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Book Review: Empire’s Ally: The U.S. and Canada February 3, 2014

Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Foreign Policy, Imperialism, Iraq and Afghanistan, War.
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Roger’s note: to some degree Canada has always been a subservient servant to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests.  But when I arrived here in 1968 as a Vietnam war resister, it was a different country politically than it is today.  Of course, for that matter, so is the United States.  I never romanticized Canada as the perfect peace loving nation.  Few do any more.  But there was a time when the Canadian government at least did not “go along” with American imperial adventures.  Stephen Harper and what my friend Charlie calls the suposi-TORIES have changed all that.  Today, more than ever Canada is the 51st state, politically, economically, culturally, and with respect to Orwellian surveillance.  Nothing less than a tragedy for peace an justice loving Canadians.

 

By  (about the author), OpEdNews Op Eds 1/31/2014 at 17:44:38

Source: Dispatches From The Edge


(image by Amazon)

Book Review
Empire’s Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan
Edited by Jerome Klassen and Greg Albo
University of Toronto Press
Toronto Buffalo London 2013

Americans tend to think of Canadians as politer and more sensible than their southern neighbors, thus the joke: “Why does the Canadian chicken cross the road? To get to the middle.” Oh, yes, bit of a “muddle” there in Afghanistan, but like Dudley Do Right, the Canadians were only trying to develop and tidy up the place.

Not in the opinion of Jerome Klassen and a formidable stable of academics, researchers, journalists, and peace activists who see Canada’s role in Central Asia less as a series of policy blunders than a coldly calculated strategy of international capital. “Simply put,” writes Klassen, “the war in Afghanistan was always linked to the aspirations of empire on a much broader scale.”

“Empire’s Ally” asks the question, “Why did the Canadian government go to war in Afghanistan in 2001?” and then carefully dissects the popular rationales: fighting terrorism; coming to the aid of the United States; helping the Afghans to develop their country. Oh, and to free women. What the book’s autopsy of those arguments reveals is disturbing.

Calling Canada’s Afghan adventure a “revolution,” Klassen argues, “the new direction of Canadian foreign policy cannot be explained simply by policy mistakes, U.S. demands, military adventurism, security threats, or abstract notions of liberal idealism. More accurately, it is best explained by structural tendencies in the Canadian political economy — in particular, by the internationalization of Canadian capital and the realignment of the state as a secondary power in the U.S.-led system of empire.”

In short, the war in Afghanistan is not about people failing to read Kipling, but is rather part of a worldwide economic and political offensive by the U.S. and its allies to dominate sources of energy and weaken any upstart competitors like China, and India. Nor is that “broader scale” limited to any particular region.

Indeed, the U.S. and its allies have transformed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from a European alliance to contain the Soviet Union, to an international military force with a global agenda. Afghanistan was the alliance’s coming-out party, its first deployment outside of Europe. The new “goals” are, as one planner put it, to try to “re-establish the West at the centre of global security,” to guarantee access to cheap energy, to police the world’s sea lanes, to “project stability beyond its borders,” and even concern itself with “Chinese military modernization.”

If this all sounds very 19th century — as if someone should strike up a chorus of “Britannia Rules the Waves” — the authors would agree, but point out that global capital is far more powerful and all embracing than the likes of Charles “Chinese” Gordon and Lord Herbert Kitchener ever envisioned. One of the book’s strong points is its updating of capitalism, so to speak, and its careful analysis of what has changed since the end of the Cold War.

Klassen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, and Greg Albo is an associate professor of political science at York University in Toronto. The two authors gather together 13 other academics, journalists, researchers and peace activists to produce a detailed analysis of Canada’s role in the Afghan war.

The book is divided into four major parts dealing with the history of the involvement, its political and economic underpinnings, and the actual Canadian experiences in Afghanistan, which had more to with condoning war crimes like torture than digging wells, educating people, and improving their health. Indeed, Canada’s Senate Standing Committee on National Security concluded that, in Ottawa’s major area of concentration in Afghanistan, Kandahar, “Life is clearly more perilous because we are there.”

After almost $1 trillion dollars poured into Afghanistan — Canada’s contribution runs to about $18 billion — some 70 percent of the Afghan population lives in poverty, and malnutrition has recently increased. Over 30,000 Afghan children die each year from hunger and disease. And as for liberating women, according to a study by TrustLaw Women, the “conflict, NATO airstrikes and cultural practices combined” make Afghanistan the “most dangerous country for women” in the world.

The last section of the book deals with Canada’s anti-war movement.

While the focus of “Empire’s Ally” is Canada, the book is really a sort of historical materialist blueprint for analyzing how and why capitalist countries involve themselves in foreign wars. Readers will certainly learn a lot about Canada, but they will also discover how political economics works and what the goals of the new imperialism are for Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin.

Klassen argues that Canadians have not only paid in blood and gold for their Afghanistan adventure, they have created a multi-headed monster, a “network of corporate, state, military, intellectual, and civil social actors who profit from or direct Canada’s new international policies.”

This meticulously researched book should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the how’s and why’s of western foreign policy. “Empire’s Ally” is a model of how to do an in-depth analysis of 21st century international capital and a handy guide on how to cut through the various narratives about “democracy,” “freedom,” and “security” to see the naked violence and greed that lays at the heart of the Afghan War.

The authors do more than reveal, however; they propose a roadmap for peace in Afghanistan. It is the kind of thinking that could easily be applied to other “hot spots” on the globe.

For this book is a warning about the future, when the battlegrounds may shift from the Hindu Kush to the East China Sea, Central Africa, or Kashmir, where, under the guise of fighting “terrorism,” establishing “stability,” or “showing resolve,” the U.S. and its allies will unleash their armies of the night.

When Canada made Afghanistan worse October 14, 2013

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Roger’s note:  I cannot agree with one of the author’s statements, to wit, that the West, including Canadians, “unintentionally” made things worse.  I don’t believe that “the West, including Canadians” (meaning governments, not necessarily citizens) gives a damn about the welfare of the Afghan people; the sole intention for the illegal invasion, occupation and destruction of the country has to do entirely with the geopolitical (oil, military, industrial, arms sales, etc.) objectives of the United States and its lackeys.  Nor do I agree with the conclusion that NATO involvement should continue, which in essence contradicts the rest of the article.

Jeffrey Simpson

The Globe and Mail

Published Saturday, Oct. 12 2013, 6:00 AM EDT

Last updated Sunday, Oct. 13 2013, 1:04 AM EDT

In those early, hopelessly naive years, when Canadian soldiers and their energetic general encamped in Kandahar to kill “scumbags” and set Afghanistan on the road to democracy, the accompanying media fell into line – in love with the general, the soldiers and their mission.

The early coverage was largely ahistorical, gung-ho, a big group hug for the Canadians – a travesty of journalism, really. What Canadians needed then was a clear-eyed analysis of the country and its history, an understanding of its regional antagonisms, an appreciation of the daunting, even impossible task Canada and its government – to say nothing of the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization – had signed up for in that forbidding, post-medieval place.

Many years later, as the Americans prepare to withdraw their forces and the last Canadians (trainers for the Afghan army) can see the end of their time in Afghanistan, Westerners will have left behind graveyards of their fallen and a country still corrupt, tribally divided and closer to civil strife than civil peace.

After that first full flush of nonsense reporting that, in fairness, played well at home and was supplemented by the country’s biggest windbag on Hockey Night in Canada, along came another group of correspondents, sympathetic to the troops and their travails, of course, but willing to question the party line and explore beyond the perimeters of the Canadian base in Kandahar.

There were some very good journalists in this group, brave men and women in a place growing more violent every day. One lost her life. Another was held hostage. Another was seriously wounded.

The Globe and Mail’s Graeme Smith (now with the International Crisis Group in Kabul) was among them. He stayed longer than most, took extraordinary risks around Kandahar and in Quetta across the Pakistani border, interviewed the Taliban (despite criticism for giving a microphone to the enemy) and, more than anyone else, exposed the story of Afghan prisoner detainees turned over by Canadians and other NATO forces to local authorities, who tortured and abused them.

Canada’s government lied about many aspects of the detainee affair, insisting that Ottawa didn’t know what was happening or that Afghan authorities were examining all allegations of misconduct – despite memos from Canadian officials on the ground saying that wasn’t so.

Mr. Smith explains the detainee affair, from the prison where he visited and interviewed prisoners to the government’s mendacity in the House of Commons, in The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, a memoir of his correspondent days in Kandahar and Kabul. But the detainees represent but one small part of a wise, enthralling, detailed, realistic account of his time in Afghanistan.

Many are the lessons from Mr. Smith’s book, but one emerges above all: that the presence of foreigners did not necessarily turn the tide against the Taliban. Indeed, the foreigners’ military forays and strange (to the Pashtuns) ways may even have allowed the Taliban to survive and, ultimately, to grow.

Mr. Smith doesn’t say so, but he would be honest to admit that his portrait is of only one part of a sprawling, diverse country. There were and are much less violent parts of Afghanistan, where leaders fought against the Taliban before and might do so again after the Americans leave.

His is a picture of Kandahar and its surroundings, where the Pashtun code of tribal identity and revenge has for centuries proved difficult for foreigners to understand. In southern Afghanistan, at any rate, “we are leaving behind an ongoing war; at worst, it’s a looming disaster,” Mr. Smith says.

How the West, including Canadians, unintentionally made things worse is a textbook case of cross-cultural misunderstanding and hubris. The West will tell itself heroic stories, then forget about Afghanistan.

Perhaps unexpectedly, given his depressing account, Mr. Smith concludes that saying goodbye would be a mistake. The Afghan government Westerners leave behind will need support, and lots of it. Without foreign money and help, he argues, the chances of a moderately peaceful Afghanistan seem remote – as remote as that support continuing.

Karazai’s Washington Visit: The War Awaiting Kandahar May 21, 2010

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(Roger’s note: a friend of mine once said about Hillary Clinton, no truthful words have ever passed through her lips.  But sometimes there is truth in irony.  Below she is quoted as follows: “We’re not fighting the Afghan people…We’re fighting a small minority of very dedicated, ruthless extremists who unfortunately are able to enlist young men… for a variety of reasons and send them out onto the battlefield.”  A small minority of dedicated extremists who enlist young men to send out onto the battlefield: dressed in red, white and blue these dedicated extremists who send young men out onto the battlefield call themselves, president, congress, pentagon, Bush, Obama, Clinton, Gates, Rumsfeld, Cheney …)

Published on Friday, May 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.orgby Ramzy Baroud

Clad in his usual attire of a colorful, striped robe, Afghan President Hamid Karazai appeared more like an emperor as he began his fourth day in Washington. Accompanying him on a somber visit to the Arlington National Cemetery were US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and top US (and NATO) commander in Afghanistan Stanley A. McChrystal – the very men responsible for the war and occupation of his own country.

The well-choreographed and clearly-rehearsed visit seemed set on giving the impression that the relationship between Karzai and these men was that of an independent, confident leader seeking the support of a benevolent superpower.

But what were Karazai’s real reasons for visiting Washington?

Typical media analyses have for months misrepresented the apparent chasm between Afghanistan and the US under Obama’s administration. Even if this administration was genuinely discontented with Karazai’s policies, at least until very recently, the resentment had little to do with the reasons offered by media ‘experts’. It was not because Karazai was failing to deliver on governance, end corruption and so on. Let’s face it, the US war in Afghanistan was never morally grounded, and it never could be either. Not unless the militant mindset that governs US foreign policy somehow acquires a complete overhaul.

For now, let’s face up to reality. Bad days are awaiting Afghanistan. True, it is hard to imagine how Afghanistan’s misfortunes could possibly get any worse. But they will, particularly for those living in Kandahar in the south. Seated next to Karazi during his Washington visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised that her country will “not destroy Kandahar in order to save Kandahar.”

The statement may sound assuring, but it is in fact ominous and very troubling. Clinton was referring to the Bush administration’s policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, she candidly admitted this by saying, “This is not Fallujah,” referring to the Iraqi city which was almost completely destroyed in 2004 by a massive US Marine assault intended to ‘save’ the city. “Lessons have been learned since Iraq,” stated Clinton.

But if lessons were truly learned, then why the fictitious language, the silly assertion that the real intention is to in fact ‘save’ Kandahar? And what other strategy does the US have in store for Afghanistan, aside from the irritating debate on whether to use unmanned drones or do the killing face to face?

Was Karazai in Washington to provide a cover for what is yet to come in the Taliban’s southern stronghold? It’s not unlikely. Considering past and repeated claims of a growing divide between Kabul and Washington, a bloody attack on Kandahar could in fact be seen as the US acting unilaterally in Afghanistan. Add to this scenario the constant and continued calls made by Karazai himself to engage Taliban. A US escalation without public consent from Karazai himself couldn’t possibly be seen as a part of a joint strategy.

At a presentation at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Karazi spoke of an extended US commitment to Afghanistan that would last “beyond the military activity right now … into the future, long after we have retired, and perhaps into our grandsons’ and great-grandsons’ — and great-granddaughters’ — generations.”

“This is something the Afghan people have been seeking for a long, long time,” he said.

Clinton too was concerned about the plight of the ‘people’. She promised to “help the people of Kandahar to recover the entire city to be able to put it to the use and the benefit of the people of Kandahar…We’re not fighting the Afghan people…We’re fighting a small minority of very dedicated, ruthless extremists who unfortunately are able to enlist young men… for a variety of reasons and send them out onto the battlefield.”

Although Clinton wanted us to believe that the Bush era is over, with a new dawn in US foreign policy upon us, she used almost the exact same language, phrased in almost the exact same context that the Bush administration used prior to its major military assaults aimed at ‘saving the people’ from some ‘ruthless extremists’, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And a major assault there will be, for the Taliban’s counter-surge is threatening the US’s counterinsurgency operations.

A quick scan of an article by Marie Colvin in Marjah, Afghanistan, where the Taliban is once more making its presence very clear, highlights the challenges facing the US military throughout the country. Entitled ‘Swift and bloody: the Taliban’s revenge,’ the May 9 article starts with the claim that “rebels have returned.” Throughout, the report was dotted with similar assertions. “Marjah was supposed to be safe…All that progress is threatened by the Taliban ‘surge’…There were always fears that they would re-emerge .. The strength of the Taliban’s presence is gradually becoming clearer…The Taliban are growing bolder…”

The term ‘surge’ was once associated with General David Petraeus’s strategy predicated on the deployment of 30,000 new troops in Afghanistan. That it is now being attributed to the Taliban’s own strategy is ironic, to say the least. Once meant to be a ‘success story, now convincing the world that things are working out in Afghanistan might not be so easy after all. “Worries are growing in the Pentagon that if thousands of marines and Afghan security forces cannot entirely defeat the Taliban in Marjah, a town of only 50,000, securing the far larger prize of Kandahar may be an even greater struggle than has been foreseen,” wrote Colvin.

The challenge ahead, although bolstered with all the right (albeit predictable) language is likely to be bloody, just like the rest of this sad Afghanistan episode, which actually began much earlier than 2001.

The US and Karazi (as a supposed representative of the ‘Afghani people’) must come across as united in the face of the extremist minority. Karazi’s visit to the US was the political padding prior to the likely military storm. It was meant to assure the public that the chaos which will follow is in fact part of a counterinsurgency effort; well-planned, calculated, executed and, as always, passionately articulated.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

Afghan Civilian Deaths Are Rising, Government Says May 2, 2010

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(Roger’s note: as Obama’s and McChrystal’s high-tech pawns continue slaughtering Afghani men, women and children, let’s review the question of why the US forces of death are in Afghanistan in the first place.   The rationale was unjustified and a violation of international law, but at least there was a rationale.  It was that The Taliban, in power at the time in Afghanistan, were protecting Osama bin Laden, presumed author of 9/11.  So the US attacked, invaded, defeated the Taliban, put in place a puppet government; and bin Laden and the rest of the al qaeda contingent fled presumably to Pakistan.  End of whatever rationale there was in the first place.  So why is the US military still there, wreaking havoc?  Oh, I forgot, the US is bringing democracy and stability to the country.  Killing innocent civilians is a new and creative strategy designed to achieve this end.  There is no doubt that it will succeed.)

Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by the Associated Pressby Rahim Faiez

KABUL – Civilian casualties are rising in Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO reinforcements stream into the country as part of a military buildup to combat the resurgent Taliban, the Interior Ministry said Sunday.

[Relatives push a hospital bed with an Afghan boy wounded when international troops opened fire on a civilian bus for treatment at a local hospital in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, April 12, 2010. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan) ]
Relatives push a hospital bed with an Afghan boy wounded when international troops opened fire on a civilian bus for treatment at a local hospital in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, April 12, 2010. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

There have been 173 civilian deaths in violence in Afghanistan from March 21 to April 21, marking a 33 percent increase over the same time period last year, the ministry said. A recent quarterly report by the U.S. office overseeing Afghanistan’s rebuilding confirmed an increase in civilian deaths. 

The ministry did not provide a breakdown of who was responsible for the fatalities.

Civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. and other international forces are highly sensitive in Afghanistan, although the U.N. says the Taliban are responsible for most civilian casualties. Still, the backlash could undermine U.S. strategy ahead of a summer military operation in Kandahar, a key southern city that is the spiritual home of the Taliban.

The goal of the U.S.-led operation is to flood in troops, rout the militants and rush in new governance and development projects to win the loyalty of Kandahar’s half-million residents.

Public outrage over civilian deaths prompted the top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal last year to tighten the rules on the use of airstrikes and other weaponry if civilians are at risk.

There are fears the problem could get worse with 30,000 U.S. and NATO reinforcements heading to Afghanistan as part of a military buildup to take on the Taliban in the south.

Several recent operations have sparked protests in Afghanistan.

On Thursday, the French military said its troops mistakenly killed four Afghan civilians and seriously injured one during a clash with insurgents east of Kabul on April 6. On April 20, NATO troops fired on a vehicle that approached their convoy in eastern Afghanistan, killing four unarmed Afghan civilians.

“Preventing Afghan casualties remains our goal despite recent setbacks,” said Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a NATO spokesman in Kabul. He added that military operations have increased this year, with many taking place in population centers.

Also Sunday, a British service member died after an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defense announced.

On Saturday, NATO said another service member was killed after an “indirect-fire attack” in eastern Afghanistan. The victim’s nationality was not immediately released.

© 2010 Associated Press

Our Corrupt Occupation of Afghanistan November 13, 2009

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Published on Friday, November 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Robert Naiman

Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome?

There is something very Captain Renault about it. We’re shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption. How ungrateful can they be?

But perhaps we should consider the possibility that our occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate – indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan today is the American occupation.

US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts in Afghanistan consists of protection payments to insurgents, Aram Roston reports in The Nation. In southern Afghanistan – where General McChrystal wants to send more troops – security firms can’t physically protect convoys of American military supplies. There’s no practical way to move the supplies without paying the Taliban. So, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, we’re supplying both sides of the war.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the nearly $30 billion in international aid to Afghanistan has been routed through foreign consultants, companies, and organizations hired by the US government and its allies, Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe. Afghan officials complain that American civilian advisers are often overpaid, underqualified, and unfamiliar with the culture of the country. A typical US adviser earns about $500 per day – several times what the average Afghan earns in a month, Stockman notes. That’s about $125,000 a year – not a bad chunk of change, even by U.S. standards. It’s more than the household income of about 85% of American families. The total cost of such an adviser, including security and accommodations (note that most people – in Afghanistan, like the U.S. – have to pay for their own accommodations out of their salaries or wages) is about $500,000 a year.

The Afghan government now has a program to hire its own advisers from friendly Muslim countries like Turkey and the UAE. The US supports this program with a $30 million dollar contribution. But that contribution represents 1.1% of the $2.7 billion that the US plans to spend on economic assistance to Afghanistan next year, the vast majority of which will be used to hire US contractors. So for every dollar we spend on paying Americans contractors, we spend a penny on a much cheaper program that allows Afghanistan to hire people who know the culture, speak the language, have more expertise, and can move around Afghanistan with less security because they aren’t Americans.

What do you call that? Afghans call it corruption. As Diogenes might say, the big thieves are giving lectures to the little thieves.

Now consider an Afghan policeman making $120 a month – half the cost of supporting a family, Western officials concede – who sees all this going on. Do you think that guy might take a bribe? Berholt Brecht wrote, in Marc Blitzstein’s translation: “First feed the face, and then tell right from wrong: for even saintly folk may act like sinners, unless they’ve had their customary dinners.” But in practice, our aid bureaucracy in Afghanistan has not yet won this most trivial insight.

But the biggest corruption of all is the occupation itself, because it is all based on a big lie: the claim that our continued occupation of Afghanistan is justified by the threat of an Al Qaeda “haven” in Afghanistan. This is a lie because: 1) as former counter-terrorism official Paul Pillar has pointed out, “the case has not been made” that “such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the United States” and 2) Mullah Mohammed Omar’s “Quetta Shura” Taliban have been signalling for months that they are done with Al Qaeda and there has been no U.S. response. McChrystal wants reinforcements to go to Kandahar. That’s Mullah Omar’s home turf. If McChrystal is given troops to go to Kandahar, then it’s not about Al Qaeda.

Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy

Obama’s Coalition of the Unwilling March 4, 2009

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Posted on Mar 3, 2009, http://www.truthdig.com

By Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama met recently with the prime ministers of Canada and Britain. This week’s meeting with Britain’s Gordon Brown, who was pitching a “global New Deal,” created a minor flap when the White House downsized a full news conference to an Oval Office question-and-answer session, viewed by some in Britain as a snub. The change was attributed to the weather, with the Rose Garden covered with snow.

It might have actually related not to snow cover, but to a snow job, covering up the growing divide between Afghanistan policies.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan includes a troop surge, already under way, and continued bombing in Pakistan using unmanned drones. Escalating civilian deaths are a certainty. The United Nations estimates that more than 2,100 civilians died in 2008, a 40 percent jump over 2007.

The occupation of Afghanistan is in its eighth year, and public support in many NATO countries is eroding. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, told me: “The move into Afghanistan is going to be very expensive. … Our European NATO partners are getting disillusioned with the war. I talked to a lot of the people in Europe, and they really feel this is a quagmire.”

Forty-one nations contribute to NATO’s 56,000-troop presence in Afghanistan. More than half of the troops are from the U.S. The United Kingdom has 8,300 troops, Canada just under 3,000. Maintaining troops is costly, but the human toll is greater. Canada, with 108 deaths, has suffered the highest per capita death rate for foreign armies in Afghanistan, since its forces are based in the south around Kandahar, where the Taliban is strong.

Last Sunday on CNN, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “We’re not going to win this war just by staying … we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency.” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine: “The United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory.” Yet it’s Canada that has set a deadline for troop withdrawal at the end of 2011. The U.S. is talking escalation.

Anand Gopal, Afghanistan correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, described the situation on the ground: “A lot of Afghans that I speak to in these southern areas where the fighting has been happening say that to bring more troops, that’s going to mean more civilian casualties. It’ll mean more of these night raids, which have been deeply unpopular amongst Afghans. … Whenever American soldiers go into a village and then leave, the Taliban comes and attacks the village.” Afghan Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, a woman, told Gopal: “Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops—it will just bring more violence.”

Women in Afghanistan play a key role in winning the peace. A photographer wrote me: “There will be various celebrations across Afghanistan to honor International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8. In Kandahar there will be an event with hundreds of women gathering to pray for peace, which is especially poignant in a part of Afghanistan that is so volatile.” After returning from an international women’s gathering in Moscow, feminist writer Gloria Steinem noted that the discussion centered around getting the media to hire peace correspondents to balance the war correspondents. Voices of civil society would be amplified, giving emphasis to those who wage peace. In the U.S. media, there is an equating of fighting the war with fighting terrorism. Yet on the ground, civilian casualties lead to tremendous hostility. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, recently told me: “I’ve been saddened and shocked by virulent anti-American responses to those wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. They’re seen as occupations. … I think it’s very important we learn from mistakes of sounding war drums.” She added, “There’s such a connection from the Middle East to Afghanistan to Pakistan which builds on strengths of working with neighbors.”

Barack Obama was swept through the primaries and into the presidency on the basis of his anti-war message. Prime ministers like Brown and Harper are bending to growing public demand for an end to war. Yet in the U.S., there is scant debate about sending more troops to Afghanistan, and about the spillover of the war into Pakistan.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

© 2009 Amy Goodman

Distributed by King Features Syndicate

Guilty: Britain admits collusion, new torture claims emerge March 1, 2009

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Sunday, 1 March 2009, www.independent.co.uk

The US government held Binyam Mohamed, below, at Camp Delta from 2004 until his release last week

HARAZ GHANBARI/AP

The US government held Binyam Mohamed, below, at Camp Delta from 2004 until his release last week

 

Evidence from last British resident in Guantanamo reveals the full story of how terror suspects were illegally maltreated. Robert Verkaik reports

Britain faces fresh accusations that it colluded in the rendering and alleged torture of a second UK resident now being held at Guantanamo Bay. The new claims bring further pressure on ministers to come clean about the scale of the Government’s complicity in the rendition and torture of dozens of terror suspects captured by the Americans after 9/11.

 

His case comes after that of Binyam Mohamed, 30, released from the US naval base in Cuba last week, and whose claims of UK involvement in his torture are being investigated by the Attorney General. Now allegations made by Shaker Aamer, the final British resident held at Guantanamo Bay, raise concerns that both MI5 and MI6 were widely involved in the US rendition and torture programme operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11.

Mr Aamer, 42, says he was rendered from the Pakistan border to Afghanistan where he claims he was tortured. He was passed by Pakistani groups to the Northern Alliance who sold him to the Americans. The CIA arranged for his detention in Afghanistan and final transfer to Guantanamo Bay.

He adds that two MI6 or MI5 officers, a man and a woman, interrogated him after he had been subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation by the Americans while being held at a prison in Kandahar in January 2002. He has told his UK lawyers that the British woman officer called herself “Sally”.

A few weeks later he says an MI5 officer was present while he was being tortured by CIA agents in an interrogation cell at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in January or February 2002. This time he claims a man called “John”, who introduced himself as being from British intelligence, was in the room when his head was repeatedly “bounced” against a wall and he was told that he was going to die.

Mr Aamer’s statement will be used in a High Court challenge against the British government to force ministers to release information about his detention and interrogation in 2002.

The new charges of British complicity in rendition and torture are the latest to be made against the British government which has always denied using torture or helping others use it. But a series of embarrassing revelations has shown the public may not have been told the whole truth. After blanket denials that the British overseas territory of Diego Garcia was used by the Americans for “torture flights”, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was forced to admit last year that the UK Government had been misled by the US administration. Mr Miliband said the British outpost on the Indian Ocean island had twice been used by the US as a refuelling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects in 2002 to Morocco and Guantanamo Bay.

Then, on Thursday, it was the turn of the Defence Secretary, John Hutton, to make an embarrassing admission to Parliament. He told MPs that Britain had helped in the rendition of two Iraqis captured by British forces and sent to Afghanistan for interrogation by US agents as recently as 2004.

Pressure is now growing on the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, to say what he was told about the US rendition programme when he was Foreign Secretary between 2001 and 2006.

Zachary Katznelson of the human rights charity Reprieve, representing Mr Aamer, said: “We must know whether MI5 or MI6 has information about Mr Aamer’s detention and torture so that we can show that any evidence against him obtained under such conditions cannot be relied on by the US in any prosecution.”

Mr Katznelson alleges Mr Aamer had been tortured by American agents for several days before he was interrogated by British intelligence officers. He said: “Mr Aamer has told us that on one occasion he was beaten and his head was bounced against the wall. They were screaming at him ‘you are going to die’. He says that during this abuse a member of the British security services was present in the room who witnessed what was happening.”

From Bagram, Mr Aamer was flown to Guantanamo Bay, where he is on hunger strike in protest at his alleged mistreatment and continued separation from his family. He also claims to have been beaten and tortured during his detention in Cuba.

Reprieve said the full story of Britain’s involvement in US rendition and torture had not been told and that ministers’ recent admissions were only the tip of the iceberg.

“This Government has misled us again and again,” said Reprieve executive director Clare Algar. “Surely we must immediately have the public inquiry into the Government’s conduct of the ‘War on Terror’ demanded by so many,” she said.

Andrew Tyrie MP, the chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, says the latest revelations require a full inquiry into Britain’s role.

Mr Katznelson said Mr Aamer’s evidence showed British collusion in rendition and torture was “systemic”.

Binyam Mohamed also claims that British agents questioned him before he was sent to Morocco where he says he was brutally tortured before being taken to Cuba. He also said one of the British officers who interrogated him introduced himself as “John”.

Mr Mohamed was arrested by Pakistani immigration officials at Karachi airport in April 2002 when intending to return to the UK. He alleges that he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, including being beaten, scalded and having his penis slashed with a scalpel.

The MI5 agent who interviewed Mr Mohamed in Pakistan in early 2002 told the High Court last year that the US and UK both wanted information from him because they regarded him as a terror threat. The question was how it should best be obtained.

A telegram sent by MI5 requesting US permission to see Mr Mohamed made the case that the security service’s “knowledge of the UK scene may provide contextual background useful during any continuing interview process … This will place the detainee under more direct pressure.”

In his note of the meeting with the British resident, the MI5 officer recalled: “I told Mohamed he had an opportunity to help us and help himself. The US authorities will be deciding what to do with him and this will depend to a very large degree on his degree of co-operation.” Could witness B be the same MI5 agent who Shaker Aamer said had called himself “John”? Or was it coincidence that both British residents came up with same name for their interrogator?

The truth may not be known until Britain releases secret evidence about the Mohamed case. In a ruling last month, the High Court recommended that these documents be made public, but the judges stopped short of making it an order. Lawyers for Mr Miliband had warned that intelligence relations with the US would be seriously harmed were the documents to see the light of day. Lawyers believe these documents may also help to show whether “John”, or someone else from MI5 or MI6, also interviewed Mr Aamer.

Mr Aamer, his wife and their three children left London in 2001 to go to Afghanistan to work with a children’s charity. But Mr Aamer, a Saudi Arabian national who came to the UK in 1996, was captured on the Pakistan border in December 2001. Mr Aamer was transferred to Kandahar and Bagram air base and then flown on to Guantanamo Bay. For four years he has been held in solitary confinement because the Guantanamo camp guards believe he wields too much influence over other detainees. He has never seen his youngest son, who was born after his capture.

Mr Aamer’s lawyers have filed a 16-page claim arguing for his removal from isolation in Guantanamo Bay prison. The British government has recently begun pressing the US administration for Mr Aamer’s release.

It is understood that a party of Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials who visited Mr Mohamed in Cuba shortly before he was cleared for release, also had limited contact with Mr Aamer, who has lost half his body weight after a series of hunger strikes. An FCO spokesman said the Americans had told the British Government that they still had security concerns about Mr Aamer and would not release him.

A spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that they took Mr Aamer’s allegations very seriously and had launched an “urgent review” of the case. He said that Britain did not carry out or collude in torture.

How the Government changed its story from denial to regret

No one told us

20 November, 2005

“These are privately chartered aircraft and they don’t need to tell us who is on board.”

Department of Transport

We don’t keep track of such things

22 November, 2005

“Where passengers do not leave the airfield, the MoD … does not record details of passengers.”

Adam Ingram, then Defence minister

No one asked us

30 November, 2005

The Government is “not aware of the use of their territory or airspace for the purposes of extraordinary rendition, nor have we received any requests, [or] granted any permission for the use of UK territory or airspace for such purposes”.

Foreign Office

It never happened

5 December, 2005

“We have no evidence to corroborate media allegations about use of UK territory in rendition operations.”

Foreign Office

We have no record

13 December, 2005

“Careful research has been unable to identify any occasion … when we have received a request for permission by the United States for a rendition through the United Kingdom territory or airspace …. Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories … there is simply no truth in claims that the UK has been involved in rendition.”

Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary

There’s no evidence

22 December, 2005

“I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all.

“I am not going to start ordering inquiries into this, that or the next thing when I have got no evidence to show whether this is right or not.”

Tony Blair, then Prime Minister

We’ve done nothing illegal

20 January, 2006

“Anything we do in relation to rendition is in compliance with our international obligations. We fulfil our legal obligations.”

Tony Blair’s spokesman

They’d have to ask us first

16 February, 2006

“We have made clear to [the US] we expect them to seek permission to render detainees via British airspace.”

Ian Pearson, then Foreign Office minister

We’ve never given permission

7 October, 2006

“Mr Hoon … made clear that the British Government has not approved and will not approve a policy of supporting the transfer of individuals through the UK to places where there are substantial grounds to suspect that they face the risk of torture.”

Foreign Office

OK, they did it twice. But that’s all

25 February, 2008

“The two flights from the US already identified are the only ones we are aware of.”

Foreign Office

Yes, we were involved. And we shouldn’t have been

27 February, 2009

“In retrospect, it is clear to me that the transfer to Afghanistan of these two individuals should have been questioned at the time.”

John Hutton, Defence Secretary

A new Afghanistan nightmare‏ February 23, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, Uncategorized, War.
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holbrooke-karzai(AFP) When Holbrooke met with Karzai in Kabul, he may have just learned of the historic significance of the following day.

By Ramzy Baroud

www.aljazeera.com, February 21, 2009

When U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke met with Afghanistan’s ‘democratically’ installed President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on February 14, he may have just learned of the historic significance of the following day. February 15 commemorates the end of the bloody Russian campaign against Afghanistan (August 1978-February 1989).

 

But it is unlikely that Holbrooke will absorb the magnitude of that historic lesson. Both he and the new U.S. President Barack Obama are convinced that the missing component for winning the war in Afghanistan is a greater commitment, as in doubling the troops, increasing military spending, and, by way of winning hearts and minds, investing more in developing the country.

That combination, the U.S. administration believes, will eventually sway Afghans from supporting the Taliban, tribal militias, Pashtun nationalists and other groups. The latter is waging a guerilla struggle in various parts of the country, mostly in the south, to oust Karzai’s government and foreign occupation forces. While Kabul was considered an “oasis of calm” – by Jonathan Steele’s account – during the Soviet rule, it’s nowhere close to that depiction under the rule of the U.S. and its NATO allies, who had plenty of time, eight long years, to assert their control, but failed.

 

In fact, just as Holbrooke sat within Karzai’s heavily guarded presidential palace, roadside bombs were detonating across the country, in Khost, in Kandahar and elsewhere. Several police officers were killed, the latest addition to the hundreds of soldiers and officers who die each year as they desperately defend the few symbols of the central government’s authority. Aside from its shaky control over Kabul, and a few provincial capitals, the central government struggles to maintain the little relevance it still holds.

 

This deems most of the country a battleground between Afghani militias, seen by a growing number of Afghans as a legitimate resistance force against an illegitimate occupation; that being US and NATO forces.

 

Unlike the unpopular war in Iraq, Afghanistan was widely viewed in the U.S. as a moral war, based on the logic that since al-Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks, and since the group is hosted by an equally militant Taliban government, both groups must pay. So far, the people of Afghanistan have paid many times over the price expected. Thousands were killed, and an entire generation was scarred by a new civil war, and yet a new foreign military occupation.

 

While mainstream news consumers are inundated with official commentary and occasional news reports on the challenges awaiting the U.S. in Afghanistan, to secure democracy, freedom and ‘national interests,’ media reports continue to reduce the battle over Afghanistan as one that is concerned with fighting local corruption, instilling human rights and ensuring gender equality.

 

Little is said of the pertinent reasons behind the war, as such seemingly tedious rhetoric of great games to control the Eurasian landmass – which dates back to the 19th century’s rivalry between British and Russian empires – is more suited for academic discussions that are by no means newsworthy.

 

But it is perhaps relevant to note that desperate attempts at controlling Afghanistan have failed miserably in the past. If Holbrooke wishes to dig deeper into history, he should learn that the British Empire, which controlled India at the time, was also defeated in Afghanistan in 1842, and again in 1878. Soviet leaders looked for a quick victory as they occupied Kabul in December 1979, only to find themselves engaged in a most bloody war that cost them 15,000 deaths (it goes without saying that the hundreds of thousands of Afghani deaths often go unreported) and an unmitigated defeat.

 

But, then again, Holbrooke must’ve known of the details of the latter period, for after all, it was his country that armed and financially sustained the mujahideen forces in Afghanistan fearing that the Soviets’ ultimate objective, during the Cold War was challenging US dominance in the region, and eventually the Middle East. Considering the strategically disastrous toppling of the Shah of Iran to the U.S., the world-leading superpower could take no chances.

 

But since then, Afghanistan has grown in significance from a politically strategic landmass, due to its proximity to warm-waters and regional powers, to an energy strategic landmass, inevitable to the exploitation of Caspian oil.

 

“I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,” said former vice-president Dick Cheney in a speech to oil moguls in 1998. In the same year, John Maresca, vice president of international relations of Unocal Corporation commented before a House committee in February 2008 on ways to transfer Caspian basin oil (estimated between 110 to 243bn barrels of crude, worth up to $4 trillion): “(One) option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of US sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan.”

 

Military success in Afghanistan is simply not possible, for numerous logistical, historical and practical reasons. But failure will also come at a price, at least for those who will directly benefit from subduing the rebellious nation.

 

Former president Bush and his entourage of allies failed to turn Afghanistan into a U.S.-styled democracy, easily exploitable for strategic and economic use. By pressing a military solution in Afghanistan, Obama is not only summoning another failed U.S. imperial experiment – as that in Iraq – but insists on adding his country’s name to those of Britain and Russia, who had better chances of success, but were squarely defeated.

 

“It’s like fighting sand. No force in the world can get the better of the Afghans,” Oleg Kubanov, a former Russian officer in Afghanistan told Reuters. “It’s their holy land; it doesn’t matter to them if you’re Russian, American. We’re all soldiers to them.”

 

It would be timely if Holbrooke takes a few hours from his hectic schedule in the region to brush up on Afghanistan’s history, for he surely needs it.

— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in numerous newspapers and journals worldwide, including the Washington Post, Japan Times, Al Ahram Weekly and Lemonde Diplomatique. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London). Read more about him on his website: RamzyBaroud.net.

Rhetoric and Reality Clash on Obama’s First Foreign Visit February 20, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Canada, Environment.
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 Chris Arsenault

www.ipsnews.net, February 20, 2009

VANCOUVER, Feb 20 (IPS) – On his first foreign visit as U.S. president, Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “hope” and “change” came face to face with the hard, divisive policy realities of climate change from Canada’s tar sands, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan and the sputtering world economy.

Some 2,500 spectators lined the streets of Ottawa to watch the president’s motorcade make its way to Parliament Hill, a marked contrast to the thousands of protestors who greeted former President George W. Bush during his last Canadian visit. While the Canadian public catches Obama fever, environmentalists and some aboriginal groups say they’ve been left in the cold by his energy policies.

“Obama must ask Canada to clean up its tar sands and to respect the rights of our aboriginal First Nations,” said Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipweyan First Nation, a community near the Alberta tar sands, the world’s largest energy project.

While promising to press ahead with “carbon reduction technologies,” Obama did not mention the tar sands directly during his visit. Extracting oil from the tar sands creates three times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional crude.

At the press conference following closed door meetings between President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and their aides, the two leaders promised a “clean energy dialogue” focusing on plans to trap carbon dioxide underground and improvements to North America’s electricity grid.

Standing in front of Canadian and U.S. flags, as the pomp and circumstance of international diplomacy dictates, Obama called climate change and the need to develop clean energy sources “the most pressing challenges of our time.”

The Natural Resources Defence Council dubs tar sands crude, “the world’s dirtiest oil.” Canada is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the U.S., sending more than 1.2 million barrels per day to its southern neighbour.

Trade between the two countries is worth more than 1.6 billion dollars per day, making it the world’s largest trading relationship. In addition to energy and the environment, the two leaders discussed bailsouts for North America’s auto industry and the general economic downturn.

“How we produce and use energy is fundamental for our economic recovery and also for our security and our planet,” said Obama at the press conference.

Prior to Obama’s Canadian visit, aboriginal and environmental groups placed a full-page add in the newspaper USA Today, stating that the tar sands “stands in the way of a new energy economy.” The day before the presidential visit, activists from Greenpeace scaled a bridge in Ottawa to hang a banner reading: “Climate Leaders Don’t Buy Tar Sands.”

During his election campaign, Obama vowed to end the U.S.’s addiction to “dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive” oil. His campaign’s energy guru, Jason Grumet, said greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s tar sands were “unacceptably high.”

In an apparent about-face from his campaign promises, Obama refused to characterise tar sands crude as “dirty oil” in a pre-summit interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. While acknowledging that the sands creates “a big carbon footprint,” Obama argued that technologies, including a plan from Alberta’s provincial government to store carbon dioxide underground, could solve the problem.

The idea of sequestering and storing greenhouse gases underground, known as carbon capture, has yet to be implemented at any tar sands operations and critics are sceptical that it can work. The tar sands are Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. Presently, tar sands oil extraction pumps 29.5 million tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every year, equivalent to the exhaust from more than 5 million cars.

Even if carbon capture technology does prove to be effective, the sands create a host of other environmental challenges, water depletion being the most significant. Producing one barrel of tar sands oil requires at least three barrels of water; there is enough toxic water in tar sands tailings ponds to fill 2.2 million Olympic sized swimming pools.

“The devastation of our homelands in this short period of time is perplexing to my people since it is only a fraction of the time that these impacts have occurred compared to the thousands of years we have inhabited these lands,” said George Poitras, former chief of the Mikisew Cree, another aboriginal community close to the tar sands.

In addition to energy and the economy, Obama and Harper also discussed the increasing violence in Afghanistan, where Obama has pledged to send 17,000 more U.S. troops as part of a “surge.” Canada currently has 2,500 combat troops stationed around Kandahar who are set to leave in 2011.

Obama stated explicitly that he was not requesting more troops or money from Canada for the Afghan occupation.

A chorus of military leaders, including a top German general and Britain’s ambassador in Kabul, have stated that the war cannot be won.

Afghanistan’s critical moment February 7, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War.
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Paul Rogers

A relentless Taliban insurgency, reluctant allies, political doubts, competing priorities – the pressure to change United States policy in a key region may prove irresistible.

6 – 02 – 2009, www.opendemocracy.net

 

The difficult global inheritance of the United States administration of Barack Obama is exemplified in the possible loss of the Manas air-base in Kyrgyzstan. This would be a painful event in any circumstance, not least as it may involve the Bishkek government making a deal with Russia that would further signal a changing geopolitical balance in the region. But the troubles the US and its allies are facing in Afghanistan means that this is a particularly bad time to be threatened with a loss of facilities and influence in another part of central Asia.

The latest developments in Afghanistan represent a decisive phase in the ongoing struggle since the Taliban regime was terminated at the end of 2001. The low-level but enduring insurgency in southeast Afghanistan that then ensued left much of the rest of the country relatively stable, until Taliban militia began to make a serious comeback in 2004-05. The response was a build-up of Nato troops in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), and a separate expansion of United States combat-troops under direct US command.

In the 2005-07 period, a pattern emerged of a developing insurgency whose most intensive periods of violence were in the summer but which tended to be relatively quiet in the winter months. A certain increase of violence in the winter of 2007-08 was a departure from the established cycle, without itself being a definitive break. In the past few days, however, four indicators suggest a real winter escalation in Taliban activity.

The Taliban’s reminder

The first event is the killing of twenty-one police officers and the wounding of eight more in a suicide-attack on 2 February 2009 in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province. This province has been less prone to violence than the neighbouring provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, but that relative calm is now ending.

The second indicator is the increased number of attacks on convoy-routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, through which at least 75% of Nato supplies travel. Many of these have been directed at individual trucks, though some have targeted major supply-depots. An operation, also on 2 February, took a different form: it demolished a thirty-metre-span iron bridge, twenty-three kilometres west of the Pakistani city of Peshawar. This has severed the supply-lines along the most important route, which cannot be restored until the bridge can be prepared.

The third factor is mounting evidence that combat-trained paramilitaries who have previously been in Iraq are now seeing Afghanistan as the main focus in the war with the “far enemy” of the United States and are moving there in large numbers, possibly in the thousands (see Sayed Salahuddin, “Afghanistan says foreign fighters coming from Iraq“, International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2009)

The overall number of Taliban fighters active within Afghanistan is estimated at 15,000; this may be a misleading figure in that far larger numbers may by present or inactive, or else based in Pakistan. The significant point is that, according to Afghan defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, in some of the conflicts with groups of Taliban paramilitaries last year, as many as 60% of the fighters were foreign (see “Iraq militants ‘in Afghan switch’“, BBC News, 4 February 2009).

This growing internationalisation of the conflict has been underway for some time; it now appears to be accelerating. It is part of and in turn reinforces the view within the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups that they are engaged less in a nationalist endeavour to retake control of Afghanistan, but rather militants in a global campaign.

The fourth feature is that the United States army has taken the unusual step of deploying substantial numbers of additional combat-troops to Afghanistan in the middle of winter, rather than wait until a likely upsurge in conflict from May 2009 onwards. Almost 3,000 troops from the 10th Mountain Division have been deployed to Logar and Wardak provinces south of Kabul; they will be  followed by the much larger number – possibly as many as 30,000 – who are likely to be sent to Afghanistan during the rest of 2009 (see Fisnik Abrashi, “NATO: 3,000 US Troops Deploy Near To Afghan Capital“, Associated Press, 27 January 2009)

The investment of new forces is combined with a shift of thinking at senior levels in the Pentagon towards a greater focus on “counterinsurgency”. This is embodied in a new and still secret report from the US joint chiefs-of-staff to President Obama, which recommends “a shift in the military mission in Afghanistan to concentrate solely on combatting the Taliban and al-Qaida”.

An account of the background says:

“The Pentagon is prepared to announce the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan as early as this week even as President Barack Obama is searching for his own strategy for the war. According to military officials during last week’s meeting with Defense Secretary [Robert] Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon’s ‘tank’, the president specifically asked, ‘What is the end game?’ in the U.S. military’s strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, ‘Frankly, we don’t have one.’…” (see Jim Miklaszewski & Courtney Kube, “Secret report recommends military shift in Afghanistan“, NBC News, 4 February 2009).

The moving target

A key indicator of just how complex the conflict has become for the United States and its allies is the attacks on the coalition’s supply-lines. These have been largely secure throughout most years of the current Afghan war, even though much of the territory through which the trucks drove has been controlled by local tribal groups with connections to the Pakistani Taliban. The reason is that the contractors running the trucks have regularly paid “taxes” – in essence, protection-money – to these groups. Some of this money has been passed on to Taliban militia who used it to help finance the insurgency (see Tim Ripley, “Hanging by a thread”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, February 2009 [subscription only]).

This situation – a combination of tacit truce, strategic denial, and convenient subvention of the enemy – has effectively broken down. The contributory reasons include the wider escalation in the conflict over 2008, when much of western Pakistan became a safe haven for Taliban and other militia groups and the widespread use of armed drones to attack presumed Taliban and al-Qaida targets within Pakistan in response inflicted many civilian casualties and infuriated local people. The new vulnerability of supply-lines is a result.

But this is just one aspect of a general decline in security across most of southern and eastern Afghanistan, a matter of intense concern to the young Barack Obama administration. The commitment of the new team in Washington (albeit with some familiar faces still in charge) to a major “surge” in the number of US forces also builds on plans already made under George W Bush, but with a twist: for the purpose is less to seek outright military victory than to exert sufficient force to bring cooperative elements of a weakened Taliban into negotiations.

The argument is neat but flawed, for the addition of foreign troops may also – as a new report by the analyst Gilles Dorronsoro argues – itself provoke increased Afghan resistance (see Focus and Exit: An Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009). This is a view shared by many British soldiers returning from recent deployments in Afghanistan.

The critical moment

It is not clear how Washington’s analysist will evolve in a fluid military and diplomatic situation, and in circumstances where the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is coming under severe domestic pressure in an election year. Much much will depend on high-level deliberations around the time of Nato’s sixtieth anniversary summit (hosted jointly by France and Germany) on 3-4 April 2009. The annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, to be held on 6-8 February 2009, may be crucial in influencing its outcome; the seriousness of the US’s concerns at this stage is reflected in the presence of vice-president Joe Biden, national-security adviser General James Jones, the head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, and the special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke (see Gerhard Spoerl, “Searching for a New World Order“, SpiegelOnline, 30 January 2009).

In both Munich and at the Strasbourg-Kehl summit, a key point of discussion is whether other Nato states will increase their involvement in Afghanistan.   Three Nato members are key to this – the Canadians, Dutch and British.  These are the only states other than the US that have deployed substantial numbers of troops for combat-roles in southern Afghanistan. The decision by these states over whether to increase their forces will be crucial to influencing other Nato member-states.

At present the signs are that they will not commit to large new deployments. There is little enthusiasm in the Netherlands; the mood in Canada favours progressive disengagement. The fact that Britain has more combat-troops in Afghanistan than any country apart from the United States makes its choice the most significant of the three; and the government of Gordon Brown (anxious, apart from other motives, to be seen to work closely with the Barack Obama administration), has sent a few hundred more soldiers to Afghanistan.

Inside the British army itself, however, there is widespread unease and disenchantment with the country’s role in Afghanistan (though this rarely enters the public domain). It will be very hard for the London government to persuading the military to agree to a serious upgrade of numbers and commitment.

The reluctance of allies, a relentless insurgency, doubts over the Afghan government, pressure from competing priorities – all this adds up to a difficult induction for Barack Obama’s Afghan policy. If it remains committed to an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan, it may need to pursue this policy in the absence of the solid Nato support it needs. Yet this would conflict with the president’s determination to be much more multilateral than his predecessor.

The tensions are multiplying – perhaps enough to ensure a fundamental rethink of United States policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The period around Nato’s sixtieth anniversary may be even more worth watching.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001here

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click

Paul Rogers’s most recent book is Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) – an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed