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

Afghan Strategy Unravelling? No, That Was Years Ago.

Among those whe believe the Afghan War policy is down the toilet and round the u-bend are more than 100 House Democrats who voted against war funding last month, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, a number of internationally based foreign policy commentators and the president of Pakistan. Internal disagreements and confusion between US Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on how substantial will be the US troop withdrawals starting next summer, reflect a false choice. Given the situation and costs in lives and treasure, there seems little doubt that Obama will substantially scale back the U.S. commitment.

Another false debate grew out of the papers recently published on the WikiLeaks Website showing that elements of the Pakistani intelligence agency were cooperating with theTaliban; that was neither surprising nor unexpected.The numbers underscore why this 'strategy' is unsustainable. U.S. casualties this year are likely to double to between 600 and 700, more than during the entire administration of President Bush; July was the deadliest month in the history of the conflict.The Afghan war will cost America $105 billion this fiscal year, more than double what it was costing when Obama took over, and almost twice what the United States is spending on Iraq. Most allies aren’t interested in being part of any long-term plans. The Dutch have withdrawn their soldiers; Canada and Poland will soon do likewise. The largest non-U.S. contingent is the almost 10,000 British troops, and Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested he’d like to pull most of them out in the not-too-distant future. There is hardly any public support in Britain for the debacle.

Yes, We Have No Obamas (Sorry for that one)

There are two overarching factors that make the U.S. policy unsustainable: Public opinion - most Americans now think the war isn’t winnable. And in contrast to the context surrounding the catastrophe in Iraq, the United States is in bad shape financially. Some of the most passionate supporters of the war, such as Senators McCain and the Israel-sponsored Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent are still calling for tax cuts. This is leading to a bad place for Obama and even the normally comatose US public is waking up to the smell of failure and defeat in Afghanistan.

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.

Unusually Long But Justified Rant By Tony

The acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being exposed by the week. The former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this week that the security services had indeed warned Tony Blair's government that aggression against Iraq, "on top of our involvement in Afghanistan", would radicalise a generation of Muslims and "substantially" increase the threat of terror attacks in Britain. A few days earlier, Carne Ross, Britain's former representative at the UN responsible for Iraq before the invasion, told the inquiry that the British government's statements about its assessment of the threat from Saddam Hussein "were, in their totality, lies". My recent posts have links to both statements.

Nine years into the ‘war on terror’ and its litany of torture, kidnapping, atrocities and mass killing these testimonies combine to highlight the utter disgrace of the British political and security establishment who deceived the public about both invasions.

Of course the UK commitment to join the attack on Iraq was clearly never driven by the supposed menace of Saddam or the legal casuistries advanced at the time, but by an overriding commitment to put Britain at the service of US power, under whichever political leadership and wherever that might take it. The "blood price", as Blair called it, for this – David Cameron made explicit last week – subservient relationship had to be paid. Someone said that the special relationship Cameron has been trumpeting in recent days(Brown parroted the same script), is so special that only one side knows about it.

Blair’s blood price is now being paid again in Afghanistan , as the ConDem coalition claims, against all the evidence, that UK troops are dying to keep the streets of Britain safe from terrorism. Cameron and his ministers have pulled out the stops in recent weeks to give the impression that Britain 's commitment to the Afghanistan war isn't open-ended. Yesterday, in the wake of yet another meaningless international conference on Afghanistan , the prime minister pledged to end the British combat role by 2015 while holding out the possibility of a start to withdrawal next year, depending on "conditions on the ground".

It's hardly surprising he feels the need to talk withdrawal. Up to 77% of the British public want troops out in a year. The £4bn annual cost is hard to justify when you're slashing public services. And the rising rate at which British troops are being killed is now proportionally far higher than their US counterparts. If this were maintained for the next five years, the British death toll would rise to over 1,000.

What is Cameron asking those soldiers to die for? Not a single terror attack in Britain – or plot, real or imagined – has been sourced to Afghanistan . Al-Qaida has long since decamped elsewhere – Pakistan , Iraq , Somalia , Yemen . Meanwhile, the strength of the Taliban continues to grow as the number of occupation troops increases, while Afghan civilians are dying in their thousands every year. There's no reason to believe the situation will be fundamentally different in four years' time.

Obama's presidency is now dangerously in hock to hawkish generals such as James Mattis (see posts passim) who declared it was "a hell of a lot of fun to shoot" Afghans

The public been accustomed to the fact that Iraq has been a disaster; now they are getting used to seeing the war in Afghanistan in the same light. It has failed in every one of its ever-changing objectives – from preventing the spread of terrorism and eradicating opium production to promoting democracy and the position of women, which has actually deteriorated under NATO according to Afghan women's groups.

What is now taking place in Afghanistan reinforces what has already been demonstrated in Iraq - namely the limits of US power to impose its will by force. If the might of the American military can be seen off by a militia on old motorbikes in one of the poorest countries of the world, the implications for the new international order are profound. Which is why the US and its closest allies will do everything to avoid the appearance of defeat – and why many thousands more Afghans and NATO troops will pay the price of a war their leaders now accept can never be won.

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

Gardez Raid Probe Excluded Key Witnesses

'But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and the brother of a police officer and a prosecutor killed in the raid all said in interviews with IPS last week that they had never been contacted by US investigators about what they had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators. In an interview with IPS, Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the bullets from bodies of my daughter and others." Tahir said that he and as many as seven other eyewitnesses had told interior ministry investigators about the attempted cover up they had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been interviewed by the US military." Link

Thanks to John for the link.

The Last Days of The Americans

Thoughtful and informed analysis by William Dalrymple. Excerpt:

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. "It is exactly the same," said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, 'We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.' But they are lying." ...“Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power," [said] Jegdalek. "But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny - our fate is always determined by our neighbours. Next, it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans."...

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.

History Repeating As Tragic Farce

In 1842, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

FF to the present day and Obama has announced that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. The start of the US withdrawal is likely to begin a rush to evacuate the other Nato forces located in pockets around the country: the Dutch have announced that they will be pulling out of Uruzgan this summer, and the Canadian and Danes won't be far behind them. Nor will the Brits, despite assurances from Hague and Fox. A recent poll showed that 72 per cent of Britons want the troops out of Afghanistan immediately, and there is only so long any government can hold out against such strong public opinion. Certainly, it is time to shed the idea that a pro-western puppet regime that excludes the Pashtuns can remain in place in Afghanistan indefinitely. The Karzai government is crumbling before our eyes, and if we delude ourselves that this is not the case, we could yet face a replay of 1842.

Obama At West Point

Speaking to graduating cadets at West Point last Saturday, President Obama noted the "ultimate sacrifice" of 78 of their predecessors who gave up their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he did not mention that just days before, five U.S. soldiers were killed in Kabul, bringing the toll of American dead in Afghanistan to over 1,000. The picture here could be captioned ' Yippee - let's go zap Charlie Towelhead'. How does Obama think this stuff (including the images) plays across the world and in the Middle East?