Commons Almost Empty For Afghan War Debate

Despite many many MP's claiming there is ‘no issue of greater importance’ than the war, fewer than 100 bothered to attend the debate in the Commons yesterday. 

Meanwhile the body of 26-year-old father-of two Lance Corporal Joe Pool from here in Scotland was returned to British soil. The soldier, from Greenock, was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Helmand Province on Sunday, making him the 334th UK serviceman to die in the war. 

Emotional: Mourners watch the coffin of Lance Corporal Joseph Pool passing through Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire following his repatriation ceremony at RAF Lyneham.

Another Nato Service - Body Parts Collected

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan. Full Story Here

Four Charged Over Blair Protest

So it seems we live in a world where peace activists are considered a danger but narcissists responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths are driven around with armed guards.

5 US Soldiers Charged With Killing Civilians

Prosecutors say some of his fellow soldiers said Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, 25, of Billings, Mont., organized a "kill team" of men willing to kill civilians while on patrol. Another soldier, Spc. Jeremy Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, reportedly gave detailed statements to investigators implicating himself and others.

Gibbs had done one tour in Afghanistan and one in Iraq before being redeployed. Some soldiers have said he boasted in Afghanistan about actions he had taken in Iraq.

Tip of the iceberg of course. Watch them walk away scot-free one by one as they always do.

8 Civilians Killed In Baghlan NATO Raid

Tuesday, 24 August 2010 11:27Written by TOLOnews

At least 8 civilians were killed and 12 were wounded in NATO operations in the northern Baghlan province on Monday, officials say

The incident occurred Monday afternoon in the province's Tala and Barfak districts when foreign forces entered a residential house and shot dead 8 civilians, wounded 12 and arrested 9 others, local officials say.

NATO forces denied having any connection with the incident. In NATO operations conducted without coordination with Afghan forces, civilians are the main victims.

In a similar incident last week, NATO soldiers had shot dead 2 civilians and arrested 3 others in Surkhroad district of the eastern Nangarhar province. The spokesman for the province's Police Chief had said that the operation was conducted without coordination with Afghan forces.

According to a recent report published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), civilian casualties have increased 31 percent in the first six months of 2010. Civilian casualties have provoked tense arguments between Afghan authorities and NATO military officials.

TONY Writes:

The chief of Baghlan's Tala Wabarfak district, Mohammad Ismail, said the deaths—six men, one woman, and one child—reportedly came in the early hours of Sunday morning in the village of Tergaran. Villagers told him troops flown in aboard five or six helicopters also destroyed several houses during the five-hour operation, Ismail said. Two people were reportedly arrested and taken away he said, adding that Taliban have on occasion been active in the area, a 10-hour walk from the nearest town over which the government exercises little influence.

NATO said U.S. troops fired warning shots on Monday to disperse a protest in eastern Afghanistan over the arrest of a religious leader suspected of a rocket attack. The alliance said no civilian injuries were reported from the demonstration, but Gen. Faqir Ahmad, the deputy police chief of Parwan province, said one civilian was killed by gunfire from an unknown source. NATO said about 300 people surrounded a patrol and attacked vehicles with rocks and iron bars outside the main coalition air base at Bagram in Parwan province.

"After several attempts to stop the attack and disperse the crowd, coalition troops received small-arms fire directed at them," NATO said in a news release. Coalition forces then fired the warning shots.

Gen. Ahmad said the coalition firing enraged the crowd with some then using rocks and sticks to attack police and the head of the district government, Kabir Ahmad, who had tried to calm the situation. The deputy police chief said Ahmad and a police officer had serious but not life-threatening injuries. (Source - various newsfeeds).

Smearing Wikileaks And Julian Assange

I was going to post on the inevitable smears on Assange. Fortunately Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque has done it quicker and better:

We have the President of the United States -- who has already openly proclaimed his "right" to assassinate anyone on earth, including American citizens, without the slightest due process of law, simply at his arbitrary command -- now feverishly expanding the use of death squads, whose stealthy night raids on sleeping villages have already killed a vast number of innocent civilians in Afghanistan (as the Wikileaks documents show). This same administration is now running "black ops," secret armies, proxy wars and other covert activities in more than 75 countries around the world. That is to say, the Obama Administration is now murdering people in their beds, fomenting bloody ethnic conflict, supporting and/or carrying out acts of terrorism, spreading corruption, assisting dictators, arming warlords, spreading hate and suffering all over the world -- and doing it knowingly, proudly. ("Evil in broad daylight" indeed, as Arthur Silber details here.)

And these are the moral paragons who have now turned their machinery of lies and smears against Wikileaks. For make no mistake; although the rape charges were manufactured in Sweden -- which, incidentally, is where some of Wikileaks' servers are located -- they emanate from the proud deathlords in Washington. Indeed, didn't we hear just a few weeks ago that the Peace Laureate's people had launched a campaign of pressuring foreign governments to put fetters on Assange and his organization? Now Sweden's center-right government -- no, Rush, Sweden is no longer the super-socialist fairyland of your nightmares -- has obviously hearkened to the master's voice.

But although this first foray has been rebuffed, it is certain that what we are seeing is the beginning of a concerted effort to destroy Assange as a public figure and thereby discredit the work of Wikileaks -- and by extension, the truth of its revelations.

And smearing, of course, is just the first step. If that doesn't work ... well, the avowed and openly proclaimed proponents of assassination certainly have other, more "prejudicial" methods at their disposal, nicht war?

Daily NATO Massacre Report

Another 'Precision Raid' Fiasco By NATO today. Less than 24 hours after the last one. This is the new Petraeus broom sweeping clean the well-established incompetence. Policemen are the latest victims.

Murderous ISAF Raid - Relatives Speak

Mohammed Aman and Mohammed Anwar

Ismail Aman set out from Kabul last week to join his family in nearby Wardak province for the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Next day Aman lay bleeding in his family guest room, alongside two of his brothers, all shot dead by U.S. special forces who were on the hunt for 'a Taliban leader'. Their deaths sparked a vitriolic anti-American protest and generated a backlash against the dramatic spike in special forces raids, which have become a crucial element of President Barack Obama's strategy in Afghanistan. NATO officials admitted this week that special forces are taking part in 1,000 operations in Afghanistan each month, a threefold increase over last year.  Omid Ali, 21, said his school friend Aman had nothing to do with the Taliban . "I want to say to President Obama: Afghanistan doesn't have hostility towards foreign forces, but, these mistakes, that is how they will be defeated in Afghanistan."

'Standard Raid'

American military officials said that Aman's shooting was no mistake. The 25-year-old student was shot as he was 'reaching for an AK-47' when the U.S. special forces team burst into the tiny guest room where he was sleeping with his brothers at the family compound, according to an account of the raid provided by the American military. As far as the  U.S. military perspective is concerned, the raid followed the standard procedures:

But the military force produced no weapons from the compound. In its initial news release on the operation, the U.S.-led military coalition said the assault forces had apprehended a key Taliban commander at a nearby compound.

"This capture will severely degrade Taliban operations in the Tangi and Shehkabad district," U.S.Army Col. Rafael Torres, a spokesman for the military coalition, said the day after the raid. "Now one less criminal is on the streets endangering Afghan civilians with his indiscriminate IED attacks," a reference to improvised explosive devices, as the military calls homemade bombs. Now, however, NATO military officials say they aren't even certain they have the right man.

"Although initially we believed we captured an insurgent commander at one of the compounds, we have not been able to definitively determine that person's identity," said oneNATO official who discussed the operation only on the condition that he not be identified, because of the sensitivity of the secret operations.

The Aman family's account differs on the most significant points.

Relatives said that Ismail Aman and 23-year-old Buranullah, an earth studies major at Kabul University, had returned from Kabul that morning to celebrate Ramadan with their family. After dinner, relatives said, Ismail and Buranullah studied for exams in the guest room. Around 1:30 a.m., U.S. soldiers burst through the door and started firing, said Wahidullah, 13, who said he was sleeping in the room with his three older brothers. Wahidullah said he heard no call to come outside before the shooting started. U.S. military officials said this week that Wahidullah wasn't in the room and couldn't have known what happened during the shooting.

Photographs of the compound, which the family provided and the U.S. military verified, show three distinct bloodstains on the floor where the brothers were killed. The U.S. military said all three brothers "showed hostile intent towards the assault force." After killing the first brother, the military said, the assault force attempted to get the other two to come out peacefully before it shot them in succession as they tried to grab the weapon. It was only after confronting the brothers in the guest room, said family members who were in the compound that night, that the assault force called in Pashto for people to come out.

One of those interrogated during the raid was Mohammed Aman, a 29-year-old brother who was sleeping in another part of the house. While Mohammed Aman's hands were cuffed and a hood was over his face, he said, his Afghan interrogator slapped him while asking him about Taliban leaders in the village. "They asked me, 'Who are the Taliban sleeping in your room?'" Mohammad Aman said during an interview in Kabul before a memorial service for his brothers.

When the soldiers said that they'd found a weapon in the compound, Aman told his interrogator to show it to him. The soldiers never produced the gun, he said. The brothers' shootings unleashed a protest in the area. Hundreds of Afghans blocked the main road as they shouted anti-American slogans.

Sourced from various newsfeeds in the UK and Middle East

Task Force 373 - Force For Freedom

From The Guardian and Wikileaks:

Shum Khan, a man both deaf and unable to speak, lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he "ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion".

The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for "other government agency") shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded "escalation of force" provisions of the US rules of engagement.

Khan was wounded but survived. The Americans' error was explained to them by village elders, so they fetched out what they term "solatia", or compensation. The classified intelligence report ends briskly: "Solatia was made in the form of supplies and the Element mission progressed".

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. Index here.

Regey Massacre - Investigation Underway

An investigation has begun into another major massacre of civilians by Nato in Helmland Province. Details are still becoming clear since Nato claimed to have investigated and found nothing. Details here.

Al Meghrahi Release - Smoke and Mirrors

This affair helps to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair's most severe critics. Tony Blair's remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the New£abour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It's proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to open an investigation. He says he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Office has quietly declared that Blair's permission will be needed before any records are shown to the public. For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Helen Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: "Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money."

There's a revealing postscript to this story. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the many mega-corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorises his population – "like a brother", according to the Libyan press. There has even been speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In so many ways, it seems, he always has.

Afghans 4 Brits 0 - Lessons of History

'Often they would tell us they preferred the Russians [occupying the country] to the Americans. We were all Americans to them. They would say the Russians left them a better infrastructure and even took some of them on visits to Russia.

'It was often the case that, when we were strong, they would be our friends. When we showed a moment of weakness, they would turn against us. That's the Afghan trait.'

There's a lack of trust between the Nato soldiers and their Afghan counterparts, whether they be police or military. I'm incredibly proud of the British soldier, but there's an awful lot going on. I feel awfully sorry for the troops on the ground. I'm not so proud of the people who put them there.

Who are the enemy? Nine times out of 10, it's the village people who can pick up a gun, fire at you and then hide it back under the floorboards. People just want to be left alone.

The British army has been to Afghanistan four times [in history], and we have lost 4-0. I first went there in 2004, and everything I saw in may last trip last year suggested it has changed for the worse.

Everyone calls it an insurgency. It's not. It's a civil war. It's the Northern Alliance against the Pashtun south. We are taking part on one side in a 30-year civil war. Link'

Human Rights Report - Afghan Civilian Casualties

'The arrival of thousands of additional US/NATO forcesforces into the country, and the desire to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" the insurgents and their al Qaeda associates by military might, bodes ill to civilian Afghans who have suffered the brunt of war casualties. The troop surge and the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as the commander of all US/NATO forces has widely been interpreted as 'the last push before exit' which not only has emboldened the insurgents but has also encouraged Pakistan, Iran and other regional interventionist states to resurface and back proxies for a post-US/NATO Afghanistan.'

Link to Relief Web article and full report here

French General Disciplined For Truth Telling

Agence France Presse

PARIS: France will punish a general who criticised the US-led war effort in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Herve Morin said today, amid growing doubts about the NATO war strategy.
General Vincent Desportes, director of France’s Joint Forces Defence College, which trains staff officers, last week told the daily Le Monde that the situation in Afghanistan “has never been worse”.
Desportes said US President Barack Obama appears unsure of his strategy, that the counterinsurgency plan underway on the ground is not bearing fruit and that American soldiers are unhappy with their leadership.

His comments were an embarrassment for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s French government, which has 3,500 soldiers in Afghanistan fighting alongside Afghan forces in a US-led coalition against a fierce insurgency.
“He will be punished,” Morin told BFM television, adding that he had asked the French chiefs of staff to take administrative action against Desportes, whom he said had shown a “lack of judgement”.
“Until we hear otherwise, soldiers are under the authority of politicians, just like any other public employee,” he warned.
Desportes spoke out shortly after Obama triggered a new round of doubts over the Afghan war when he sacked the US commander of the NATO coalition, General Stanley McChrystal, over his own comments in the media. According to the investigative weekly Canard Enchaine, Desportes’ concerns about the coalition’s strategy are widely shared among senior French officers, one of who described the war as “an unmanageable shitstorm”.
French civilians are also opposed to the war. Opinion polls showed that 80 per cent of voters were against Sarkozy’s decision last year to reinforce the French contingent with additional troops.

'It's an American war', Desportes told Le Monde, complaining that NATO pays no heed to European concerns. 'When you're a one per cent shareholder you don't get to speak out. The allies have no strategic voice.'

NATO Attack Kills More Afghan Soldiers

Josef Blotz, a Nato spokesman, confirmed the attack. He said he regretted the incident and that Isaf would launch an investigation. "The reason for this is perhaps a co-ordination issue," Blotz said. "We were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area." He extended the personal condolences of General David Petraeus, the newly arrived commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, to the families of the victims. A Nato air strike killed four Afghan soldiers in Wardak province in January and the German army accidentally killed five Afghan soldiers in April in a "friendly fire" incident in Kunduz province.

Three thoughts:

I think Blotz could have left the word 'perhaps' out of his first sentence.

It makes a change for NATO to be 'not absolutely clear' whether there are Afghan soldiers in the area as opposed to be being 'not absolutely clear' whether there are Afghan civilans in the area.

It didn't take long for Petraeus to have to trot out the condolences in the context of another NATO bloodbath. It won't be long till the next time(see posts passim).

Kandahar Offensive Creaking Into Motion

Some Afghan bloggers are reporting this morning that there has been a huge escalation in checkpoints and road-blocks by NATO. They suspect this is the long awaited start of the worst-kept military secret in modern neo-colonialist history. Petraeus is possibly looking for some good PR 'Getting Things Done' headlines. Watch out for the spike in civilian (sorry make that 'suspected militants') casualties. The collateral damage to ordinary Afghans(sorry make that 'compound people') by ISAF/NATO goes on. Links here and here. The second incident happened in Kandahar.

Petraeus - Primed To Fail In Afghanistan

Petraeus created the illusion of success in Iraq where the carnage and deadlock continue. Obama hopes he can pull the same trick in Afghanistan. He won't. Short clip on corruption and chaos at the heart of the continuing debacle.

Tony Blair And 'The Politics of Condemnation'

In the days of the long war in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for years used the same response when asked to condemn IRA bombings and killings. They would say 'we are not going to indulge in the politics of condemnation'. Since the Good Friday Agreement the phraseology had become redundant. But Tony Blair, US Middle East Puppet 'Peace Envoy' (God help us) courtesy of George Bush, dusted it off and trotted it out as his weasel worded whitewash for the phosphorous bombing of civilians in Gaza in 2009 by his Israeli friends. Within hours his New Labour acolytes were trotting it out on the BBC and Channel 4 news. The same, exact phrase. Where is the 'Peace Envoy' now that his chums have innocent blood on their hands once again? A deafening and eloquent silence. Surely it merits at least a quote for the Murdoch media along the lines that we shouldn't indulge in the 'politics of...........' Well, you know the rest.  

Bomb Disposal Deaths (2 in a year) 'Unacceptable' Says Coroner

Oh yes? Try 2 deaths among Afghan civilians every half an hour on average as a death rate which is unacceptable, Mr. Coroner? Thought about that?

Latest NATO Killings - Whitewash Unravels

"A lot of times these raids are premised on faulty evidence so someone will give a time to the international forces that "hey, there's an insurgent in this house," a raid will happen, it'll have tragic consequences and then there is just a dead silence."