and southern Afghanistan, justice, not security, is the principal concern. Even where the military is in control, Afghans slip out to Taliban-controlled areas to seek fair dealing, having more confidence in Taliban sharia courts than in Karzai-regime judges. They see lack of rule of law and international community failure to develop a functioning economy, particularly in the countryside where 80 percent of Afghans live. And they increasingly perceive the coalition as a foreign occupation force, much like the Soviets.

 The Soviets thought they could subdue Afghanistan through brute force, political indoctrination, and bribes. They wanted to put across the notion that their form of government had far more to offer than the jihad embraced by the mujahideen. They lost.

The West, following dangerously close to the path of its Soviet predecessor in Afghanistan, must show that it isn’t there to impose its own views but to help ordinary people feel they have a future.

•Edward Girardet, author of “The Soviet War” and a forthcoming 30-year retrospective on Afghanistan, has reported for the Monitor since 1979.

By Dr Raja Mohammad khan

“No country has ever showed more hospitality to Afghanistan than Pakistan, and that his country (Afghanistan) would not allow its soil to be used against Pakistan.” These were the wordings of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai during the joint press conference between him and Pakistani Premier, Yousaf Raza Gillani on the conclusion of a daylong visit of the former to Pakistan on March 11, 2010.

Earlier both countries agreed for a joint fight against the terrorism and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the augmentation of bilateral relationship. Declaring Pakistan and Afghanistan as the “twin brothers,” President Karzai further said that the “destiny, grieves and happiness of both the countries are shared.” On this occasion, Prime Minister Gilani assured the visiting President that, “We want to take the strategic partnership with Afghanistan forward.” Moreover, Pakistan would enhance its cooperation with Afghanistan to eliminate terrorism, and bilateral ties between the two countries would be further enhanced.

The resilience shown by either side is being envisioned as the glimmer of hope for the beginning of a new chapter in the bilateral relationship of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unfortunately, the history of Pak-Afghan relationship is an account of uneven correlation. There has hardly been a period of good will and cooperation between these two brotherly Muslim countries, linking various regions and civilizations of Asia. Why there has been a gulf in their mutual relationship, who has been playing in-between, and how long would it continue, is indeed a fruit for thought for over 200 million people of both countries? The significant factor, which has to be kept in mind, is that, after all, they have to live together, since neighbours cannot be changed.

The buoyant joint statement of the two leaders indeed, is reflective of the lessons they learnt during their prolonged uncooperative history, especially after the incident of 9/11. In this regards, Pakistani efforts at various tiers has played a vital role. The Afghan Government has now realized the significance of incessant Pakistani pursuance for the CBMs and emphasis for the adoption of a collective fight against the terrorism. Pakistan has always been critical to the role of extra-regional powers in the internal affairs of Afghanistan and in the bilateral relationship of Pakistan and Afghanistan. So much so the US and NATO countries, with whom, Pakistan is playing the role of a frontline state and as a partner in the global war on terror has been suspicion of the Pakistani role.

During the meeting of the NATO’s Military Committee in Chiefs of Defence Staff (CHODs) held in Brussels on January 26-27, 2010, the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, adequately highlighted the role played by Pakistan in the war on terror. Indeed, Pakistan lost over twenty five thousand lives during last nine years, since the beginning of this war. The casualties of security forces of Pakistan are much more than what the coalition and Afghans forces have collectively suffered in these years. General Kayani’s presentation on the Pakistan’s contribution indeed, removed the misperception of the NATO countries about the Pakistani role in the global war on terror. Thereafter, the Western world has changed its perception about the Pakistani role and vision.

Sequel to this meeting General Kayani, briefed the foreign and domestic press about the outcome of the meeting in Rawalpindi. During the course of the meeting, he categorically said that, “We cannot wish for Afghanistan anything that we don’t wish for Pakistan.” Since Pakistanis desire peace, stability, and economic prosperity for their country, therefore, they ought to wish similar comforts for their brethrens of Afghanistan. Furthermore, three decades of war, factional fighting, and the internal instability in Afghanistan has brought us to the conclusion that, stability and peace in Pakistan is directly proportional to these factors in Afghanistan. Indeed, the statement of Chief of Army Staff was the factor compelled Afghan President to say that, “the destiny, grieves and happiness of both the countries are shared.”

In the aftermath of US invasion of Afghanistan, India, a noncontiguous country, intruded in Afghanistan in a big way. Initially it assumed the responsibility of reconstruction of infrastructure of Afghanistan, but subsequently, it took over the responsibilities of other projects in that country. So much so, that Indian Army was given the responsibility to undertake the training of Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan secret services and Afghan National Police (ANP). Besides, the Indian training teams, training Afghans on their soil, over 100 Afghan senior defence officials are being trained every year in India’s military institutions. It is worth mentioning that a huge number of the Indian army officers and lower ranks have been especially deputed to teach basic military field-crafts and English-language skills to personnel of ANA. Afghan police officers and foreign ministry officials have also attended training courses in India. Afghanistan is getting Indian help in the training of Afghan pilots and technicians for using its helicopter-gunships.

Afghan education system is yet another area where India has been given a key role to play. Now it is to the imagination of the Afghan people to know, as what would be the ethical condition of its future generation after having gone through the Indian founded educational system and training of its security setup (ANA, ANP and spying agency). Pakistan feels that Indian trained ANA and ANP will be on the warpath to all its neighbours, mainly Muslim countries, and People’s Republics of China. Apart from its geographically contagious neighbours, these Indian trained troops will be in conflict with basic Muslim cultural and social setup of that country even. Besides, promoting internal clashes, these troops will maintain the current state of volatility, distrust, and hostility with Pakistan. Indeed India and Afghanistan are two different countries, with different values, culture, and different future requirements. Therefore, the Indian trained ANA would further destabilize the region as a whole. This state of affairs would neither suit coalition nor to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In order to save Afghanistan from the lukewarm effects of these factors, General Kayani offered Afghan Government for the assistance in the training of ANA and ANP. Indeed, this step would greatly reduce the current instability and hostilities along the Pak-Afghan border by promoting harmony among the security forces of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as both countries share common terrain and borders to defend. Moreover, they have the similar cultural and historical values and milieus and ideological harmony. This is only possible once there are common trainers having corresponding training parameters for both armies. In fact, Afghans should not forget the experience of getting their Army trained from the former Soviet Union in 1970s. The result of the Soviet trained troops, teachers, doctors, other officials, and even politicians brought them in clash with the traditional Afghan society in late 1970s. That clash of ideas finally led to the Soviet invasion. Afghan society had enough of that, in the form of thirty years factional fighting, foreign invasions, and internal strife. Do they still want Russian like Indian invasion? Afghan should question themselves and later from their Indian friends too, that, why they (Indians) are so much concerned about Afghan people. Why should they forget the Indian role during Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980s? Being part of the Communist camp, India fully supported the Soviet Union globally as well as regionally and considered the invasion as justified.

Indeed, through the offer for the training of ANA and ANP, Pakistan envisions to bring the stability in the Afghanistan in the first phase and stabilization of the whole region thereafter. Besides, the offer would help in the implementation of the President Obama’s recently conceived “exit strategy” from Afghanistan, largely by paving way for the gradual restitution of peace in the region. The vision behind the offer is that “We cannot wish for Afghanistan anything that we don’t wish for Pakistan.” What all Pakistan wish for is a peaceful, stable and friendly Afghanistan. If visualized precisely, the Coalition forces and Afghan administration should be very happy on this offer, as it would surely lessen the ceaseless fighting in Afghanistan in the near future. Did not successful Pakistani military operations during 2009, help in lessening the militancy in Afghanistan, by constricting space for the terrorists. This evidence indeed should become a lead point for the materialization of the Pakistani offer of the training to ANA and ANP. This indeed would be a “win-win for Afghanistan, the United States, ISAF, and Pakistan.”

Besides, sharing common values, culture, and comparable stakes, both countries have a history of interdependence. Foreign interferences, influences, and imperialism cannot force the people to think differently. Pakistan visualizes a peaceful, stable, and economically affluent Afghanistan. It also wishes the Afghanistan freed from the foreign interferences and forays with an ethnically cohesive society. The wish for a stable Afghanistan is the collective voice of 170 million people of Pakistan. They can no more see their Afghan Brethren in a state of melancholy. The visionary offer of the Pakistani Army Chief for the training of ANA and ANP has the backing from the whole nation. Indeed, they stood behind Pakistan Army in curbing the militancy from Pakistan and have the enduring desire of peace and stability in both countries. The vision behind the offer indeed is a sincere endeavour to save Afghanistan from another debacle or colonialism.

Dr Raja Muhammad Khan has done his PhD in International Relations from Karachi University. Presently he is an Associate Professor with National Defence University, Islamabad.

Of recent, he has started to contribute his articles to www.opinion-maker.org

DELARAM, AFGHANISTAN — Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistanis far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day’s drive from the nearest city, ‘the end of the Earth.’ Another deems the area ‘unrelated to our core mission’ of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.

U.S. Marine commanders have a different view of the dusty, desolate landscape that surrounds Delaram. They see controlling this corner of remote Nimruz province as essential to promoting economic development and defending the more populated parts of southern Afghanistan.

The Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see. By this summer, more than 3,000 Marines — one-tenth of the additional troops authorized by President Obama in December — will be based here.

With Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin reducing U.S. forces looming over the horizon, the Marines have opted to wage the war in their own way.

‘If we’re going to succeed here, we have to experiment and take risks,’ said Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan. ‘Just doing what everyone else is doing isn’t going to cut it.’

The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.

The Marine approach — creative, aggressive and, at times, unorthodox — has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how U.S. forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.

But the Marines’ methods, and their insistence that they be given a degree of autonomy not afforded to U.S. Army units, also have riled many up the chain of command in Kabul and Washington, prompting some to refer to their area of operations in the south as ‘Marineistan.’ They regard the expansion in Delaram and beyond as contrary to the population-centric approach embraced by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, and they are seeking to impose more control over the Marines.

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, recently noted that the international security force in Afghanistan feels as if it comprises 42 nations instead of 41 because the Marines act so independently from other U.S. forces.

‘We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the U.S. Marine Corps,’ said a senior Obama administration official involved in Afghanistan policy.

Some senior officials at the White House, at the Pentagon and in McChrystal’s headquarters would rather have many of the 20,000 Marines who will be in Afghanistan by summer deploy around Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, to assist in a U.S. campaign to wrest the area from Taliban control instead of concentrating in neighboring Helmand province and points west. According to an analysis conducted by the National Security Council, fewer than 1 percent of the country’s population lives in the Marine area of operations.

They question whether a large operation that began last month to flush the Taliban out of Marja, a poor farming community in central Helmand, is the best use of Marine resources. Although it has unfolded with fewer than expected casualties and helped to generate a perception of momentum in the U.S.-led military campaign, the mission probably will tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.

‘What the hell are we doing?’ the senior official said. ‘Why aren’t all 20,000 Marines in the population belts around Kandahar city right now? It’s [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar’s capital. If you want to stuff it to Mullah Omar, you make progress in Kandahar. If you want to communicate to the Taliban that there’s no way they’re returning, you show progress in Kandahar.’

Marines support Marines

Until earlier this month, McChrystal lacked operational control over the Marines, which would have allowed him to move them to other parts of the country. That power rested with a three-star Marine general at the U.S. Central Command. He and other senior Marine commanders insisted that Marines in Afghanistan have a contiguous area of operations — effectively precluding them from being split up and sent to Kandahar — because they think it is essential the Marines are supported by Marine helicopters and logistics units, which are based in Helmand, instead of relying on the Army.

After concern about the arrangement reached the White House, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who heads the Central Command, issued an order in early March giving McChrystal operational control of Marine forces in Afghanistan, according to senior defense officials. But the new authority vested in McChrystal — the product of extensive negotiations among military lawyers — still requires Marine approval for any plan to disaggregate infantry units from air and logistics support, which will limit his ability to move them, the defense officials said.

‘At the end of the day, not a lot has changed,’ said a Marine general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as did several other senior officers and officials, to address sensitive command issues. ‘There’s still a caveat that prevents us from being cherry-picked.’

The Marine demand to be supported by their own aviators and logisticians has roots in the World War II battles for Guadalcanal and Tarawa. Marines landing on the Pacific islands did not receive the support they had expected from Navy ships and aircraft. Since then, Marine commanders have insisted on deploying with their own aviation and supply units. They did so in Vietnam, and in Iraq.

Despite the need to travel with an entourage, the Marines are willing to move fast. The commandant of the Corps, Gen. James T. Conway, offered to provide one-third of the forces Obama authorized in December, and to get them there quickly. Some arrived within weeks. By contrast, many of the Army units that comprise the new troop surge have yet to leave the United States.

‘The Marines are a double-edged sword for McChrystal,’ one senior defense official said. ‘He got them fast, but he only gets to use them in one place.’

Marine commanders note that they did not choose to go to Helmand — they were asked to go there by McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, because British forces in the area were unable to contain the intensifying insurgency. But once they arrived, they became determined to show they could rescue the place, in much the same way they helped to turn around Anbar province in Iraq.

They also became believers in Helmand’s strategic importance. ‘You cannot fix Kandahar without fixing Helmand,’ Nicholson said. ‘The insurgency there draws support from the insurgency here.’

‘Mullahpalooza tour’

The Marine concentration in one part of the country — as opposed to Army units, which are spread across Afghanistan — has yielded a pride of place. As it did in Anbar, the Corps is sending some of its most talented young officers to Helmand.

The result has been a degree of experimentation and innovation unseen in most other parts of the country. Although they account for half of the Afghan population, women had been avoided by military forces, particularly in the conservative south, because it is regarded as taboo for women to interact with males with whom they are not related. In an effort to reach out to them, the Marines have established ‘female engagement teams.’

Made up principally of female Marines who came to Afghanistan to work in support jobs, the teams accompany combat patrols and seek to sit down with women in villages. Working with female translators, team members answer questions, dispense medical assistance and identify reconstruction needs.

Master Sgt. Julia Watson said the effort has had one major unexpected consequence. ‘Men have really opened up after they see us helping their wives and sisters,’ she said.

The Marines have sought to jump into another void by establishing their own police academy at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand instead of waiting for the U.S. military’s national training program to provide recruits. The Marines also are seeking to do something that the military has not been able to do on a national scale: reduce police corruption by accepting only recruits vouched for by tribal elders.

‘This is a shame culture,’ said Terry Walker, a retired Marine drill instructor who helps run the academy. ‘If they know they are accountable to their elders, they will be less likely to misbehave.’

Then there’s what Marines call the ‘mullahpalooza tour.’ Although most U.S. military units have avoided direct engagement with religious leaders in Afghanistan, Nicholson has brought over Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Saifulislam, one of only two imams in the U.S. Navy, to spend a month meeting — and praying with — local mullahs, reasoning that the failure to interact with them made it easier for them to be swayed by the Taliban.

At his first session with religious leaders in Helmand, the participants initially thought the clean-shaven Saifulislam was an impostor. Then he led the group in noontime prayers. By the end, everyone wanted to take a picture with him.

‘The mullahs of Afghanistan are the core of society,’ he said. ‘Bypassing them is counterproductive.’

Reviving a ghost town

In December, columns of Marine armored vehicles punched into the city of Now Zad in northern Helmand. Once the second-largest town in the province, it had been almost completely emptied of its residents over the past four years as insurgents mined the roads and buildings with hundreds of homemade bombs. Successive units of British and U.S. troops had been largely confined to a Fort Apache-like base in the town. Every time they ventured out, they’d be shot at or bombed.

To Nicholson and his commanders, reclaiming the town, which the Marines accomplished within a few weeks, has been a crucial step in demonstrating to Helmand residents that U.S. forces are committed to getting rid of the Taliban. To other military officials in Afghanistan, however, the mission seemed contrary to McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

‘If our focus is supposed to be protecting the population, why are we focusing on a ghost town?’ said a senior officer at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar.

Nicholson notes that Helmand’s governor supported the operation, as did many local tribal leaders. Hundreds of residents have returned in recent weeks, and at least 65 shops have reopened, according to Marine officers stationed in Now Zad.

‘Protecting the population means allowing people to return to their homes,’ he said. ‘We’ve taken a grim, tough place, a place where there was no hope, and we’ve given it a future.’

Nicholson now wants Marine units to push through miles of uninhabited desert to establish control of a crossing point for insurgents, drugs and weapons on the border with Pakistan. And he wants to use the new base in Delaram to mount more operations in Nimruz, a part of far southwestern Afghanistan deemed so unimportant that it is one of the only provinces where there is no U.S. or NATO reconstruction team.

‘This is a place where the enemy are moving in numbers,’ he said, referring to increased Taliban activity along a newly built highway that bisects the province. ‘We need to clean it up.’

Nicholson contends that if his forces were kept only in key population centers in Helmand, insurgents would come right up to the gates of towns.

Other U.S. and NATO military officials say that what the Marines want to do makes sense only if there were not a greater demand for troops elsewhere. Because the Marines cannot easily be moved to Kandahar, U.S. and British military and diplomatic officials have begun discussions to expand the Marine footprint into more populous parts of Helmand with greater insurgent activity where British forces have been outmatched. That shift could occur as soon as this summer, when a Marine-run NATO regional headquarters is established in Helmand.

Until then, however, Marine commanders want to keep moving.

‘The clock is ticking,’ Nicholson told members of an intelligence battalion that recently arrived in Afghanistan. ‘The drawdown will begin next year. We still have a lot to do — and we don’t have a lot of time to do it.’

Major Jim Gant in Afghanistan

By Khalil Nouri STAFF WRITER
VETERANS TODAY

Major Jim Gant, an Army silver star Green Beret hero, considered the best field grade officer for the “AfPak Hands” program. He is also the author of “One Tribe at a Time” and an outspoken advocate of Afghan tribal engagement strategy (TES), who lived and breathed the notion for years, and outstandingly, he has the ears and attention of the brass in his chain of command.

Gant’s proposal centers on the idea that, “it’s insignificant as how many troops are deployed; it’s how they can be best utilized.” He is promoting; the field American “tribal engagement teams” (TET) to live with — and fight alongside — Pashtun tribesmen, who dominate Southern and Eastern Afghanistan with little faith in, or loyalty to, the central government. His advocacy is to use the centuries-old tribal code of honor, justice and revenge, called “Pashtunwali” system (the only system of governance) to defeat the Taliban.

But the question remains: would the tribal strategy that perceived magically to charm Afghanistan’s future be achievable?

Major Gant’s outstanding and enthusiastic presentation not only reflects the correct itinerary but also in close vicinity of integrating the real aspects of centuries old Afghan tribal structure into a practical model that could eventually change the entire dynamics of the war in Afghanistan.

Moreover, if this is a chance for succeeding and bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan, it will mean; learning from our mistakes and more importantly, recognizing the obstacle in terms of culture, norms, geopolitics, and religion, thus, not to deny them and not to ignore them.

Mission Hurdles

Taming “Yaghistan” (the land of the unruly) — as the Afghans traditionally labeled Afghanistan — is the most burdensome and complex mission since WWII; first and foremost, nothing fundamentally will change in the region until the issue with the Durand line is resolved. The creation of the border line since inception, its failure then — to regularize the position, and its continued failure, should be a justifiable reason for a thorough UN evaluation and revision.

As a clear reminder that, ever since the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been adversaries, with the tribal areas and the Northwest frontier territories being at the center of the dispute.

As Emir Abdul Rahman, ruler of Afghanistan when the Durand mission did its work in (1893) writes to the Viceroy of India, warning him of the dangers of splitting the peoples of the tribal areas. “If you should cut them out of my dominions,” he said, “they will neither be of any use to you nor to me: you will always be engaged in fighting and troubles with them, and they will always go on plundering.”

Within seven years, the Emir was to be proven right, with the British having to put down major uprisings, dealing with — North West Frontier Agencies (NWFA) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) — Chitral, Bajaur, Malakand, Waziri and Afridi wars, and now, history is repeating itself except with vast span of the Pashtun belt gearing for a state of chaos.

The Irony is that, with the current coalition policy of expanding the Afghan Army, the Emir was arguing back in 1893 that the “brave warriors” of the tribal regions would “make a very strong force” and that only a ruler of Afghanistan could “make them peaceful subjects”. Divorced from Afghanistan, they are the problem— within Afghanistan, they could be part of the solution. Hence, broadening Major Gant’s policy to the Pakistan’s neglected areas of FATA and NWFP without resolving the Durand line will be hopeless.

Aside from the above obscurity, many Afghans and Afghan-Americans believe that no matter how well-trained or Afghan-culture sensitive U.S. Special Forces are, they will never know enough about a specific local area and its indigenous norms to carry out their daily counterinsurgency campaign effectively; because the people will never trust them enough to share everything. Perhaps one bonanza by TET was effectively struck with the Mangal tribal elder Malik Noor Afzhal — as Major Gant calls him “Sitting Bull” — and apparently no other tribal elders were put to attest for the workability of such doctrine.

In fact, this is also Major Gant’s main challenge as he states in his paper; “The situation at each tribe will be complex and will vary with each tribe.”

True, tribal structures are not uniform across Afghanistan, they are very complex, and there is no standardized or “one size fits all” setting. Unlike the Paktia tribes— the traditional political authorities are in fact village and or tribal elders and or local Mullahs or Maulavis; who do not share power equally and do not exist in a “traditional” sense of the word, and very much will not invigorate the social and moral fabric of the society— However, the Durrani and Ghilzai tribes in Southern Afghanistan have no tradition of raising volunteer forces (Arbaki in Pashto language) to maintain local Security. This is why Taliban managed to emerge and successfully (but deceitfully) sell themselves as neighborhood Gladiator figures, protecting regular folks from marauding warlords.

But the tribal leaders among the tribes still command considerable respect and exert influence in their communities. The fact is that, tribal leaders with deep roots in local communities can make a difference, and therefore, the tribal mindset differs tribe to tribe throughout Afghanistan.

The costs

In fact, as a roadmap to success for Afghanistan, TES will require a complete paradigm shift in Pentagon’s operational culture— from conventional risk-averse micromanagement to unconventional decision making, Command and Control and Rules of Engagement. This is a significant cost in addition to financially prospering the tribes.

The risks

For this — One Tribe at a Time — model to bear fruit; the deploying courageous volunteers TET must be “sincere and devoted volunteers” for popular resistances against oppressive forces. Whenever such agile and courageously committed fighters are introduced to live in local tribal communities and even when they are personally driven to help the society fight against local oppressors. They still could be viewed in the eyes of indigenous that they are actually working for a larger, but hidden, oppressive Empire,— United States — as was the case with the “best and brightest” in Vietnam, then the results can be disastrous— because the real motive is viewed as fabrication, a sham, and at heart, a lie.

The gravest concern is, the U.S. may eventually again abandon Afghanistan — as foreign powers come and go — and the tribes to whom coalition forces have promised long-term support will be left to be massacred by a vengefulTalibn.

If Obama’s recent call to start bringing the troops home in 18 months, and also with fragile NATO alliance that the Dutch to depart first and then the Canadians, will likely to create an alliance of worrisome tribal chieftains whether to continue trusting the U.S. and NATO further. This could tip the balance into a state of confusion and may cause reluctance to prop up tranquility in Afghanistan.

Despite the fact that the code of (Pashtunwali) amongst some tribes is considered primary than the religion of Islam, but still If TET does not have the same devotion towards Islam as the inhabitants do, then they are considered outsiders. The mosque remains the clandestine decision place for a quick close-door Jirgah (Grand Assembly) where one cannot even infiltrate as what was discussed amongst the tribal members. At the end of the day, the final decision will network itself in agility to other mosques where public awareness could multiply exponentially.

Needles to say that the Afghan society is a barely penetrable jungle— with its more than fifty ethnic groups, 400 plus tribes and vast sub tribes and clans, religious groups, mystical brotherhoods, mafia networks, village communities and nomads’ camps, with the clienteles of political actors, the militias of the warlords, bands of robbers and urban neighborhoods, plus marriage alliances, professional guilds and internationally networked trade and bazaar structures. In such a jungle, even the gutsiest gladiator with all his might is quickly lost.

Alternate Solution

Day by day a growing chorus of voices is heard saying that the tribes are the solution in Afghanistan. This very powerful grassroots movement is blossoming; and it can give the Afghan people new hope, self-esteem and a sense of belonging. But, to make sure that there is success to this notion, an effective bottom-up approach tool is required to match the existing top-down approach so that jointly both approaches can rescue the nation.

One must bear in mind that, the importance of understanding the strength and degree of tribe and clan-based loyalties and what happens when foreign occupiers interfere in the traditional order of balance and stability that took thousands of years to set in place; foreign displacement of Pashtun authority will always result in resentment exponentially within layers of tribal hierarchy.

After decades of wars, famine and all around instability; dire sociological stresses, severe ethnic tensions, imbalance of societal structure, and downward native vibrancy (depression) has resulted; but, all could be overturned if a robust and well intended bottom-up approach can be introduced.

But, to overcome chronic national symptoms and restore the nation’s cultural, social, political and economic health; a practical blueprint should be defined as a framework in terms of “accessible resources.” The very necessary and indispensable resources that Afghanistan desperately needs today are Expatriate Afghans as well as the underutilized Afghans inside Afghanistan.

The current U.S. military operation in Afghanistan is just beginning to realize the importance of the tribes. That is why; the Community Defense Initiative (CDI) is now being enthusiastically backed by General Stanley McChrystal. This is a huge transition for the U.S. and NATO operations that can be valued more deeply by engaging a framework for an Afghan-American to tribal Afghan cause.

Unlike Iraq, the degree of tribal complexity in Afghanistan is much higher. We believe, enlisting tribes against militants not only carries risks in terms of promoting warlord strategy, but also could undermine the hard work which was done previously disarming proscribed militias. Therefore, in contrary to Major Jim Gant’s doctrine, our approach is – a clear Afghan solution to an Afghan cause – considered a nonmilitary one.

According to the Census Bureau, there are between 200,000 plus Expatriate Afghan-Americans. Their ethnic backgrounds reflect ethnicities of all Afghan origins, and most have preserved their close ties with their tribes and clans inside Afghanistan. Culturally, their family bond and social intimacy is as strong as ever. Furthermore, the strength and degree of tribe and clan-based loyalties is the solid foundation that has knitted the tribal constituents for centuries.

Placing the above circumstances into perspective; the question arises as to how a thriving bottom-up approach can be implemented?

The real method

Initially the formula can be an empowerment of face to face interaction between; an Afghan in the U.S. (a tribal representative) and an Afghan in Afghanistan (a tribal leader), whose tribal roots are connected and are in acquaintanceship to each other. In regards to a tribal representative, he is not only loyal to his tribe but also to his adopted counrty the United States. Therefore, a genuine connection with “strings-attached” can be achieved. On the contrary, in the perception of top-down approach, trustworthiness and tribal interlink is unachievable, and evidently has resulted in failure and disappointment.

Major Jim Gant meeting with tribal elders

Furthermore, the tribal leader and tribal representative will be implementing the said mutual interaction exclusively in a business tribal council framework we call “business-Jirgah to business-Jirgah” –- or “Biz Jirgah to Biz Jirgah”— which should be applicable within local responsibilities and local structure, with cost effectiveness in mind, and free of foreign bureaucracies.

In addition, “Biz Jirgah to Biz Jirgah” involves establishing business relationships, and actual business initiatives on a people to people (rather than a nation to nation) basis, where each Afghan tribe is invited and encouraged to establish a business that can work closely with its Afghan-American business counterpoint and eventually grow from micro to macro.

These standardized and fixed priced businesses — specialized assets — can reflect basic human necessities such as potable water, cold storages, fish farms, chicken farms, and so forth; while they can be built in areas that are in compliance with individual tribal approval.

In addition, by using this concept which is in phase with thousands of years of customary Afghan culture, the stigma of foreign intervention is diminished and real dialogue and trust can be developed. As the result, the seeds of trust between Afghan and American business interests are firmly planted, and needed infrastructure projects can be completed within acceptable time-frames and maintained for generations.

This indigenous interaction can not only strike a successful agreement between the tribal players, but it can also be cost effective in terms of non obligation of force protection, since no American Military Civil Affairs or International Development personnel are engaged.

Major Gant’s “One Tribe at a Time” initiative—minus to live with and fight alongside the tribes—can easily be persevered and switched for a genuine and convincing dialogue within the Afghan tribal communities in the United States, Europe and Elsewhere in the world. It is a doable prospect but has to be an Afghan instigation only.

Once the communities inside Afghanistan start ascending towards prosperity, self fortification against intruders and area insurgency will be weakened, and at the end of day, flourishing and self esteemed communities likely to join together and thrive economically with domino effects.

In the initial stages, this program requires full U.S. financial support, so that the average person’s day-to-day necessities come from income he generates; and he can turn away from insurgency recruitment for hire to feed his family.

And finally, no central agency in Kabul can ever know the priority needs of people in every Afghan village, and unity cannot be delivered from the top. But when local leaders, engaged — for an Afghan solution — in the nitty-gritty of local policymaking, practice fairness and inclusion, the people will follow. A weak state cannot be made strong overnight. But it can set up the systems that catalyze strong local communities by adopting village by village “Biz Jirgah to Biz Jirgah” initiatives.

In hindsight, Major Jim Gant does not need to take the risk fighting alongside the tribes to protect them against the militants. With this flourishing economical opportunity, they will do anything to protect themselves and their communities against any obstacle.

Khalil Nouri is the cofounders of New World Strategies Coalition Inc., a native think tank for nonmilitary solution studies for Afghanistan. www.nwscinc.org

PRECONCEPTIONS, MISCONEPTIONS AND “NO FEEDBACK LOOP” LEADS TO AMERICAN DISASTER IN AFGHANISTAN

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

I have only recently returned from the region where I toured as a journalist and lecturer.  Our group included Jeff Gates, Raja Mugtaba, BG Asif Haroon Raja and BG Ali Raza and me of Veterans Today and Opinion Maker.  We met with some people we will not mention and many we can.  Prince Ali of Afghanistan had a delegation with us headed by Fayyaz Shah,  as advisors.  BG Ali Raza was primary coordinator on the ground for Pakistan during the “Charley Wilson War” against the Soviets.  No person has spent so much time “where he isn’t supposed to be” as General Ali Raza.  BG Asif Haroon Raja is Pakistan’s best known military analyst and author and an invaluable resource.

I would thank the Director General of the ISPR,  Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas and Director BG Syed Azmat Ali for their detailed briefing and great courtesy.

Background on the critical border regions was supplied by the former military head, BG Amir Gulistan Janjua.  His vast experience in the region was an invaluable aid to our understanding.  I would also thank Ahsan Rashid and Col. Javed Mujtaba for their advice, hospitality and analytical skills.

Our primary briefer and advisor for the region and constant correspondent is Admiral I A Sirohey, former Chairman, JCOS of Pakistan.  General Aslam Beg, former Army Chief of Staff and General Hamid Gul, former DG ISI, also briefed us extensively on military affairs.  These three, along with our companions, BG’s Raja and Ali, are the primary experts on regional military affairs and the Taliban.

We also want to thank Tarik Jan of the ISSI for his kind assistance.  I am leaving out two dozen names, some out of kindness.  Many political leaders met with us who normally would never see Americans.  We were treated with more than courtesy and kindness in some of the most unexpected places. 

My close friends and personal advisors, Col. James Hanke, USA SF (ret) former Defense Attache to Israel and Fred Coward, former FBI counter-terrorism expert were a continual help.  Their knowledge and extensive contacts in the region were vital. 

The question, of course, what did we learn?  Does anyone learn anything if weighed down by prejudiced, misconceptions or military and political theories based on flawed analyses or policies?  Our job is simply to listen, learn and use our best judgment.  Our responsibility is to be honest in our assessments.  The findings in this work are entirely my own.

The root of the problems in the region are historical in nature.  Unless you go back 200 years or more, something we aren’t doing here, nothing will make sense.  The region, Af-Pak, is a creation, primarily of Britain’s, seemingly created out of a design to stimulate instability and conflict to enable “the great game” Britain is famous for to be played, one side against the other.  In 1893, when Afghanistan and India/Pakistan were split by Durand, dividing tribes and even families, continual war was guaranteed.  In 1947, when Pakistan was created out of a group of peoples, roughly “Islamic” but otherwise unrelated, we were guaranteed even more instability.  Pakistan would be a combination of advanced culture, warlike tribes and resentful quasi-independent regions constantly at odds with their powerful neighbor, India.

The alliances that have defined the region, India and the Soviet Union, Pakistan and the United States (and China) and now, India and Israel and the United States(maybe Russia again and part of Afghanistan) and Pakistan and the United States (and China) have led to continual military buildups, including nuclear weapons and other advanced strategic technologies, all within a framework of acrimony and continual terrorism.

India, Israel, the United States, Afghanistan, China and Britain are all accused, on a daily basis, of coordinating terror attacks inside each country of the region, including Iran.  Accusations of training and arming terrorist groups, numbered in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds, in each of the countries involved, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, are continually voiced.  In the process, everyone denies involvement in the vast drug trade that has reemerged with the American occupation of Afghanistan and the vast network of corruption based primarily on what seems to be an American policy to stimulate waste. 

Permanent war, in itself, has become the only business of the region, other than drug trafficking, with endless thousands of “contractors” from around the world flocking to the region to suck down the American dollars carelessly thrown at every imaginable perceived threat or ill, often with little or no consideration for end result or attempt at accounting. 

This has brought American war planners to a number of disastrous conclusions about the area, ones that defy any historical or strategic model.  The gutting of the intellectual capabilities of American policy planners during the Bush administration, based on an overlay of an Evangelical Christian model, applied, not only to the Pentagon but intelligence services, State Department and many key decision making environments has left the United States unable to process and respond properly to feedback.  Thus, failed policies are replaced by untested experiments and short term fixes, none based on broad or sound analysis.

All advice comes from groups tied financially to the continuation of the war and even the destabilization of Pakistan.  One major unseen actor is Israel, whose powerful lobby in Washington is capable of making policy for the region.  Israel’s military alliance with India and extensive investment in the regions gas and oil industry is a major driver in, what has become a suicidal American effort.  With Israel benefitting from billions in arms contracts with the United States and India along with becoming a defacto “super power” of the region by proxy, their “special interest” and unique ability to use their control of media, their massive influence over the electoral process in the US and their long relationship with the Pentagon, continual regional conflict may be a hidden agenda.

Current American policies in the region, both military and economic, seem to prove this out.  All are doomed to eventual failure, seemingly purposely so and all are the result of reliance on advice from sectors profiting from war and destabilization, not only of the region, but of the United States itself.  It is a unique possibility that the series of ill conceived wars begun under the Bush administration may eventually bring about the economic collapse of the United States as had happened to the Soviet Union some years before.

AFGHANISTAN

America claimed they came into Afghanistan seeking the terrorists who attacked on 9/11.  This is blatantly dishonest.  Osama bin Laden had been a guest of the Taliban for some time but had been put under severe restrictions by that group.  There is no evidence any terrorist organizations were being run by Bin Laden in Afghanistan and current intelligence has proven, despite “media” coverage to the contrary, that bin Laden had no involvement in 9/11.  Broad evidence exists that bin Laden died during the initial US attack in 2001.  All intelligence and informed opinion leads to this conclusion causing both embarrassment and consternation when “press driven” demands for a continued hunt for bin Laden come from the United States. 

Less publicly, the United States has long accepted the death of bin Laden yet has spent millions of dollars and hundreds of lives in a dishonest attempt to keep a “branded” big name terrorist in front of the public.  This has caused a general distrust of the United States among its military allies who, universally, believe that the phony “hunt for bin Laden” is proof, not of a need to resurrect a phony “boogieman” for public consumption but rather to create an artificial “icon” to cover massive corruption and a history of failure.

At the outset, America’s approach in Afghanistan was flawed.  Our dependence on the Northern Alliance, a group of warlords wishing to restore drug production, prohibited by the Taliban, to assist us led to establishing a regime in Kabul that was never accepted by the people of Afghanistan.  President Karzai, not only notoriously corrupt and weak but closely allied to India, would make an unlikely leader in a war requiring continual coordination with Pakistan, a country nearly as distrustful of Karzai as his own people.

The decision by the US to support Karzai, even after a rigged election and to build an army and national police force primarily out of tribal minorities from the Northern Alliance who are hated by the majority of Afghanis has led to the need for the current increase in American presence and the stalled military operations in Helmand, the nation’s primary opium producing region since 2001.  Current American plans to consider restructuring the massive national police force on regional ethnic lines is encouraging but doomed to failure.

Tribal traditions in Afghanistan are based on a system called Pashtunwali.  All judicial and police functions reside within a long established tribal structure, one that functioned well prior to the Soviet occupation and one which could be restored.  Replacing this with a “northern occupation” will only lead to continual warfare.

GUN CULTURE

The economy of Afghanistan is almost entirely non-existent.  Warring groups are living off American bribes, payments to allow supplies to pass unharmed to American forces or from taxes on the massive opium harvest.  With the destruction of tribal cohesion under the Russian backed government and the mining of Afghanistan, the traditional yearly migrations of the large pastoral population within Afghanistan has stopped.  This group, numbering as many as 15 million, are a recruiting ground for “gun culture.”

Replacing normal occupations, farming, husbandry or small industries is a vast number of fighters, many simple bandits and criminals but untold thousands fighting out of a belief they are opposing a foreign occupation.  Discerning the difference between the two and restoring a traditional economy to replace warlord-ism, drug production and mercenary activities is the only way of bringing about stability.  The cost of these programs, some of which the USAID is working on now, is low in comparison to military action.

However, too little is being done and, for every successful program, ten “boondoggle” programs are put in place, building useless projects with massive cost overruns and corruption.

MILTARY ACTION

American military planners are currently trying a variety of approaches, including working with the Afghan army, a vast mercenary group, primarlily of the northern tribes that is, on the whole, both unsupportable economically and totally helpless when used in any independent capacity.  Afghanistan has a tradition of compulsory military service, a “people’s army” of lowly paid but highly motivated soldiers from ever area of the nation.  These troops are paid as little as $5 per month but receive food subsidies for their families and extensive training in civilian trades as part of their service.

This successful system has been destroyed by the United States and the Karzai government, replaced with a “paid” professional army untrusted by any group within the country.  Pakistan fears that this army will fall under Indian command and threaten their borders and, perhaps, rightly so.  The model used is based on Blackwater, a private military contractor, not any national army.  The new national army in Afghanistan is quite likely to work for any group capable of paying them.  The nation of Afghanistan itself will never have that capability.

American efforts to occupy destabilized regions thru “civil affairs” operations used in Vietnam with some success can only function as they did in Vietnam, as part of a permanent occupation force which will be immediately replaced by an opposing “occupation force” of domestic fighters, the enemy, when Americans leave.  In fact, Taliban units simply melt into the civilian population when confronted by American forces beyond their capability of defeating.

Only the foreign fighters in Afghanistan, those who came to fight and die, continue action against the US forces under unfavorable conditions.  Others, trained in “irregualr warfare” from birth, simply wait out America’s resolve, exactly as had happened in Vietnam.  Pentagon planners understand this, thus making our current efforts by cynical and deceitful.

WHEN ALL DISSENT IS QUELLED, IDIOTS RULE

America is unaware that most of the Taliban live in Pakistan.  The total number of Taliban exceeds 50 million, a number America and Pakistan can never fight successfully nor do they need to.  The vast majority of those the US considers enemy combatants can be rehabilitated, but not under programs currently being initiated by the United States.  The idea of paying “fighters” or members of the “gun culture” to stop resisting is hardly a  thoughtful strategy but it is the one the United States has chosen.

There are forces that need to be defeated and that could be defeated by an Afghan army, a traditional force based on compulsory service and fighting for a government with wide support among the tribes, a government Afghanistan currently doesn’t have.

Current military operations are likely to recruit more fighters against the United States and the unpopular Karzai government and, as things are going, eventually lead to a wider conflict in Pakistan and the economic destruction of that nation, a vital US ally.   We are well along that road already and are more than well aware of it despite our protestations to the opposite and the total lack of media attention to any “reality based” assessment.

Economic development programs being enacted in Afghanistan are primarily based on supporting a corrupt culture and maintaining “cover” for the massive drug trade that powerful groups among all the players, Afghanistan, Israel, the United States, India and Pakistan, are growing immensely wealthy and powerful on.  A restructuring of the economies on both sides of the Durand Line separating Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan along lines suggested by Imran Khan and Jeff Gates and groups supporting Prince Ali Seraj may be the best solution.

Simple “grass roots” development built on supporting and expanding traditional industries while providing improved delivery of educational and health care services is a start.  Only education of men and women can fight the cycle of extremism, broad public education delivered at village level within a social and economic environment supporting a traditional model.  These plans exist, are inexpensive and have broad support among nearly all tribal leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The only thing stopping their implementation is the current much more profitable and corrupt system that is creating a new ruling oligarchy based on American money and continual chaos.

SOLUTIONS?

They have always been there but real solutions have been opposed by those profiting off the war and the environment the war has created.  Too many with too much money and power want the wars to continue for too many reasons, including long term geopolitical goals unfavorable to the United States and Pakistan.  With a lack of strong leadership within the United States compounded by the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, US foreign policy will continue to be a “runaway train.”

The first step toward enacting known solutions would be getting real information to decision makers and keeping the American people properly informed.  Currently, media in the United States is so heavily skewed toward misinformation and propaganda that political accountability has nearly disappeared.  An systematically misinformed populace negates all concepts of democracy and representative government.   There can be no accountability and no national policy as long as the mechanisms for disinformation that have taken control of America’s news media exist.

Defacto control of Americas media by foreign nations and a cabal of corporations tied to the war economy has ended effective public participation in American policy and decision making and, in the process, ended Congress’s ability to oversee policy.  Grassroots movements in Afghanistan, while America remains the “prime mover” depend on restoration of similar authority in the United States.

Commodore Tariq Majeed – Pakistan Navy

Preamble—and Summary

This presentation, whose outline was prepared for a lecture at the Model Town Library, Lahore, identifies a grave, multi-threat, existential danger to Pakistan—indeed, also to the other Muslim countries.  It calls for the immediate attention of the thinking people, especially those concerned with national security.

The term New World Order was in wide popular use in the early 1990s.  Then it gradually disappeared from the scene, and has since been hardly heard of. This is quite in line with the guileful game plan of its originators. They are having their new order methodically enforced in every country, while the people, although tormented by the ever worsening economic, social and political conditions around them, remain ignorant of the real villains and their game.

The NWO is the design according to which the conditions of life and the identity and geography of countries are being reshaped—by scores of agents in countless ways. The two principal agents in the developing world are the IMF and the World Bank. The conditionalities attached to the loans that governments receive from them lead to enforcement of measures that are NWO’s components.

It is the conditionalities accepted by Pakistan’s rulers that set in a rogue system to alter the fundamentals of the country’s economy and to crush the common consumers. Subsidies on POL, electricity, food and fertilizers were stopped and a mechanism for prices to rise continuously was created. The rogue system dictated selling off of national assets, vital services and industries to foreign private parties. All this has played havoc with the country’s economy and society. The havoc will go on if the rogue system is not reversed, as the conditionalities enforcing the NWO are set to continue.

The IMF and World Bank are a major force in establishing the NWO, but they are only tools—serving a bigger force, World Zionism, also known as the Zionist International Jewry (Zinjry), which is aiming at creating a One-World Government to function under Zionist Order. The NWO design cannot be understood without understanding Zinjry. The NWO’s discernable schemes in the 1990s, while targeting all the countries, already had their main focus on Muslim countries. After 9-11, more schemes, almost all against the world of Islam, came to light.

This paper offers only a glimpse at the Zinjry and the NWO. Much more needs to be exposed and explained about this hidden entity and its schemes.

How to deal with the colossal danger?  Obviously, full knowledge of Zinjry and its aims, strategies and resources is in itself a big step in battling the danger. The force of the media and the strength of public support should be fully employed. The ruling elite and the intelligentsia must have the competence and the will to take the required actions. Some of the NWO schemes, eg, privatization of national assets, spreading of SAARC network in Pakistan and the scheme to turn SAARC into South Asian Federation (SAF), must be stopped in their tracks, and then reversed.  The local Fifth Column without which Zinjry cannot succeed in its schemes must be neutralized.

Zionist International Jewry

It is the secret Clique of power-seeking, ruthless Zionist political barons, rabbis, scholars, scientists and international moneylenders which exercises control over the world’s Jews and the state of Israel. Zionism is a racial, political, anti-religion and anti-morality creed, which has become the ideology of Jewish people. Israel is a Zionist not Jewish state.

This Clique has been functioning for centuries and has amassed huge resources of all types. In 1897, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was set up to serve as its front. The WZO, located in London and New York, has a worldwide network of branches and lobbies. The Zinjry already controls the Western countries, and aims to establish a One-World Government under its control.

Zinjry’s Goals are Against All Nations

Zinjry’s goals, resources and strategies, described here very briefly, are a vast subject.  This brief description is still very useful in order to have an idea of the Zinjry’s dreadful threats and to correctly respond to them.

When Zinjry’s programmed puppet Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990 and cleared the way for the US forces to occupy the Gulf States, the noise of a New World Order (NWO) rose in the Media. Many leaders and intellectuals wrote and spoke about it, but they were far off the mark. They had no idea that the NWO was a plot of World Zionism and not of America; they could not even imagine that the United States itself was to be a victim of the NWO!

To expose the NWO, and to warn the people, I wrote a thesis, The Plot Called The New World Order and How to Counter it, in October 1991. It was published in the weekly Facts, Lahore, on 14 January 1992, and later formed part of my 1995 book, The Global Game for a New World Order. I explained that the so-called NWO was in fact the set of the Zionist Jewry’s long-held Goals that it was enforcing in all the countries in the world.  Zinjry keeps expanding its Goals, as its own unfolding Game discloses. The launching of its scheme of Mega-Terrorism on 11 September 2001 disclosed several of its aims and strategies that were previously hidden.

The exposition that follows is in two parts: the NWO’s substance that became apparent in October 1991 which remains its bedrock, and its features that came to light after 9-11.

The New World Order as Exposed in October 1991

The so-called NWO is a long thought-out project of Zionist Jewry to change the shape of the world in all spheres of life, political, economic, military, social, cultural, moral and ideological, to complete its hold over the world. The ideological force of Islam, with its potential to become a politico-economic force, is the only remaining obstacle in the way of the Zionist Jewry. That is why the Muslim People and the Muslim Countries are its main targets. Zinjry’s full force is directed against Pakistan that it considers as its main obstacle in the Muslim world.

Zionist Offensive against the World of Islam—assessed in 1991

Since around mid-1970s, Zinjry has been following a cunning and effective strategy in a four-pronged offensive to crush the Muslim Countries.

• It has created through its agents severe sectarian, ethnic and social conflicts amongst the Muslims within each country.
• It has engineered deep divisiveness and mutual hostility between various Muslim Countries.
• Zinjry has created its puppets in the ruling and the religious classes in each Muslim country, and has then used them in various ways to bring Islam into disrepute.
• By means of powerful propaganda and engineered incidents, Zinjry has projected Islam as a great threat to the non-Islamic people of the world, thereby arousing animosity in them against Islam and the Muslims. In one of its most dreadful schemes, Zinjry is engineering mutual clash between Christians and Muslims in every country in the world, wherever these two communities have been living so far in mutual peace and harmony. A worldwide Christian-Muslim clash, if successfully engineered by Zinjry, will be devastating for the followers of the two religions. It will particularly harm the Muslim immigrants in the Western Countries and the Christian minorities in the Muslim Countries.

New World Order’s Main Schemes—1991

1.   Breaking up all major countries, including USA, China, India, Brazil and the Soviet Union, into Ethnic, Secular Mini-States, Cantons and City-States.

2.  Combining the Mini-States into Regional Federations on Ethnic/Linguistic basis, and governing them through a One-World Government functioning at the United Nations, of a reorganized shape.

3. Bringing about large-scale Population Shifts by creating Refugees, Employment-Seekers, Immigrants, Displaced Persons, etc, and moving them within/between countries to dilute their national spirit and to disturb the Social, Moral, Economic and Political conditions within each country.

4.  Eliminating the concept of Nationalism and Patriotism and replacing it with Internationalism and Globalism.

5.   Privatizing National Industry, Banking, Public Services and Utilities within each State, with their ownership/control passing to Zionist-owned Multinationals.

6. Bringing under the International Organizations the Economy, Budgeting, Commerce and the Development Programs in the emerging Mini-States.

7.  Sharply reducing or ending Military Capabilities (including Nuclear) of the Mini-States and investing the Regional Federations with these capabilities.

8. Exercising Central Control over World Economy, Finance, Commerce, Essential Commodities (eg, Oil, Food), High Technology, Space Exploration, Armaments and R&D.

9. Bringing the Print and Electronic Media and other major Information Dissemination sources under International Direction and Authority.

10. Exercising Central Control over Global Intelligence, Spying, Terrorism, International Vice Rings and Drug Trade, and using these Instruments to Manipulate the regimes and the people in the States of the world.

11. Eliminating the Traditional Difference between Virtue and Vice, and Spreading Zionistic Culture of Immorality, Vulgarity, Irreligiousness, and Money worship.

12. Discrediting the Religion of Islam, Maligning and Ridiculing it by various means, and Depicting it as impracticable in contemporary times.

13. Subverting and Ridiculing the Feminine Virtues and Overturning the Respected Status of Women. Exploiting young women and girls by Misleading them to be “Liberated” and to live and work without the protection of men folk. Bringing more and more “Liberated Women” in top Political and Executive Positions in all States, especially the Muslim States.

14. Abolishing the Institutions of formal Marriage, Family togetherness and Home, and Taking young Children Away from Parental Care and Authority under the cunning strategy of Children’s Human Rights.

15. Expanding the Zionist State of Israel territorially to the so-called Eretz Israel boundaries; Enlarging its Jewish population by Ingathering of Jews.

16. Placing Zionist Jews in Top Positions in the Regional Centers of Power and in the UN, and turning the UN into the planned One-World Government.

Some of the NWO Schemes—Seen after 9-11

The 9-11 Mega Terror was an integral part of the Zinjry’s Global Control Plot. Zinjry had designed it as a decisive step in subverting and subduing Islam. For that purpose, Mossad had created bands of Muslim Patsies spearheaded by trained Middle Eastern and Central Asian Jews disguised as Muslims. These bands were programmed to act as Muslim extremists and terrorists and avowed opponents of America and the West. They provided the US the justification for its so-called war against terrorism and military aggression against Muslim States, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq. The 9-11 terror operation accelerated the ongoing NWO schemes (identified above) and brought forth more measures for implementation of the Zionist Order, some of which are described below.

1. Establishing Permanent/Long-Term Western Military Presence in all the important Muslim States and Areas.

2.  Creating a Class of Muslim Henchmen (including females) of Zionist Order and through them misleading other Muslims into accepting the Zionist Order.

3. Forcing Muslim Countries to induct Females in the Fighting Forces, Para Military Forces, Defence Organizations, Police and Commandos etc, thereby Feminizing these institutions and intensely disturbing their work environment.

4. Forcing Muslim Countries to formally accept all evil values and practices, including the abomination of homosexuality, which Islam forbids, but, which are legally sanctioned in the Western and various other countries.

5. Through false propaganda, engineered rogue incidents and programmed Muslim extremists, accusing Islam of preaching terrorism; maligning Jihad and equating it with terrorism; fabricating proofs against the authenticity and Divine nature of the Qur’an; launching a campaign in the West to restrict/ban publication and import of the Qur’an in the Western Countries; spreading disinformation and blasphemous literature about the personality of the Prophet of Islam (pbuh).

6.  Subjecting Muslims in Western Countries to harassment, insulting profiling and rough treatment; labeling moderate Muslims who shun and oppose obscenity and immoral practices as extremists.

7.  Gradually letting the hidden Zionists in various roles show their identity and their commitment to the Zionist Order; making Zionists privileged persons, not answerable to local authorities and laws, especially in Muslim Countries.

8.  Creating conditions for entry of Jews into Madinah and other places in Saudi Arabia, and for them to claim old properties and compensation.

9.  Engineering a campaign demanding that people of other religions who profess belief in One God be allowed to visit the holy Ka’bah.

10.Through the schemes of Privatization, Foreign Investment, Land Acquisition on long-term lease and Mergers, facilitating the Zionist MNCs and Banks gain control over the strategic industries, natural resources, banks, vital utilities and services and medical and educational institutions in all states, especially Muslim States.

11. With the help of its Muslim henchmen and other secularist Muslims, bring Islam into the fold of the Zionist Interfaith scheme, with the aim to alter or dilute Islam’s basic beliefs and to create a new schism in mainstream Islam.

12. Speeding up the Administrative, Political and Judicial infrastructure for making the key cities, eg, London, Delhi, Istanbul, Islamabad, Independent City-States.

Zinjry’s Resources, Strategies and Machinations

It is not easy to grasp how Zinjry is accomplishing such vast, and shocking, designs, without having some knowledge of its resources and strategies. This subject is extensively covered in my book Masterminds of Air Massacres— of Aug 17 in Pakistan and Sept 11 in America. It is also covered in the Zionist Protocols.

Zionist Tools, Resources and Instruments Inherent Zionist Traits, disguise, dissembling, spying, avarice, ruthlessness The Jewish People—citizens of various countries but loyal only to WZO.

• Zionist Jews in Key Positions in various countries Centuries-old, Enduring Command Organization.
• Gold Reserves, Capital, Real Estate, etc
• Banks, Investment Houses and Multi-National Companies
• Information Media, Advertising, Polling and Opinion Survey Agencies
• Centers of Higher Learning, Scientific Studies and Future Vision Science and Technology, Major Industries and R&D
• Publishing Business and Books Trade
• Highly secretive and elaborate Worldwide Intelligence and Spying Network Secret Societies, Free Masonry, Grand Lodges and Brotherhood Leagues.
• Heretical Religious Creeds for Subverting the revealed Religions
• Occult Knowledge and Magic—widely operative, but unknown to others
• Global Networks of Mafia, Terrorism,  Big Crime, Smuggling and Narcotics
• Cultivated Servants of the Zionist Order—in the countries around the world
• Women as Special Agents—especially deployed in Muslim Countries Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
• The Movie, the Theatre and the Fashion and Modeling Industries
• Principal Think Tanks and Coordination and Execution Forums

The Bilderberg Group

• Council on Foreign Relations
• Business Roundtable
• Trilateral Commission
• World Bank and IMF
• World Economic Forum
• United Nations and UN Security Council Strategies and Methods of Operations

Leading Strategies

• Multi-Layered Deception, Ultra-Long Advance Planning
• Foolproof Secrecy
• Make-Believe, Illusions, Virtual Reality
• Propagation of False Theories Creating Disorder, Infiltrating All Parties, Misguiding Ruling Elite.
• Joining with the Rising Power and with the Forces of Inevitable Change
• Practice of Moneylending
• Fabrication of Statistics
• Provoking Inter-State Conflicts and Wars
• Engineering Financial/Economic Crises

Numerous Other Strategies

• Debilitating the People, including the Leading Classes.
• Crippling the Sense of Honor in the Ruling Elite and the Intelligentsia and Implanting in them a Low Opinion of themselves and their nation.
• Derailing the Womenfolk from their Natural Noble Role in Life, Alienating them from the sacred institution of Marriage and Motherhood, Driving them out of Home and into the Market world, Depriving them of the Protection by Men, Divesting them of their precious Virtues of Modesty and Chastity.
• Making People, especially the Youth, Addicted to and Engrossed in Material Pleasures, Entertainment, Fun and Fashion, Singing, Dancing, Sports, Fast Food, etc, and Alienating them from Higher Aims and Ideals in Life.
• Rendering the Intellectuals, Islamic Scholars, Political Leaders and the Patriotic Elements Unmindful of the  enforcement of the Country-Breakup Measures—Privatization of State Assets, Autonomous City and District Governments,  Ownership of Land and Property by Foreigners, un-Islamic Education and Cultural Practices, Public Displays of Female Semi-Nakedness, and other malignant steps to demoralize, disunite and disintegrate the State.
• Dislocating and Displacing Populations, Forcing People to become Refugees to foreign lands or within their own Countries, Turning them into Migrant Workers or Slave Labor through Human Trafficking.
• Giving Prominent Social Status to the Morally and Intellectually Low-Grade Elements of Society; Parading Immoral Decadent Male and Female Figures as Role Models for the younger generation.
• Engineering Anti-Jewish Incidents and Raising Howls of “Anti-Semitism” to obstruct any Condemnation or Criticism of Israel and Zionism.
• Belittling the Image of the Armed Forces especially the Army; Provoking Hatred against the Army in the Civil Intelligentsia, also exploiting Military’s own follies.
• Engineering Ethnic and Sectarian Conflicts, employing disguised CIA, Mossad and Raw Saboteurs and Local Tools, including Programmed Religionists and  Media Persons.
• Making the Zionist “Human Rights” the supreme Moral and Social Code, and using it for banning Islamic Laws and Customs, granting Freedom for Immoral Practices and for making the Blind, Cripples and other severely Handicapped Persons eligible for joining Political Institutions and  Governmental Services.

An Amazing Example of Zionist Stratagems

Here is a case from history that is unmatched in revealing the ruses practiced by  Zionist Jews. It is recorded with full documentation in Waters Flowing Eastward. In

1492, Chemor, Chief Rabbi of Spain, wrote to the Grand Sanhedrin, which had its seat in Constantinople, for advice, when a Spanish law threatened expulsion. This was the reply:

Beloved brethren in Moses, we have received your letter in which you tell us of the anxieties and misfortunes which you are enduring. We are pierced by as great pain to hear it as yourselves. The advice of the Grand Satraps and Rabbis is the following:

1. As for what you say that the King of Spain obliges you to become Christians: do it, since you cannot do otherwise.

2. As for what you say about the command to despoil you of your property: make your sons merchants that they may despoil, little by little, the Christians of theirs.

3. As for what you say about making attempts on your lives: make your sons doctors and apothecaries, that they may take away Christians’ lives.

4. As for what you say of their destroying your synagogues: make your sons canons and clerics in order that they may destroy their churches.

5. As for the many other vexations you complain of: arrange that your sons become advocates and lawyers, and see that they always mix in affairs of State, that by putting Christians under your yoke you may dominate the world and be avenged on them.

6. Do not swerve from this order that we give you, because you will find by experience that humiliated as you are, you will reach the actuality of power.

(Signed) Prince of the Jews of Constantinople

A Crucial Question

After this, what more can be said on the strategies, machinations, tactics and ruses that the Zionist Jews employ for their evil aims against humanity!

If at all there is anything more to be said, it is to ask a crucial question. Will the Muslim rulers, senior military and civil officials, media managers, political and community leaders, ulema, intellectuals and industrialists now grasp the Zionist Game? And will they move quickly to save their countries and their religion from the anti-Islam onslaught of World Zionism and its field-arm, the state of Israel?

The NWO Marches On

The Zinjry is unremittingly enforcing its NWO goals identified as early as October 1991. Its progress is phenomenal. Tragically, people remain ignorant.  Many of the NWO schemes can be seen in operation in the Muslim world, including Pakistan. In other countries, NWO‘s advance is even wider and deeper.  Britain is set on the path of dissolution. Scotland has its own parliament and Wales is on the verge of having one. Groundwork for India’s breakup is in place. Its 29 states, embroiled in disputes with the Center and with each other, now behave as independent entities. The Brahmin ruling elite is intensely hated. While in most countries the conditions for disintegration are engineered, in India these are inherent. India’s federal structure will collapse with just one sharp jolt. The US is in turmoil. Its break up, once unthinkable, is now an open question. Indeed, the US is bound to break up, because it is a requirement of the Zionist world order, and a Zionist band, also called the Lobby or Neocons, is governing the country.

Regional Bodies, ASEAN, SAARC, African Union, GCC, OAS etc, to become Federations on the model of European Union, are already in place.

Zinjry to Unleash More Horror

The planned Meltdown of September 2008, a Financial 9-11, cleared the way for a new global financial control mechanism to go with NWO. In order to clear the remaining obstacles in NWO’s way, Zinjry plans more horror—a colossal act of terrorism, Another 9-11, and US/NATO armed intervention in more Muslim Countries, creating a world war situation.

Dealing with NWO’s Challenges

A multi-disciplinary program, including a plan to get out of the IMF clutches, is required to counter the NWO.  Four requirements are essential in this respect: awareness, determination, a national ideology and quashing the Fifth Column.

A nation must have its own ideology-based culture; otherwise it cannot escape being overwhelmed by the culture of Capitalism which is same as NWO. Muslim Countries do have a perfect ideology in the shape of Islam. But they have treated Islam not as an ideology but merely as a dogma for prayers and religious rites. Consequently, their social, moral, intellectual and economic environment—their culture—is left with only a little of the strength that Islam imparts to Muslim culture, and which enables it to withstand any alien cultural onslaught.

Pakistan has to revive its Islamic cultural strength. The national leaders must have full understanding about Zinjry and its malevolent schemes and they must have the will to save the nation. Equipped with these assets, they would see the several measures that need to be taken straightaway to protect Pakistan.

Plans to privatize Railways, Pakistan Post, PSM, PEPCO, PIA, etc, be stopped. The planned High Court in Islamabad must not be set up. Pakistanis of dual nationality should be banned from taking part in elections or holding political or governmental office. Foreigners be not eligible for owning property in Pakistan. Moves to turn SAARC into South Asian Federation (SAF) should be crushed and SAARC’s role in Pakistan should be curtailed. The permission given to Americans to intervene in the official and civic sectors in Pakistan should be withdrawn.

In 1948, Quaid-e-Azam had warned the nation of the local Fifth Columnists. This was ignored. They have done immense harm, besides their role in the 1971 disaster. They must be neutralized to avoid further harm to Pakistan.

Cmdre Tariq Majeed of Pakistan Navy (Retd) writes for www.opinion-maker.org

He is an analyst of the Zionist Global Game for World Control.

Individuals in the upper level of the Pentagon and media polloi are beginning to commit a cardinal sin. They’re blurting the truth – sort of. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military’s senior spin surgeon (his father was a Hollywood publicity agent), says that “Afghans are in
the lead” of the Marjah offensive. But not everybody involved in writing the narrative is willing to tell a lie that big.
New York Times journalist C.J. Chivers, a former Marine, was among the first mainstream media voices to shoot down claims the Afghan army was leading the operation. In a Feb. 20 article posted from Marjah, Chivers reported that Marines were doing the “heavy lifting” while the Afghans lagged behind. They lagged so far behind, Chivers noted, that the Marines coined a new acronym: WOA (waiting on the Afghans).

“Statements from Kabul have said the Afghan military is planning the missions and leading both the fight and the effort to engage with Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and the newly arrived troops,” Chivers wrote. “But that assertion conflicts with what is visible in the field. In every engagement between the Taliban and one front-line American Marine unit, the operation has been led in almost every significant sense by American officers and troops.”

In response to truth-outs like Chivers’, unnamed “senior military officials” tell us via NPR that the U.S. definition of “in the lead” means the Afghans are “planning the operation” and are “sitting down with Afghan elders in mosques or in meetings known as shuras.”

If the Afghans are sitting down with elders in mosques, it’s because U.S. planners told them to go find another babysitter. Planning a military operation like the Marjah madness involves a lot of things; talking to old civilians isn’t really one of them.

Read more at-Largely

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Times Reporter Victimized by “Spoof”

By Gordon Duff / STAFF WRITER / Senior Editor

Yesterday, the New York Times, in an article by journalist Carlotta Gall, “the queen” of the Kabul press corps, published an article accusing Special Forces trained Brigidier General Sultan Amir, a hero of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan a supporter of terrorism in Afghanistan.  Referred to by her as “Col. Imam,” General Amir is hardly anything this article says.  I wonder what sources and motivations could have produced such a travesty:

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.

Jeff Gates & Col. Imam (photo G. Duff)

In a lengthy article, this glaring falsehood, unattributed and extremely inaccurate stands out.  In fact, nothing else in the article supports this charge, certainly nothing that can be proven and nothing with any basis in reality.  Why would someone write something like this, something likely to endanger the life of a heroic patriot, American ally and one of my friends?

He hasn’t done anything wrong.  He is playing by the rules.  You don’t hear him talking about the massive drug dealing Americans are involved in or the corruption looting billions out of the American treasury.  I am saying these things, things everyone in the region knows but keeps their mouths shut about or “access” will be cut off by a bureaucracy looking the other way.

Tell the truth about drugs, rendition, torture and a “house could fall on you.” 

“Col. Imam” simply tells the truth on issues where he is an expert, military tacts and tribal interrelationships in Afghanistan.  We choose not to listen to him and other real experts.  US policy is idiotic.  We are pretending to win a war and well know the enemy simply goes underground and is waiting for us to leave.  Our plans for an army and police force in Afghanistan is childish.  He is simply pointing it out.  We all know it.  We are making fools of ourselves, pretending to win a war and stabilize a country while we are really planning to put up a bit of a show and sneak out the back door like the British and Russians did.

It is the job of our MSM/Corporate press to print the lies, keep their access and serve those that own America’s media, defense contractors and Israel.

Raja Mugtaba, Jeff Gates and I recently had dinner with the Colonel and a number of other members of a Pakistan based think tank he advises.  They all support a settlement that will involve elements of the 50,000,000 Taliban in the region.  Our inability, ours and some reporters, to be able to tell the difference between local insurgents and regional bandits and criminals doesn’t surprise me.  American leaders in Afghanistan are surrounded by liars who advise them.  It is hard to tell who is playing who, as the layers of lies, deceit and trickery keep unfolding, one after another. 

After all, our own allies in Afghanistan are, themselves, criminals, drug lords and bandits.  We are building an army and national police force around them.  Most of the people of Afghanistan consider them, not only “collaborators” but, in fact, foreigners.  Afghanistan is a country of many divisions.  America’s alignment with the “Northern Alliance” is why we are sending in tens of thousands of troops to gain temporary control of a country that we only control 3% of after 9 years of war. 

After we “conquer” Afghanistan, we have plans to set up new warlords in the south and keep their “gun culture” going for generations. 

“Little Omar, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I want to be a mercenary or drug lord or maybe a suicide bomber, I can’t decide really.  There isn’t much future in being a suicide bomber and to be a mercenary or drug lord I have to work with Americans all the time.  Maybe I should see a guidance counselor.”

More of the insanity of it all is the charge that the Colonel is supplying material support for the Taliban.  Does anyone ever wonder where the Taliban gets its money.  The answer is easy. 

THE PRIMARY SOURCE OF FUNDS FOR THE TALIBAN IS MONEY PAID BY U.S. CONTRACTORS TO ALLOW TRUCKS SUPPLYING AMERICAN TROOPS TO PASS INTO AFGHANISTAN.

We are now paying $900 per truck or more for each of the thousands of trucks passing from Karachi into Afghanistan, more than enough money to finance the Taliban for a century.  What is keeping the New York Times from reporting that?  Anyone have ideas how the Taliban moves the tons of opium in and out of a landlocked country?  Anyone know “agencies” with a history of gun running, questionable partners and aircraft that make “secret flights?” 

Is it worth sitting around Kabul being hand fed lies at press conferences, same as in Saigon, same as in Baghdad, same as in Washington? 

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is quoted:

NEVER ACCEPT MEAT FROM ORCS.

One of the things we are supposed to do as journalists is to ask the question:  “Why am I being told this?” 

There is only one reason for this story.  The United States is trying to set up Pakistan as the next “evil doer.”  The Pentagon boys, General Petraeus in particular, are joined at the hip with Israel, a country busy, in partnership with India, eating up the natural resources of the region with gas and oil operations in several countries nearby.  Control of Afghanistan and the dismemberment of Pakistan with help of the United States will make any people extremely rich, even richer than they are getting running narcotics around the world.

Sibel Edmonds, FBI whistleblower told the American Conservative:

EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan……bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.

GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?

EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.

Edmonds goes on, in an article by Brad Bradstein naming key US official as part of the racket, not only drug smuggling and supporting terrorists but trading nuclear secrets and more.  Among those standing accused but, as of today, totally unreported by the New York Times are “lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman.”

Bradsteins article goes further:

Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a former Speaker of the House, was involved in “several categories” of corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She mentioned his “acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash” coupled with the ability “to do certain favors…make certain things happen for… [the] Turkish government’s interest.”

 Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a “townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities” and said that “foreign entities knew about this. In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those…activities in that particular townhouse.”

 The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years earlier, Hastert—who left Congress in 2007—now makes $35,000 a month lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.

With an aging warrior, “Col. Imam” retired in Rawalpindi after a lifetime of service, much for the United States, the best the New York Times can do is lap up the leavings of liars, drug runners and thieves and join the queue, the MSM/Corporate media, the “mouthpiece” of a generation of racketeers working to create a new “Third Reich” with an Israeli twist.

THE SERVICE AND SACRIFICE OF ALL AMERICAN WAR VETERANS IS AT STAKE

MY HONOR IS NOT FOR SALE, NOT FOR A LIE

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Veterans Today Editors, Jeff Gates, Raja Mujtaba and I were in the AF-Pak region over the last couple of weeks.  Jeff and I are Vietnam veterans, Raja a decorated combat veteran, tank commander, from the India/Pakistan war.  We met dozens of Pakistani military, including nearly all of their highest ranking retired officers, from Admiral Sirohey, Chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff to General Alsam Beg, Head of the Army to Lt. General Hamid Gul, former head of the ISI.  In our party were our other Veterans Today contributors, BG Asif Haroon Raja and BG Raza Ali, of “Charlie Wilson’s War” fame. 

Today, I received an email from Admiral Sirohey.  His office is lined with memorabilia from a long career of service, service as an ally and friend of the United States.  Sirohey and the rest were America’s most stalwart allies during the Cold War.  These were the real allies that helped us bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union.  I was honored to be among them.  Today Admiral Sirohey is scheduled to attend a rally protesting the illegal kidnapping, brutalizing and conviction of Dr. Affia Siddiqui.  America’s best friends in Asia, the finest soldiers in the world are horrified at what we have done.

Can it be that bad?

VETERANS TODAY EDITORS RAJA MUJTABA AND JEFF GATES, ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN, FEBRUARY 2010 (PHOTO BY GORDON DUFF)

The Bush administration, when it saw its “War on Terror” wasn’t getting enough suspects, hired drug cartel members and criminal elements to kidnap innocent civilians to fill our secret prisons.  Yes, we actually did this.  In this case, we kidnapped a mother with 3 children, tortured her for years, murdered a small child and then charged her with attempting to murder her captors after years in a secret prison  on Bagram Air Force Base.

Every soldier on that base, everyone who has served there has to live with the dishonor of this act until something is done.  Remember when America, after World War II painted the people of Germany with the stain of guilt for not knowing about the death camps?  Tell me what is different here?  We didn’t know that druglords and gangsters were stealing people off the street to fill our prisons with “terror suspects” so Bush/Ashcroft and Cheney could crow about their successes? 

If you didn’t know before, this is what all the secret “torture memos” were all about, not real terrorists, but innocent people we “bought” as though we were slave runners of old.

A few years after we bought our phony terror suspects, tortured, raped and brutalized them, most were released.  They had committed no crime other than to be standing on the wrong dark street corner when the druglords working for Bush were out hunting “meat” for America’s gulags.

Dr. Aafia had to be convicted, had to be jailed and silenced.  The crimes against her and her children were so heinous, only a kangaroo court in America, a country whose news is orchestrated by the Islam hating MSM/Corporate media and powerful Israeli/AIPAC lobby would have the audiacity to bring her to trial.

Do we need to review the case?  Remember the OJ case?  He was released because of a glove not fitting.  Dr. Aafia was shot by the “translator” during her “debriefing.”

She has a Doctorate from an American university.  She comes from a country where everyone speaks English.  “If the translator doesn’t fit, you must acquit!”

Do we now call a person with a cattle prod a “translator?”

When the My Lai massacre happened, I was with a Marine unit less than 50 miles away.  All of us who were there then, not so many are around any more, carry the stain of that dishonor and have for decades.  I can talk of honor or service but all people see is babies and their mothers, shot to death, lining the bottom of a ditch.

It is a matter of honor.

There are no “secret prisons” and nobody is tortured without someone knowing about it.  We are all responsible, I don’t care if you are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere around the world, active duty, reserve, National Guard, retiree or veteran.  We are nearly 30 million strong.  Many of us don’t have much, memories, wounds, a small pension and our honor. 

Our silence strips our honor away.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was not a terrorist.  The newspapers lied, we all know why.  Either she is guilty or we all are.  Better to destroy her than to arrest those guilty of real crimes, arrest people some of us voted into high office. 

“We were just taking orders.”

Where have we heard that before, Nuremberg?  It isn’t just this one life.  We already killed over a million people in our ill fated invasion of Iraq.

Fog of War.  We know better, everyone with eyes to see knows better, know it now.  Then why are we still acting like criminals?  No more lies.  We are at war, a war with real enemies.  We have so little, our short lives, our families and what we believe in. 

Did a tiny crippled woman, illegally imprisoned for years try to murder a room of FBI, Special Forces and Blackwater/CIA operatives? 

I can tell you this:  If I get my butt kicked by a 100 pound woman in a wheel chair, you won’t see me in front of a jury in New York City crying for my mama. 

The only possible answer is that everyone involved in the trial of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a liar.  Nothing else is possible.  I know why they lied, they were ordered to “for the good of the service.”  Was there something in the oath involving “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America unless told to lie for the good of the service?” 

What are we protecting?

Once the public learns that we are buying phony terror suspects from the worlds largest drug dealers, people we are protecting, people flooding our streets with narcotics, there might be problems.  Best not let the public know why we never found those weapons of mass destruction, that yellow cake uranium, those mobile bio-weapons labs or why our continual search for Osama bin Laden keeps failing.

The deal of the century, destroying an innocent life and earning the hate of a valued ally, all to stand behind the lies and rhetoric of America’s “dark age.”  We would be lucky if it were only every citizen of Pakistan that was enraged at us for this travesty.  It is worse, far worse. 

Who are the real terrorists?  In Pakistan, Admiral Sirohey, friend to half a dozen American Presidents is heading to a peaceful protest.  What can we, Americans, claim?  If kidnapping, torture, rape and covering it up by letting the victim rot in prison isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is. 

We should be thankful for that seat on the UN Security Council.  We may need it for more than covering up for Israel.  The next nation facing sanctions for international crimes may be us.  All that stands between us and being cut off from the world is our veto.  All that is keeping an entire administration from War Crimes trials is the Bush administrations withdrawal from the International Criminal Court at the Hague. 

Why is President Obama allowing the outrages of the Bush administration to continue?

“CONSPIRACY THEORY” BECOMES REALITY IN THE NEW CIA/BLACKWATER PARTNERSHIP

By Ahmed Quereshi

“When these CIA agents killed a couple of Chinese engineers back in 2004, CIA psy-ops used the incident to put the blame on Afghan Taliban, thereby creating doubts in the minds of Chinese officials that Pakistani intelligence might have had something to do with this since Pakistan maintained ties with the Afghan Taliban government in Afghanistan before 2002.”

CIA needs authorization from US Congress before launching covert operations in other countries. Congress approves releasing funds for the operations.

Because of this requirement CIA has to give people in government details about the covert operations it is asking money for.

To avoid this disclosure, CIA has been looking for funding from other sources to launch ‘rogue’ operations, ones that are not fully endorsed by the government.

In Afghanistan, CIA has launched several covert operations since 2002 meant to target not al-Qaeda or Taliban but some of the neighboring countries whose policies may not sync with US interests.

For example, Pakistan allowed Chinese personnel to build a huge strategic seaport called Gawadar. This Chinese presence was not in US interest. So CIA used Karzai’s intelligence people and India’s offer of help to target Chinese engineers in Pakistan. CIA did this quite successfully by slipping terrorists inside Pakistan pretending to be Taliban or al Qaeda.

It was easy for CIA agents to carry out this operation because Pakistan under former president Pervez Musharraf had granted US personnel, civilian and military, unprecedented freedom of movement within the country.

When these CIA agents killed a couple of Chinese engineers back in 2004, CIA psy-ops used the incident to put the blame on Afghan Taliban, thereby creating doubts in the minds of Chinese officials that Pakistani intelligence might have had something to do with this since Pakistan maintained ties with the Afghan Taliban government in Afghanistan before 2002.

Similarly, CIA launched covert operations against Iran, western China and Pakistan. It used Afghan soil in all of them, which made logistical issues pertaining to these operations much easier.

Where did the money come from for all of these operations?

Some of the money came from the US government, which has an anti-Iran covert program running until now from the Bush days. Nothing secret here. But not all CIA operations in Afghanistan are funded by the US government.

It is believed that many CIA operations inside Pakistan and China received partial or no funding from the US government. These operations were meant to create ethnic, sectarian and political turmoil in Pakistan, and ethnic turmoil in China, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang.

CIA developed a new source of funding to finance these rogue operations.

The Afghan Taliban almost destroyed the Afghan opium trade, a feat unparalleled in the history of Afghanistan. It was near impossible for anyone to impose such discipline on a chaotic nation like Afghanistan.

After 2002, drug production and trade grew by leaps. CIA introduced latest drug production and transportation tehniques to Afghanistan, learned from CIA operations in South America.

CIA also recruited all the main Afghan drug barons. Almost all of them are on CIA’s payroll, or were so until early 2010.

Some of these AFghan drug barons were actually rewarded. CIA recommended some of them to US government and military as legitimate powerbrokers who deserved a share in the Kabul government.

This is one facet of the multidimensional role that CIA played in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2010 to distrub regional balance of power and pursue US strategtic interests beyond the immediate goals of America’s war on terror.

THE SO CALLED WAR ON TERROR HAS CREATED MORE TERROR THAN THE SUPPOSEDLY TERRORISTS

Pak Army troops and the militants in north-western tribal belt are locked in mortal combat since 2003. Both sides have been bleeding each other but refusing to give up. While the Army has lost 2955 officers and men, the losses of militants are as much of not more. Both enjoy some tactical advantages and also suffer from certain handicaps. In terms of armaments, both sides are well stocked and laced with sophisticated weaponry and communication system to fight a long drawn protracted war of attrition. Material and monetary needs of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are met by CIA and RAW. Rough terrain, inclement weather and hit and run tactics compensate for militants inferiority in numerical strength and absence of tanks, artillery, choppers and air.

These hazards are overcome by avoiding positional and pitched battles and making use of caves and tunnels in the mountains. Supply routes through porous Pak-Afghan border and safe havens in Afghanistan are other advantages enjoyed by TTP. Its linkage with several banned extremist groups based in major cities and with Al-Qaeda adds to its strength. Security forces lacking in guerrilla warfare training and counter terrorism equipment found it difficult to fight the faceless enemy. Another serious handicap was the constraint of collateral damage since the fight was with misled Pakistanis. Last but not least, the Army had to all along remain mindful of its wicked enemy on the eastern border as well as enemies in guise of friends in Kabul, continuously stabbing Pakistan in the back.

Valour, steadfastness to keep fighting and spirit of camaraderie are in abundance on both sides. Both are convinced that they are fighting for the right cause. It is a clash of titans and battle of nerves between the brave hearts, each side trying to outwit the other. Both made gains and also suffered reverses but recovered after inking peace deals and again crossed swords with even greater vigour and enthusiasm.

This matching contest continued till as late as February 2009 when peace deal was signed in Swat. By that time the security forces had overcome most of their shortfalls and were fully motivated and battle inoculated. Double game of the so-called friends had become evident in mid 2007.

One year of mission oriented low intensity conflict training from January 2008 onwards together with handsome welfare package for the troops helped in raising their fighting proficiency and morale. Above all, public support turned in favour of the Army after Fazlullah led militants dishonoured the treaty and their hidden intentions got exposed.

The finesse which the Army applied in the critical battle of Malakand and Swat against heavily fortified positions of Fazlullah led militants began to swing the tide in favour of the Army. Rapid successes achieved in Swat received a quantum jump in the mother of battles fought in South Waziristan (SW) where to the utter surprise of many the Army demolished strongholds of TTP at Kotkai, Srarogha, Shrangrawari, Kunigram, Ladha and Makeen. Speed and intensity of three pincers upturned the well laid network and forced the militants to flee. Air force and choppers played their respective parts professionally to avoid collateral damage.

Loss of main operational bases of Swat and SW deprived the militant commanders the ability to put up organized resistance. It forced them to activate smaller bases in Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai and Kurram Agencies with a view to break the momentum of offensive in SW. Series of suicide attacks combined with terrorist attacks were unleashed in major cities to affect recoil and to force the leadership to seek peace.

Since the Frontier Corps had already been positioned and tasked to deal with militants in likely restive areas and its strength was buttressed with army units, helicopter and air support wherever required, the militants could not gain advantage in any of the trouble spots. Offensive posture adopted by the Army units on all fronts gave the militants no respite to regroup and thus enabled the Army to wrest initiative. People weathered the terror attacks with fortitude.

Though the TTP is in disarray and there is leadership crisis, it is certainly not a spent force and is capable of launching small scale attacks and suicide attacks for quite some time till they expend their stocks and exhaust funds. TTP members have however begun to respect and admire the tenacity and fighting skills of soldiers and now call them as ‘Faujis’ instead of ‘hypocrites’. The people of Swat and Malakand Division have started loving the Army after having seen their real humanitarian face.

Till the deadly attack carried out by a Jordanian on US base in Khost in which seven CIA agents were killed and six got injured, the wrath of drones fell on areas influenced by Gul Bahadur and Sirajuddin Haqqani in North Waziristan (NW), both believed to be aiding insurgency in Afghanistan. The incident infuriated CIA so intensely that in revenge it accelerated drone attacks on suspected targets in NW. CIA operated drones then began to target fugitive Hakimullah Mehsud since he was seen in a video tape with suicide bomber Balawi. Although Hakimullah played no role in the attack, two to three attempts have already been made on him. Last one was on 14 January in which it was widely believed that he was killed. It is still a mystery whether he is dead or alive since TTP spokesman still maintains that he is alive while the US is reluctant to confirm.

This is one way to build the image of a runaway in the eyes of locals of Waziristan since those in bad books of America are heroes in the books of tribesmen. This may have become necessary in the light of unearthing of huge dumps of Indian made armaments from his strongholds thereby establishing his links with RAW and CIA. Other reasons could be that besides his possible connection with Balawi, USA must be unhappy with his performance. He gave up his main bases fortified over a long period too easily and cheaply thereby not only jeopardizing the position of India and America but also making the position of Pakistan strong. Another reason of targeting Hakimullah could be to prove to Pakistan that it is following an even handed policy in two parts of Waziristan.

Despite Pakistan’s loud protests the US continues to maintain that drones are an effective tool to stabilize Afghanistan and would not be discontinued. US leaders fail to realize that this highly inaccurate weapon system kills 98% innocent people and only 1% actual suspects. The average so far is one militant out of 100 innocent civilians killed. They fail to comprehend that drones are further radicalizing the people of FATA, fuelling anti-Americanism, jeopardizing the position of Pakistan government and impelling peace loving citizens to pick up arms and join hands with Taliban. What should one expect from the survivors of a family cut to pieces by hellfire missiles?

Downing of one drone by militants in NW has triggered retaliatory revengeful drone attacks. NW is virtually under siege of CIA operated drone onslaughts. Deadliest attack was on 02 February in which 18 missiles were fired killing 32 people mostly innocent civilians. In one of the attacks Jalaluddin Haqqani’s son has been killed. Drone attacks have purposely been intensified to provoke the militants and the people in NW to confront the Army thereby compelling the latter to launch a full fledged operation and thus get further stretched.

The US military has got locked on to NW since it strongly believes that Osama as well as top leadership of Al-Qaeda is based in this region and that they are busy planning another 9/11 like attack on US homeland. All civil and military leaders of USA, Obama downwards have expressed fears about FATA. US military operating in Afghanistan hold FATA based Al-Qaeda and Taliban duly supported by Pakistan responsible for its dismal performance. Top US military leadership is convinced that unless the bases in FATA are dismantled, no progress can be made in Afghanistan. In other words they have linked their success in Afghanistan to the progress achieved against Al-Qaeda and Taliban in FATA. Now that SW has been taken over by Pak Army, the US wants the operation to be extended to NW.

If Al-Qaeda is supported by the ISI and Army, why these two institutions captured over 600 Al-Qaeda operatives including high value targets and handed them over to USA; and why so many terror attacks on these institutions?  Likewise, if there is covert link between the ISI and Afghan Taliban, why several Taliban leaders have been arrested in the recent past and that too at a time when US military in Afghanistan is in dire trouble and contemplating early withdrawal and the Taliban have gained an upper hand? This theme suits US military to cover up its failures.

Having assessed the fighting potential, resolve and tenacity of the militants, their misdirected potentials should be diverted towards constructive channels by way of inducting them as regular soldiers in newly named Tribal Light Infantry Battalions similar to the initial status given to NLI.

Afghan National Army being overwhelmingly non-Pashtun and US trained is seen as a US mercenary army and has no credibility in the eyes of Afghan Pashtuns. Efforts to bolster its strength and fighting capacity would go waste until and unless the demographic balance is not corrected.

Obama has not wilted under public pressure to announce gradual reduction of US troops from Afghanistan from mid July 2011 onwards and to enter into negotiations with Taliban for a negotiated political settlement. Poor military showing against resurgent Taliban together with worsening economic health are the two over riding factors behind his decision. Having already spent $1.075 trillion on war on terror and with $1.7 trillion budget deficit and debt likely to rise to $20 trillion by 2015, and with little hope of recovery both on military and economic planes, the US can ill afford to continue with expensive and senseless war.

Pakistan should insist on stoppage of drone attacks; immediate closure of Pak specific Indian consulates in Afghanistan and end to covert operations. The US should be advised that to make proposed reconciliation productive, negotiations with Taliban should not be selective and conditional; and policy of dividing Pashtuns and pitching one against the other may prove counter productive and result in another round of internecine war once the foreign forces depart.

Brig Asif Haroon Raja is a Member Board of Advisors, Opinion Maker. He is a defence analyst who has written five books.

Juan Cole has the story. Writes Cole: “[T]he Taliban are apparently attempting to destabilize the capital and to punish foreigners working to stand up the new government (in this case India), using the tactics of Sunni radical insurgents in Baghdad. While this tactic can indeed slow state formation, it is just the act of a spoiler and does not lead to any positive political achievements.”

The Afghan capital was struck by three suicide bombings early Friday morning, beginning at 6:30 am local time. Radio Azadi reports that there were five attackers, who struck in the area near the entrance of the Hotel Safi Landmark. The first bomb damaged the hotel.

Two of these bombings, Aljazeera Arabic says, targeted guest houses for Indian expatriates in Kabul who work for companies or NGOs. The third blast was huge, and the guesthouse was left in rubble, such that there may be bodies still within. As I write, the death toll is estimated at 18, with 32 wounded, and some of the dead are Indians and many of the wounded are. The Aljazeera correspondent says that Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told him that the mission had been to hit the “enemies of Afghanistan from among the foreign Indians.” The Sydney Morning Herald confirms that the Taliban were targeting Indian hostels.

The Taliban have hit the Indian embassy in Kabul twice, once in July 2008, and again in October 2009. Many Taliban have helped train or fought alongside Pakistani militant vigilantes fixated on overthrowing Indian rule of Muslim-majority Kashmir.

India is also a significant provider to Afghanistan of development aid and investment, and so is helping build up the government of Hamid Karzai. Having offered $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid, India is the largest regional donor. There are some 4,000 Indian workers in the country, some of them “security personnel,” according to the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Several prominent Tajik (Persian-speaking Sunni) politicians have long-standing ties to New Delhi because India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW, the equivalent of the CIA) provided aid to the old Northern Alliance at a time when it was under siege in the late 1990s by the Taliban. These Tajiks are die-hard enemies of the Taliban, who had committed massacres against them. The Taliban animus against India thus is multifaceted.

The attack lasted about 4 hours, according to Radio Azadi, with some of the attackers using small arms fire. All five were ultimately killed.

Some observers were surprised that the attack was launched on the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. But many hard line Salafi revivalists, who say they want to go back to the practice of Islam that prevailed among the first generation of the companions of the Prophet, oppose celebration of birthdays in general and of that of the Prophet in particular.

Pollster Matt Dabrowski tweeted from Kabul that he was awakened by the first blast, and could see a smoke column bigger than the downtown indoors market building.

US Navy Lt. Joe Halstead tweeted from Kabul, “Insurgents using Mohammed’s Birthday and attempting to counter progress in Marjah with attack in Kabul today.”

Friday’s attack resembled one in January. Although the Taliban are attempting to project an image of Kabul as having little security and the Karzai government as helpless in the face of their assaults, actually they are just proving that the Afghanistan security forces are pretty good and can fairly easily capture or kill attackers.

The Taliban have lost momentum on two fronts in recent weeks. The CSM estimates that Pakistani authorities have captured 7 of the 15 membersof the Quetta Shura, the command council of the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar. American drone strikes killed another major Taliban leader in North Waziristan on Thursday, Muhammad Qari Zafar. He was a mastermind of the attack on the US consulate in the southern Pakistan port of Karachi in 2006.

The other front is Marjah, where Taliban direct attacks are becoming rare as the US military and the Afghanistan National Army establish control of the city of 80,000. Some twenty thousand residents have fled to nearby Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. The Taliban are still fighting with roadside bombs, and are likely to go doing so for some time.

In the wake of these two defeats, the Taliban are apparently attempting to destabilize the capital and to punish foreigners working to stand up the new government (in this case India), using the tactics of Sunni radical insurgents in Baghdad. While this tactic can indeed slow state formation, it is just the act of a spoiler and does not lead to any positive political achievements.

By: Khalil Nouri STAFF WRITER FOR VETERANS TODAY

AN INEVITABLE KARZAI DYNASTY RULING

Subsequent to Hamed Karzai shamelessly stealing the Afghan re-election; he agreed that his achievements and standards would be higher – and the Obama administration vowed that he will honorably and ethically keep his word, but the Afghan president once again deceitfully proved his greed for power.

He has reportedly granted himself powers over a key electoral watchdog, a move likely to aggravate relations between his government and NATO allies fighting insurgents in the war-torn country.

In a presidential decree published last week, Karzai gave himself the power to appoint all five members of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC).

The commission, helped expose massive fraud in last year’s presidential poll, forcing Karzai into a second vote.
However, under a previous law, the United Nations appointed three foreign experts to the five-member commission, which would work alongside Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC). The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (IHRC), and the Supreme Court of Afghanistan appointed the remaining two members.

This deceiving resumption cannot come at any time worse when the American, NATO and Afghan forces are wholeheartedly battling the insurgency and shedding their blood in the name of peace in Afghanistan. But Mr. Karzai is boldly interested only in his own political power, which is immensely destructive for the U.S. NATO operation and Afghanistan’s democratic process. In fact, Mr. Karzai’s failure to build a credible, honest and even modestly effective government is the Taliban’s number one recruiting apparatus.

NEXT PREDICTABLE DECEITFUL MOVE:
A DYNASTICAL APPROACH?

The new decree will help Karzai ensure that the parliament after elections in September will be dominated by his political allies. With a future parliament on his side, Karzai ultimately would be able to amend the constitution so that he can run for more than two elected terms if he chooses to do so. That would allow Karzai to run for election again in 2014, and once that door is opened, in due course, he could declare himself head of the Afghan state for life.

On hindsight, if Karzai for some reason is unable to amend the constitution to allow himself to run for a third elected term, a sympathetic parliament on his side could help him extend his term in office by supporting a declaration of a state of emergency—a move that could delay elections indefinitely.
At last with his allied constituents; warlords, drug cartel and accumulated deep-pockets, he can easily buy—former Russian president, (now vice president) Vladimir Putin did the same for his friend Dmitry Medvedev by winning the Russian presidency— an election for a family member or a crony who could protect Karzai in a safe heaven when his term ends.

One may argue as why go through another presidential election when the last one was a fiasco?
In fact, that is a valid argument, and Afghanistan never had an election in that fashion before.
Moreover, election process in Afghanistan will always be a mess and a recipe for ethnic tension and civil strife.

For centuries the head of Afghan state was chosen by the grand assembly of elders (Loya Jirgah), and the selected one was for life.
This process is still well suited for today Afghanistan, but undoubtedly Mr. Karzai is not the man for the job. He neither can lead nor can be accepted by the majority of Afghans. Therefore, he is considered a hindrance to U.S. NATO goals in Afghanistan.

IS THIS AN AFGHANIZATION OR ANOTHER DECEPTION?

“This is the beginning of Afghanization and it will continue” as declared by Karzai’s deputy spokesperson. He also said, “The Afghan government for long wanted to Afghanize the electoral process and ten days ago, the cabinet ratified the amendment and the president endorsed it.”

As an Afghan born, I believe, Afghanization is a good thing, but with the current state of fragility in Afghanistan, the country cannot endure to stand on its feet. Conversely, this seems to be another path for creation of a sound fraudulent system in Afghanistan.

In fact, the whole electoral machinery having been installed by him personally, and this is alarming that even Afghan parliament is unable to force the president to fire ministers.

There are signs that the West is not careful, and this could be moving towards an unintended dictatorship, and hindrance for creation of a legitimate Afghan state. Also, it could be a futile effort to win the war on terror as well as the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

Hamed Karzai’s lack of deliverance in the past nine years is plain, and hence, the collective patience of NATO alliance is increasingly running out. As a result, the fractious coalition could be dismantled precipitously and set a victory for insurgency.
Recently Dutch government announced soon to pull out of Afghanistan, and next year Canadians to do the same. Therefore, the Afghan mission could be winding towards a failure by emboldening the insurgency further.

In final, Karzai’s recent decision about the electoral process is not only a continued betrayal towards his nation, but continued crises of credibility, which are also clear recipes for downward spiral in Afghanistan.

In that regards, has it occurred to anyone in the White House national security circles or the pundit class that the ongoing loss of American and Afghan lives is wasteful and immoral?
Moreover, what will the court of public opinion think?
Also, how a fragile NATO alliance could be cohesive against the cause in Afghanistan?
At last, what are the repercussions for a collapsed Pakistani government and the regional chaos?

I believe another change of strategy for Afghanistan is foreseeable in a near future.

Khalil Nouri is the cofounder of New World Strategies Coalition Inc., a native think tank for nonmilitary solution studies for Afghanistan. www.nwscinc.org

Headline above is from today’s New York Times. The last 15 words of the lede are from an infamous militarist. How about we just get these guys home and give them what they deserve?

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has long called European contributions to NATO inadequate, said Tuesday 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 security 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 to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.

A perception of European weakness, he warned, could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers.

The meeting was a prelude to the alliance’s review this year of its basic mission plan for the first time since 1999. “Right now,” Mr. Gates said, “the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.”

Mr. Gates’s blunt comments came just three days after the coalition government of the Netherlands collapsed in a dispute over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. It now appears almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops there will be withdrawn this year. And polls show that the Afghanistan war has grown increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.

The defense secretary, putting a sharper point on his past criticisms, outlined how NATO shortfalls were exacting a material toll in Afghanistan. The alliance’s failure to finance needed helicopters and cargo aircraft, for example, were “directly impacting operations,” he said.

Mr. Gates said that NATO also needed more aerial refueling tankers and intelligence-gathering equipment “for immediate use on the battlefield.”

Yet alliance members, he noted, were far from reaching their spending commitments, with only 5 of 28 having reached the established target: 2 percent of gross domestic product for defense. By comparison, the United States spends more than 4 percent of its G.D.P. on its military.

Dana Allin, a senior fellow with the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, called Mr. Gates’s remarks “very striking.”

“Whether this is a conscious statement to sound a real sharp warning, there’s no question that the frustration among the American military establishment is palpable regarding coalition operations in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr. Gates did soften his message a bit, noting that, not counting United States forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were to increase from 30,000 last year to 50,000 this year.

“By any measure,” he said, “that is an extraordinary feat.”

More sobering, he said, was that just two months into the year, NATO was facing shortfalls of hundreds of millions of euros — “a natural consequence of having underinvested in collective defense for over a decade.”

NATO’s growing problems — greatly magnified by the expansion of its mandate beyond European borders, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — called for “serious, far-reaching and immediate reforms,” Mr. Gates said.

Therefore, the core goal of the U.S. must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The ability of extremists in Pakistan to undermine Afghanistan is proven, while insurgency in Afghanistan feeds instability in Pakistan. The threat that al Qaeda poses to the United States and our allies in Pakistan – including the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material – is all too real. Without more effective action against these groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan will face continuing instability.

And from Dec. 1, 2009; Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan: 

First, we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban’s momentum and increase Afghanistan’s capacity over the next 18 months.
The 30,000 additional troops that I’m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 — the fastest possible pace — so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers.  They’ll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight.  And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.

And now from the Huffington Post:

Washington Post Feb. 22, 2010: Marja offensive aimed to shape U.S. opinion on war. Gareth Porter writes for IPS News, “Senior military officials decided to launch the current U.S.-British military campaign to seize Marja in large part to influence domestic U.S. opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported Monday.”

The Post report, by Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock, both of whom cover military affairs, said the town of Marja would not have been chosen as a target for a U.S. military operation had the criterion been military significance instead of impact on domestic public opinion.

The primary goal of the offensive, they write, is to ‘convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year long war….’ U.S. military officials in Afghanistan ‘hope a large and loud victory in Marja will convince the American public that they deserve more time to demonstrate that extra troops and new tactics can yield better results on the battlefield,’ according to Jaffe and Whitlock.

Read the full piece here. Here’s a bit more from the Post story:

‘You want to be able to define your narrative, and we’ve had trouble doing that in the past,’ said Mark Moyar, who has served as a civilian adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. McChrystal is under pressure to show progress fast: President Obama has directed that U.S. troops begin to withdraw in July 2011.

In recent days, U.S. commanders in Kabul and Washington have gone to great pains to describe the Marja offensive as a new beginning. ‘This is the start point of a new strategy,’ one senior military official told reporters on Thursday. ‘This is our first salvo.’

Here’s another gem: “[I] n purely military terms, sending 11,000 U.S. and Afghan troops to defeat a few hundred Taliban fighters in Marja won’t change much in Afghanistan. The greater significance of the battle is in how it is perceived in the rest of Afghanistan and in America.”
—
Pakistan

Are we seeing a historic shift in Pakistan? In the latest issue of The New Yorker, journalist Steve Coll offers his thoughts on “Taking on the Taliban,” arguing that “there are few strategic issues of greater importance to the outcome of President Obama’s Afghan war [as Pakistan].” Simply put, one of the root problems for NATO in Afghanistan is its militarized neighbor, Pakistan, which has a historically cozy relationship with the Taliban. Coll discusses the latest development in the Afghan War — the capture of senior Taliban commander Mullah Baradar — and places it in the context of an ostensible change in Pakistan’s strategic priorities in Afghanistan. After facing a string of terrorist attacks last year that killed 3,021 people — including an attack on the Pakistani Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi in October 2009 — the country’s military may be considering greater cooperation with the United States in the fight against the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The root problem in this murkiest theatre of the Afghan war is not Pakistan’s national character or even the character of its generals; rather, it involves Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani Army has learned over many years to leverage its grievances, dysfunction, bad choices, and perpetual dangers to extract from the United States the financial and military support that it believes it requires against India. At the same time, Pakistan’s generals resent their dependency on America. For the I.S.I. [the Inter-services Intelligence agency] to repudiate the Taliban entirely, its officers would have to imagine a new way of living in the world — to write a new definition of Pakistan’s national security, one that emphasizes politics and economics over clandestine war. For now, many Pakistani generals imagine themselves masters of an old game: to be not so sweet that they will be eaten whole by the United States, but not so bitter that they will be spat out.

Coll hesitates to declare the recent cooperation from the Pakistanis as necessarily indicative of a strategic shift. He is convinced that unless “the geopolitical incentives that have informed Pakistan’s alliance with the Afghan Taliban” are altered, the United States and NATO will continue to have a precarious ally to the east.

Conventional wisdom or deceit if I may by mainstream media and political leaders in Congress and the White House is that maybe voters will direct their anger and ire elsewhere (Tea Bag Movement comes to mind with their intentional inability to connect the dots between our national deficit and defense (excuse me offense) spending,) like at the political party in power as they ignore or continue not talking about the wars.

It seems as if talking about THE WARS is like talking about SEX was during the 1950s. On that note lets hear what a Congressional candidate from California – challenging the Democratic Party machine of her state and the national Democratic party leadership – has to say about remaining SILENT on the wars.

Robert L. Hanafin, Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired, Veterans Today NewsWill the Out of Iraq Caucus Live Up to Its Name? Speak Out by Marcy Winograd 08 June 2009

This was written way back in June 2009, before the on-line debate of the Pro-Peace Democrats and Independents shifted focus to Afghanistan.

“After the near comatose nod to [Obama administration] escalation of US troops in Afghanistan, passage of H.R. 2346, the 97-billion Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, was in doubt in the House – not because of the strength of the anti-war movement, which morphed into the elect-Obama-movement, nor due to the high suicide rate amongst veterans, but because the GOP [was] miffed the bill [contained] billions to increase the lending capacity of the International Monetary Fund.

With Republicans opposed or on the fence about the supplemental, the power to defeat the war-funding bill [rested] in the hands of those in the [Democratic Party] Out of Iraq Caucus, led by Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, as well as with congress members who [wanted] to see the torture architects in the Bush administration held accountable for ordering water boarding, stress positions, rape, and more.

Besides setting aside another 97-billion for war and occupation, the 2009 supplemental also [included] the Graham-Lieberman Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009, which [allowed] the [Obama] administration to block the release of detainee photos. The senate voted to include this provision in the supplemental, which [meant] President Obama and the Pentagon can suppress any “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

In other words, a vote for this bill, with its Graham-Lieberman provision, [was] a vote for protecting those who were involved in the torture regime under the Bush administration.”

Why the Democratic Party is losing its base

(VT. Editors Note: Below is what we will not listen to, hear, read, or see in mainstream media or PBS.)

“If some of those same torturers are still in government today, [military officers] commanding a battalion or something greater, then the anti-war Democrats who, from the start, voted against the US invasion of Iraq may find themselves in a political stress position – with one arm tied to their anti-war base and the other to the Democratic leadership who opposes prosecution and wants to keep the Pandora’s box of war sins closed forever.”

Who was, or is, the Democratic Party Out of Iraq Caucus

“There are 73 members of the Out of Iraq Caucus; only 39 Democrats need to join the Republicans and effectively block the supplemental war spending bill. If there were ever a time for determined leadership, it is now — and the anti-war leader in the House [was] Waters.

The military says it needs the next batch of billions by July; otherwise other budget accounts will have to be raided to pay for the wars that never end.”

Who are not Out of Iraq Democrats? Who are pro-War Democrats?

Marcy Winograd who is an out of the mainstream-independent minded Democrat noted back in 2009 that, “If I were in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t bet odds on my 2010 congressional opponent Jane Harman voting to block the [Wars] supplemental. Other California Democrats she pointed out who were Pro-War as their Republican counterparts, and most likely to cave into defense and oil industry pressure to continue the wars are:

Congressman Howard L. Berman of California’s 28th District

Congressman Henry A. Waxman of California’s 30th District

Congressman Brad Sherman of California’s 27th District

Congressman Adam Schiff of California’s of California’s 29th District

An example of just how far Democrats will go the distance to not talk about Iraq or Afghanistan but will talk about the Israeli-Palestinian situation is this town hall meeting poll taken by Congressman Brad Sherman from  his constituents in California’s 27th District.

The only foreign policy questions asked were in reference to:

1. Chinese foreign trade: In regard to foreign trade, I have been drafting legislation to revoke China’s Most Favored Nation status. When I discussed this legislation with President Obama, he said that he thought it would be too disruptive. What do you believe? Despite what the poll says, we are in debt up to our eyeballs to China, we revoke China’s Most Favored Nation status then what do we do when China asks for payment on our loans for Iraq and Afghanistan – invade and occupy China? DAH!

2. The Middle East Conflict where Democrat Sherman evidently needs to learn Geography for he totally leaves the occupation of Iraq out of the equation – like Iraq is not part of the Middle East – say what?

VT. Editorial comment: Simply put his poll is about as rigged and controlled to weed out questions about Iraq and Afghanistan as most polls asked by mainstream media today.If Congressman Sherman were running for a California city, county, or state level political office, one could understand his ignorance on Middle East foreign policy but My God Man you are in the U.S. Congress???????????????????????????????????

It asks thus,

Which statement best fits your views on the Middle East conflict?

a. We should strongly support Israel. [that one explains why there is no mention of the occupation of Iraq, potential conflict with Iran, what role Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and so on will play as we strongly support Israel. It is a loaded question.]

b. We should support Palestinians at least as much as we support Israel. [Again the focus is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Israeli occupation of Palestine, but folks U.S. tax payers are only wasting a small portion  of WAR DEBT to CHINA on this situation most in favor of Israel, U.S. troops do not occupy Palistine (YET), Iran, Syria, Jordan, Yemen or so on OUR U.S. Economy is wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of these Democrat mentioned here want to talk about that.]

c. We should just stay out of the conflict between Israel and Palestine all together [assuming that means to fiscal aid to either party, now that would almost be a cost savings to bring down our national debt. Of note, despite the lack of attention intentionally paid to Iraq and Afghanistan, more respondents either wanted to the U.S. to treat the Palestinians as fairly as the Israelis or not get involved period 53% versus only 47% who strongly supported Israel.]

Why this focus on Israel and Palestine totally ignoring Iraq and Afghanistan, potential threat of Iran, and further destablization of the entire Middle East-a destabilization BTW that Israel cannot take on alone.

How any candidate for national office let alone an incumbent could ignore our real foreign policy hot spots Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan is beyond the comprehension of Veterans Today???

Are politicians from both parties as naive or ignorant as mainstream media? Well they sure as heck THINK we are!

Which California Democrats lean toward Peace vs Offense Budgets?

Marcy Winograd notes that those Democrats most likely to challenged continued blank checks for the Pentagon would be of course Congresswomen Maxine Waters one of the original 132 House members who voted against the invasion of Iraq.

The other Democratic members of  Congress from California she mentions as Pro-Peace members of the Out of Iraq Caucus are:

Congresswoman Diane Watson of California’s 33rd District

Congressman Bob Filner of California’s 51st District, who also chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of California’s 6th District

Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California’s 9th District

These would be the courageous politicians 2010 Candidate Winograd believed would just say nay, not another dime for these war crimes.

What role must the Pro-Peace/Anti-War movement play?

Candidate Winograd, herself a leader and activists in the Pro-Peace movement noted that the only way to stop the funding of war crimes and occupations is for the anti-war base that elected Obama speaks up at critical [moments].

The Enemy of PEACE is not only the Repubicans but the House Democratic Leadership – in a House and Party Divided

According to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, the House Democratic leadership was hoping back in 2009  to change the hearts and minds of key[Peace] Democrats listed– above.

On the Pro-War Democratic Leadership’s hit list were Waters, Watson, and Woolsey [in California], in addition to Congressman Dennis Kucinch of Ohio, and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and on the Congressional Black Caucus who should not have had to swallow such a bitter and bloody pill to stay in good favor with those in the [Democratic leadership] who control the committee chairs.

With army commander [General George] Casey suggesting we need to occupy Iraq for another ten years and the Pentagon sending another 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, Candidate Winograd noted that speaking up will require high-decibel action.

With the upcoming Pro-Peace deomonstrations in Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA is is NOW time to take that decibel a couple of notes higher than way back in June 2009, because the Democratic leadership as expemplified by what happened in California back in 2009, the Democratic leadership nor President Obama has YET TO HEAR US!!!

Marcy Winograd is running for Congress in 2010, challenging Pro-War Democrat Jane Harman in southern California’s 36th district. For more on the race, visit Winograd4Congress.com and become a fan on Facebook at Marcy Winograd for Congress.

This story originally written by Marcy Winograd back in June 2009 with a focus on that time frame has been updated with emphasis added by Major Bobby Hanafin, Veterans Today News.

LINK TO ORIGINAL STORY – CLICK HERE

That emphasis for the Peace movement remains the SAME!!!

WASHINGTON — Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, kept a remote U.S. base in the country manned last year at the local governor’s request despite warnings from his field commanders that it should be closed because it was vulnerable and had no tactical or strategic value.

McChrystal’s decision to maintain the outpost at Barg-e Matal prompted the top American commanders in eastern Afghanistan to delay plans to close a second remote U.S. outpost, Combat Outpost Keating, where insurgents killed eight U.S. troops in an assault Oct. 3, a McClatchy investigation has found.

Keeping Barg-e-Matal open also deprived a third isolated base of the officer who would have been its acting commander and left its command to lower-ranking officers whose “ineffective actions” led “directly” to the deaths of five American and eight Afghan soldiers in an ambush Sept. 8, according to a high-level military investigation.

In addition, an unidentified witness told the military investigators that the operations center that failed to provide effective artillery and air cover to the U.S. and Afghan force that was ambushed in the Ganjgal Valley was focused instead on Barg-e Matal.

However, the ambush inquiry and a similar high-level Army probe into the Oct. 3 deaths at COP Keating, the worst single American combat loss in 2009, don’t mention that McChrystal’s decision to keep Barg-e Matal open made the combat outpost and the Ganjgal operation more vulnerable.

Instead, the inquiries hit lower-ranking officers — including two field commanders who’d urged McChrystal for months to close Keating and Barg-e Matal — with administrative penalties.

The two officers, Col. Randy George and Lt. Col. Robert B. Brown, and other U.S. officials had warned repeatedly that the two outposts were worthless and too costly to defend, two American defense officials and a former NATO official told McClatchy.

Neither George nor Brown could be reached for comment.

A spokesman for McChrystal said the U.S. commander had ordered American troops to remain in Barg-e Matal to prevent it from falling to insurgents while a local militia was being trained there.

“The threat at that time was both significant and real,” Rear Adm. Gregory Smith wrote in an e-mail.

Nuristan Gov. Jamalluddin Badr pressured the United States publicly and privately to keep troops in Barg-e Matal to prevent the village from falling to the Taliban before Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential election. The two U.S. defense officials said McChrystal’s decision to keep the outpost there open until the local militia was trained was intended to help Badr survive the political fallout had insurgents captured the village after an American withdrawal.

“Everyone knew why we were in Barg-e Matal,” one U.S. defense official said. “McChrystal . . . was not in favor of pulling out because of the political ramifications.”

The two American defense officials and the former NATO official said they wanted to discuss the matter because of what they considered flawed investigations that penalized the two field commanders but failed to hold McChrystal and other superior officers accountable. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

They said that George, of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Carson, Colo., had begun making plans to close Keating in January 2009, six months before his 4th Brigade Combat Team deployed to Afghanistan last June.

He briefed plans to close Keating and Barg-e Matal to McChrystal, other senior commanders and top Afghan officials at a July 17 meeting in Kabul, they said, and he and Brown briefed McChrystal again in early August at Brown’s headquarters at Forward Operating Base Bostick in Kunar province, they said.

“The Barg-e Matal operation made it impossible to close Keating,” the former NATO official said. George “had a whole schedule for coming down out of those COPs accordion-style.”

George, the American commander in four Afghan provinces that border Pakistan, has received a letter of admonishment; Brown, whose operational area included Keating and Barg-e Matal, has received an official reprimand.

The admonishment, which is a minor penalty, is unlikely to affect George’s career, but the official reprimand could end Brown’s career.

“They are screwing these two guys,” the first U.S. defense official said of the field commanders.

“They were looking for heads,” the second American defense official said. “It’s a travesty.”

Penalizing the pair is even more egregious, the U.S. defense officials and the former NATO official said, because their plans to close the outposts were consistent with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy of moving American troops from remote areas to economically important population centers.

The fact that officers in the field are being punished while no mention has been made of the role that their superiors played signals that those on the front lines always will take the blame when things go wrong, the first U.S. defense official said.

“This will make the Army even more casualty-averse,” he said. “This is the worst message at the worst time for McChrystal to send.”

Army Lt. Gen. Guy Swan, who conducted the Keating investigation, didn’t return calls seeking comment on why his report, which found that manning Barg-e Matal delayed Keating’s closure for several months, didn’t hold McChrystal or any other general officer responsible for that decision.

Fewer than 70 American soldiers were deployed at Keating, which was in a deep valley and under frequent attack. It was closed after the Oct. 3 assault by an estimated 300 insurgents, some 150 of whom are thought to have been killed after U.S. airpower finally arrived.

“By mid-2009, there was no tactical or strategic value to holding the ground” and “the chain of command” decided to close Keating in “July-August 2009,” the report says. The withdrawal was “delayed when the assets required to backhaul base supplies were diverted to support intense brigade-level operations in Barg-e Matal.”

In addition, it says, drone aircraft and other intelligence-gathering “assets that could have given the soldiers at COP Keating better situational awareness for their operational environment were reprioritized to support Barg-e Matal as well as the search for a missing U.S. soldier in the south.”

“The delayed closing of COP Keating is important as it contributed to a mindset of imminent closure that served to impede improvements in force protection on the COP,” the report continues. “There were inadequate measures taken by the chain of command, resulting in an attractive target for enemy fighters.”

A U.S. Army spokesman in Afghanistan said he couldn’t discuss why Barg-e Matal’s impact on the ambush in Ganjgal wasn’t included in that investigation.

The report found that the commander of Forward Operating Base Joyce, which had operational control of the ambushed force of Afghan troops and border police and their American Marine and Army trainers, was away on leave, and his deputy was assigned to Barg-e Matal.

“The absence of senior leaders in the operations center with troops in contact . . . and their consequent lack of situational awareness and decisive action was a key failure,” the report says.

An unidentified officer said in a sworn statement on the incident that “during this same period, we were managing leave, and providing battalion command and control to the fight in Barg-e Matal. The fight in Barg-e Matal had an even greater need for a competent battle captain because they were constantly in contact (with the enemy), and the (sic) lethal fight far more complex at that time than anywhere else in our battlespace.”

The roughly 200 10th Mountain Division troops in Barg-e Matal were nearly a third of FOB Joyce’s combat power, creating a major strain on the contingent, which was spread across parts of Kunar and Nuristan provinces.

The area was so “expansive” that a quick reaction force that would have been dispatched to relieve the ambushed force in the Ganjgal Valley had been disbanded, the unidentified officer said in his sworn statement.

Smith, McChrystal’s spokesman, acknowledged that the top U.S. commander had ordered the makeshift base in Barg-e Matal held from July until mid-September to prevent insurgents from seizing the area while a local militia was being recruited and trained. Four American soldiers died during that operation.

“We responded to a request by the government of Afghanistan to support nascent security forces that had come under direct and sustained insurgent pressure and were jeopardizing governance and the people in the area,” he said.

The area was a “historical rat line” — or infiltration route — for the Hezb-i-Islami insurgent group and al Qaida, Smith added.

There also was a “political component to the decision,” Smith said, indicating that in one pillar of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, McChrystal wanted to extend Afghan government authority to the district.

“The decision on the scale and tempo of support to Barg-e Matal was balanced against other competing operations,” said Smith, who added that the local militia in Barg-e Matal is “doing a pretty effective job, so the investment has paid dividends.”

Knowledgeable American officers and officials countered that the impoverished mountain backwater of 2,500 in Nuristan province has no strategic value, lacks any roads, is far from key population centers, traditionally has disdained the authority of the central government in Kabul and is historically hostile to outsiders, including other Afghans.

“It’s lunacy to deploy forces to a location simply because the unseasoned, politically driven host government so requests,” said a U.S. diplomat who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “Bear in mind that this operation in what is undoubtedly one of the most remote and difficult locations in all of Afghanistan occurred at the time of discussion about revising our strategy to concentrate our forces in areas of dense population and strategic importance.”

Barg-e Matal is deep in rugged mountains where insurgent snipers were so well dug in that American troops resorted to calling in jet fighters and attack helicopters to silence them, U.S. soldiers based there told a McClatchy reporter in September after he was denied permission to visit Barg-e Matal.

The troops, who originally were told that they’d be in Barg-e Matal for four days, said they were under constant attack.

The outpost of sandbags and concertina wire consisted of a girl’s school and wooden homes on one side of a river that bisects the village, and the local administration compound where Afghan troops and Latvian trainers were based on the other.

It could be supplied only by dangerous nighttime helicopter missions, and the nearly constant fire made the reconstruction projects on which American counterinsurgency strategy hinges all but impossible. Local officials distributed some U.S. aid to the few locals who remained there, but they hoarded most of it, the American troops said.

Two Afghan soldiers shot and wounded themselves in September so they could be evacuated, U.S. troops said.

BY KHALIL NOURI
STAFF WRITER FOR VETERANS TODAY

“We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.” said triumphantly General Stanley McChrystal as the NATO operation spearheaded by British troops towards Marjah and Nad-Ali districts in Helmand Province last weekend.

It is measured to be the mother of all the tests, using millions of aid dollars to roll out a ready-made administration that intended to allow the Afghan government to quickly reassert its authority in an area where its representatives didn’t dare set foot earlier in the week. But unfortunately a “Pandora’s box” has just been opened with 12 civilian deaths and more foreseen due to Taliban using civilians as human shields.

This dangerous plan intentionally sacrifices strategic and operational surprise, and does so with good reason.  McChrystal seeks a “combination victory” in Helmand province, a victory where military success on the battlefield translates into a political and information warfare coup that will ultimately resonate throughout Afghanistan and into Pakistan’s rebellious tribal regions.

With 40 million inhabitants in the Pashtun belt and per UN estimate 4.5 million unemployed men between ages of 18 to 23 are only in Afghanistan, and one percent of that number can exceed four times the current number of NATO and Afghan troops combined and vulnerable for recruitment into insurgency. Hence, we are back to square one for another troop surge.    

Per BBC report, public in Afghanistan is widely confused because they see a recent London gathering in the name of peace and reconciliation, and then a quick military operation in Southern Afghanistan.

Next year U.S. and its allies have been in Afghanistan for a decade. There hasn’t been much progress other than installing a government led by Hamed Karzai, who is accused of being corrupt.   

No one put the warning to Mr. Obama more baldly than Karl W. Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan. Who first raised the alarm during Bush years that the American approach in Afghanistan was failing. Recently he warned Mr. Obama against putting the success of American strategy in Mr. Karzai’s less-than-reliable hands.  He wrote in a leaked cable to the State Department “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner.”  He also added; “The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibility and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal.” Moreover, “Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further.”  

Mr. Eikenberry told Congress in December that his worries have since been largely allayed, and he is now perfectly satisfied with President Obama’s strategy. But he seemed to be speaking for a wing of the Obama administration that fears the Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy could crumble in Mr. Karzai’s hands. Hence, this is an additional square one.  

The weekend NATO and Afghan troop advancement is not about the battle, it’s about the postlude, or what happens afterwards. Moreover, It will be remain to be seen if the governance effort – the first of its kind in Helmand –  expected to begin within days is going to bear fruit or not.  

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan are an audience. The essential message is brilliantly plain. They are attracted to martyrdom, and will definitely make the call that “Jihad is the way; sharia is the goal.” 

The intention is to defeat the Taliban but also embarrass them by exposing their limitations and portraying these limitations as a weakness. That leads to another local audience: Afghan civilians in the battle area.

Bearing fruit is all about winning hearts and minds, but there is the other side of the Afghan war that in many occasions the U.S. claimed to have killed Taliban, later the local governors and the United Nations have confirmed civilian deaths – including women and children.  

The Taliban typically use “human shields” as a cruel defensive measure – which means they take the populace hostage and invite attack. NATO’s insistent warnings anticipate this heinous tactic and serve as a “pre-emptive political counter” (locally, regionally and internationally) to accusations by Taliban propagandists that the U.S. intentionally killed Afghan civilians that engages into a deep cultural and psychological dimension.

So far we have already seen the opposite which Gen. Petraeus said by testifying before the U.S. Congress: “We cannot kill our way to victory in Afghanistan.”

Hence, intentional or unintentional killing is undefined to average Afghans.

Khalil Nouri is the cofounder of New World Strategies Coalition Inc., a native think tank for nonmilitary solution studies for Afghanistan.  www.nwscinc.org

IS THIS A HOSPITAL OR POWER PLANT? CAN YOU TELL?

FROM THE PHONY “SURGE” IN IRAQ TO NON-EXISTENT PROJECTS

 

KILLING AROUND THE WORLD FOR FUN AND PROFIT

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

How do we tell what is real?  Today we have a “surge” going on in Afghanistan against the Taliban.  What is real?  Some of the Taliban are “Taliban,” but most are not.  Do we know the difference?  Of course not, as usual, we will “kill them all and let god sort em’ out.”  Will we be successful?  Of course we will, we always report that we are successful and if we screw up totally, we make a movie about it later.  You can always win a war in a movie.  Who is going to make the movie about the failed “surge” in Iraq, the one where General Petraeus was supposed to play General MacArthur and ended up more like Al Capone.

You didn’t know that we promised to keep our troops “out of the way” and pay the “bad guys” millions of dollars and cut them in on crooked oil and defense contracts?  President Bush didn’t tell you that?  The man who sent 5000 American troops to their deaths looking for lies, WMDs, non-existent terrorists would try to worm his way out of a war by bribing the enemy and letting the country fall into ruin later?  Didn’t you know there was an election coming up?  You say you still believe his cover story on 9/11?

You should drive around Iraq and look at what our billions of dollars have bought.  I have.  Ever wonder why all the sewer systems, power stations, hospitals and housing projects we spent hundreds of billions on have never been photographed?  Simple.  We never built them.  Some of the same companies that sold bacteria infested river water for our troops to drink were just as good at selling invisible buildings.

According the the Department of Defense, $295 billion in weapons purchased for the war in Iraq never existed, paid for but invisible also.

We did the same thing in Afghanistan.  I was talking to one of  the senior tribal leaders yesterday.  He was describing projects built by USAID, part of the State Department that also launders “black-op” money for unapproved CIA projects.  He was telling me about a dairy built in the north for $5m.  There are no cows there, Afghanistan has plenty of cows, but none anywhere near the dairy.  It lies abandoned.

Then we offered them milk.  They have milk but we needed to send them milk from Poland.  Poland sent us troops when nobody else would, so Afghanistan is supposed to get powdered milk from them and farmers in Afghanistan can always just join the Taliban, thanks to USAID.  There wasn’t just one project like this, there were dozens, all the same, just like we do back home.  We call it “pork.”

What Afghanistan does need is cold storage facilities for potatoes and onions, things they ship to Pakistan after harvest and buy back  at 7 times the price later on.  Afghanistan needs lots of little, simple things, things that would reestablish their agricultural economy and stabilize the nation.  Those things would stop the war, end the profitable opium trade and cut profits for the American, sorry, ”offshore” companies we hire to build the broken, misplaced, invisible or useless projects we have come to call “nation building.”

All of the American contractors, especially the top 15 that sell weapons to the Department of Defense have set up “offshore” companies.  Seems that laws involving bribery, money laundering and taxes were an inconvenience.

I keep coming back to Iraq and the surge.  How do we put a “spin” on paying off our enemies, plain old bribes, so we can pretend to have a big win on election day?  We were hoping that McCain, with the help of Fox News and their corporate/defense owned media friends could lie their way out of things falling apart afterwards?  Is paying off terrorists legal?  If General Petraeus paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to people who are now killing thousands in Iraq, which is exactly what he did, isn’t he guilty of being in “material support of terrorism?”

The money bought weapons, paid the salaries of terrorists, bought equipment for making IEDs and financed organizing terrorist organizations, groups under the protection our military, groups that had killed thousands of Americans.  How many of the people who planned this are involved in planning operations in Afghanistan?  How do we balance supporting a useless and unpopular national leader who stole an election, not Bush, I mean Karzai, keeping the worlds largest narcotics operation alive and financially healthy and finishing our mission, all at the same time?

Mission.

What expactly was that mission?  In Afghanistan, it was to find the terrorists that were responsible for 9/11.  However, there has never been any proof that terrorists from Afghanistan were involved.  Our first job was to remove the Taliban and replace it with a democratic government with free elections.  9 years later, we are in a pitched battle with the Taliban who control the entire country and our “democratic government” is one of the most universally hated insitutions on earth.

Our new mission.

We are planning on killing so many people we can get out of Afghanistan before a million new Taliban fighters can be armed and trained making everything we have done useless and idiotic.   The choice we didn’t make, building a nation WITH the people, rather than playing one side against the other and soaking the US taxpayer for phony “boondoggle” dairies or “executive” housing projects for our hated friends will eventually have to be made or a generation of Americans will have to “surge” in Afghanistan every year.  Ask the Russians and British.

Our options?

We could take a moment or two, firing our military leaders, Petraeus, McChrystal and all our other experts on terrorism, nation building, international banking and those things we seem to know so much about and stop.

We could ask ourselves some hard questions.  Why the hell are we there?  We don’t even know who the Taliban are.  We are told there are 3 different Taliban groups in Afghanistan, two of which are potential allies.  We, however, are fighting them too.  We have experts who tell us to do such things.  We pay them millions each year for this kind of help.

Afghanistan.

This is a country where people belong to tribes, prettymuch, as it is described to me, as the Scots.  They are really Clans.  Their leaders are honest, generous and strong or they aren’t leaders at all. 

None of them would last a minute in Washington.  I can see why we want to get rid of them.

Afghanistan needs simple things, simple, inexpensive and not hugely profitable, like killing people with rockets.  We could help them if they asked us to.  We do know a few things.  Nobody from Afghanistan is planning terrorist acts inside the US, nobody is planning this, nobody has ever planned it.  Bush made it all up like he did everything else while he was president.  He is a weakling and pathological liar surrounded by much of the same, dishonest, greedy and not too bright.

What can you build off the works of such people?

A minor aside:

Whenever our military goes anywhere, there seems to be a pressing need to build orphanages and hospitals.  Do I need to explain why?

AFGHANISTAN:  The Flawed Operation “Mushtarak”

BY KHALIL NOURI STAFF WRITER FOR VETERANS TODAY

“If “Success” is the word labeled for Operation “Mushtarak” when that outcome means agony, death, disfigurement and disablement for life for mostly young men, who were children just a few short years ago, then how can the definition of winning hearts and minds  be such heinous atrocities, atrocities tied to Karzai, tied to America and her allies, tied to them and remembered for generations. Any disillusioned Afghan will profoundly consider recruitment into insurgency when a foreign invading army, with much better equipment and weaponry, is slaughtering the poorly equipped local tribesmen and their innocent families.”

On February 12th Operation “Mushtarak” meaning “together” in Farsi and Pashtu languages was launched jointly with both NATO and Afghan forces intended “to boost counterinsurgency and eliminate the Taliban embedded with the 80 thousand plus Pashtun inhabitants in Marjah and Nad-Ali districts of Helmand province.”   What were they thinking?

As reported, the green light was approved by the unpopular and vote rigged Afghan President Hamed Karzai who has been telling us for years he is determined to purge corruption and presumably bringing peace and prosperity in Afghanistan.  However, using the word “Mushtarak”, was it because the U.S. and its allies did not use a local Afghan name for their operations in the past nine years that failed miserably? The fact remains, any local or nonlocal naming conventions will not bear fruit when Afghans in their own homeland are treated as second class citizens.

Will a new name change things when the ideas behind it are old ones, ones that have, not only failed in their efforts, but have always made things worse, much worse.

REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS, THE PLAIN TRUTH 

Moreover, the main question remains; will the operation make a difference? Yes it will. It will harden the resolve of the Taliban and their sympathizers who will now become even more doggedly determined to rid the country of foreign forces no matter how long it takes. This is an unwinnable situation and no matter which US General is in charge.  

The entire concept behind this operation is not “reality based.”  This is theatre, and nothing more, but many of the players and much of the audience will suffer from this ill-fated production.  I suspect they knew they were writing a tragedy from the beginning.  None of us were fooled.

Practically thinking, engineering such flawed operation akin to what the Russians and British convened during their occupations of Afghanistan which resulted in failures of epochal proportions such that they are a stain on history itself must have escaped the attention of the US planners.

ARE WE REALLY FIGHTING THE TALIBAN?

The people of Afghanistan resist foreign invasions, even if the “foreigner” is from a tribe 20 miles away.  Everyone knows this.  Calling people who fight back “taliban” so that the most powerful nation on earth can use weapons of mass destruction against them is a war crime. 

If you break into someone’s home and they are armed, they will shoot you.  The National Rifle Association says this is a basic American right.  Welcome to Afghanistan, we invented this right!

Diverting an operational strategy from a safe and sound strategic path in an effort to reconcile with the militants in this manner is senseless.   This is a futile effort by the U.S., and soon to be proven as an absolutely dysfunctional military approach which will bring about a far deadlier spring time militancy ramification.   

Hundreds of Taliban fighters may be killed but in terms of neocolonialist occupation as perceived by the disenchanted Afghans, will only motivate hundreds more to join the cause.  For every Taliban killed, 5 more will show up in weeks, maybe months.  In years you will see 50 more.

WHEN IS WINNING ACTUALLY LOSING?

If “Success” is the word labeled for Operation “Mushtarak” when that outcome means agony, death, disfigurement and disablement for life for mostly young men, who were children just a few short years ago, then how can the definition of winning hearts and minds be such heinous atrocities, atrocities tied to Karzai, tied to America and her allies, tied to them and remembered for generations.

Any disillusioned Afghan will profoundly consider recruitment into insurgency when a foreign invading army, with much better equipment and weaponry, is slaughtering the poorly equipped local tribesmen and their innocent families. This is only to save face in the name of the policy makers who don’t have the stomach to admit this pointless war is without any justification, and they cannot admit mistakes for fact that they will look bad, and therefore it is okay to resume killing.

In hindsight, Operation “Mushtarak” may be successful as a public relations exercise if reports of US-led forces’ casualties are kept to a minimum, but it will not be a long-term military success where the Taliban are too well adapted to the terrain with their guerilla tactics. 

Similarly, it will be an outstanding success just as the same types of operations in Vietnam where huge “search and destroy” operations, with high altitude aerial bombings, infantry units transported by helicopters, as well as ground advances. Subsequently it was claimed the foe was driven away, but only to return later and continue their insurgency with much intense sophistication.  

Furthermore, this appears to be another illusory “breakthrough” offensive to the similar failed said offensives of Vietnam War; NATO forces are dropping bombs and peanut butter, with the message, “resistance is futile,” a nation-building strategy with no historical precedent of success. The uncritical Western “hard news” needs to stop questioning merely tactics, and stop disseminating sanitized images. NATO nations need to start questioning whether this entire action is ethically and legally justified.   

However, this notion proves that killing men is not going to kill an idea — whether it is good or bad — and the very act of war inspires those ideas that the West is trying to exonerate the world of. However, one can assert that there are alternatives to war.  But it is a political stunt. There are upcoming U.S. senate elections this year, and there is general election in the UK. Of course, Obama and Brown desires are to look like war heroes.

As an Afghan born, I believe, even if the whole world is willing to sustain bankruptcy to transform Afghanistan into a capitalist or communist state, for that matter, it will fail miserably.  With centuries old week central government, tribal imbalance and feud throughout the entire country, and the deep intertwined centuries old complexity, no outsider has yet understood this notion of Afghan tenacity.

Moreover, no amount of weapons and increasing number of troops are going to bring any success. As long as a single foreign soldier remains in Afghanistan there will be no peace or “success.”  Evidently, in this long term NATO war, if peace was not achievable. Then one must refer to history and be cognoscente of the fact that a non-Muslin army in an Islamic country will never win “hearts and minds” and will always be seen as the aggressive occupier. 

The only Afghan operation should be contemplated  is to withdraw all foreign troops immediately, and refer back to the 1830’s second Afghan-Anglo war to define a similar exit strategy, which worked for another 100 plus years until Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979.

 Khalil Nouri is the cofounder of New World Strategies Coalition Inc., a native think tank for nonmilitary solution studies for Afghanistan.  www.nwscinc.org