Reporting for Aljazeera online, Spencer Ackerman writes on the unprecedented CIA’s drone attacks in Waziristan areas of Pakistan (Dec. 17, 2010). Before delving further into his article, I draw information from Wikipedia that helps us to locate Waziristan in Pakistan, its official designation, and why it is important to the CIA and US military forces stationed in Afghanistan.
According to Wikipedia,
“Waziristan (Pashto and Urdu: وزیرستان, "land of the Wazir") is a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan and covering some 11,585 km² (4,473 sq mi). It is part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, considered to be outside the country's four provinces.
“Waziristan comprises the area west and southwest of Peshawar between the Tochi River to the north and the Gomal River to the south. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa lies immediately to the east. The region was an independent tribal territory until 1893, remaining outside the British Empire. Tribal raiding into British-ruled territory was a constant problem for the British,[1] eliciting frequent punitive expeditions between 1860 and 1945. The region became part of Pakistan in 1947. [See map from Wikipedia below.]
“For administrative purposes, Waziristan is divided into two "agencies", North Waziristan and South Waziristan, with estimated populations (as of 1998) of 361,246 and 429,841 respectively. The two parts have quite distinct characteristics, though both tribes are subgroups of the Wazir Tribe and speak a common Wazirwola language. They have a reputation as formidable warriors,[2] and are known for their frequent blood feuds.[citation needed]
“The Wazir tribes are divided into sub-tribes governed by male village elders who meet in a tribal jirga. Socially and religiously, Waziristan is an extremely conservative area. Women are carefully guarded, and every household must be headed by a male figure. Tribal cohesiveness is also kept strong by means of the so-called Collective Responsibility Acts in the Frontier Crimes Regulation.
“Taliban presence in the area has been an issue of international concern in the War on Terrorism particularly since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.”
Expansion of Drone Warfare
Once focused on South Waziristan, the CIA drone attacks have been expanded to and increasingly concentrated on North Waziristan. Ackerman writes:
“Over the past two days, four Predators or Reapers fired their missiles at suspected militants in North Waziristan, with three of the strikes coming early today.
“They represent a geographic expansion of the drone war. Today’s strikes come in Khyber, an area abutting Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, that’s been notably drone-free. It has become an area for militants fleeing military action in South Waziristan to take succor.”
As drone attacks have been expanded geographically, they have also increased in number. The “drone-strike tally for this year,” Ackerman reports, [is] “up to 113, more than twice last year’s 53 strikes.” But there is more.
“According to a tally kept by the Long War Journal, 58 of those strikes have come since September: There has been a drone attack every 1.8 days since Labor Day. LWJ’s Bill Roggio says the pace of attacks between September and November (there was a brief December respite, now erased) is “unprecedented since the U.S. began the air campaign in Pakistan in 2004.” (By contrast, in 2008, there were just 34 strikes.)
And the majority of the drone attacks in 2010 have “clustered in North Waziristan.”
“Both Roggio and the New America Foundation have found that the overwhelming majority of this year’s strikes have clustered in North Waziristan: at least 99, by Roggio’s count.”
What are drones? The following information is from Wikipedia, “General Atomics MQ-1 Predator.”
“The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Initially conceived in the early 1990s for reconnaissance and forward observation roles, the Predator carries cameras and other sensors but has been modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft, in use since 1995, has seen combat over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, and Yemen.
“The USAF describes the Predator as a "Tier II" MALE UAS (medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV system). The UAS consists of four aircraft or "air vehicles" with sensors, a ground control station (GCS), and a primary satellite link communication suite.[3] Powered by a Rotax engine and driven by a propeller, the air vehicle can fly up to 400 nautical miles (740 km) to a target, loiter overhead for 14 hours, then return to its base.
“Following 2001, the RQ-1 Predator drone became the primary UAV used for offensive operations by the USAF and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas. It has also been deployed in other locations. Because offensive uses of the Predator are classified, US military officials have reported an appreciation for the intelligence and reconnaissance-gathering abilities of UAVs but declined to discuss their offensive use in public.[4]”
Effects on and responses from Pakistanis to Drone attacks
Ackerman:
“It may take years, but some researcher will travel to Pakistan’s tribal areas and produce a definitive study on what it’s been like to live amidst an aerial bombardment from American pilotless aircraft. When that account inevitably comes out, it’s likely to find that 2010 — and especially the final quarter of 2010 — marked a turning point in how civilians coped with a drone war that turned relentless.”
[….]
“But no one knows whether a backlash is just around the corner. While most Pakistanis remain ignorant of the strikes, those in the tribal areas live literally in their shadow, and register enormous discontent, approving of retaliatory attacks on U.S. forces.
“Reportedly, the CIA’s top officer in Islamabad has fled Pakistan after a man from North Waziristan whose son and brother were killed in a strike filed a lawsuit against the agency.
“There’s no official or universally accepted figure of how many civilians have died as a result of the strikes, but New America pegs it at around 25 percent of all fatalities. Long War Journal’s registry is more generous, claiming that 1,671 militants and 108 civilians have died in the strikes since 2006.”
Are the Drone Attacks Legal?
From Ackerman: “Then there’s the question of whether the strikes are legal. Obama administration claims that the September 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force in retaliation for 9/11 provides all the legal protection necessary for the strikes. Some lawyers and law professors, by contrast, think that the drones’ remote pilots could eventually get hauled before a war-crimes tribunal.
“A United Nations report urged Obama to rein in the drones, restricting them to attacks on the seniormost militants. He did the opposite.
“Don’t expect him to heed that warning in 2011 either. After reading the administration’s war-progress report, The New York Times‘ David Sanger noted that background discussions with administration officials made it clear that next year “the pace will be picked up.” The technology certainly enables it: The Predator is giving way to the Reaper drone, which carries a bigger payload; while weapons manufacturers are lightening the weights of air-launched precision missiles.
[….]
“However targeted the strikes may be, the hundreds of thousands of civilians in North Waziristan and the rest of the tribal areas live with the anxiety of the missiles overhead. How long can the U.S. avoid a reckoning?” [End of quotes from Ackerman.]
For more information on the legality of the CIA drone attacks on Waziristan, see David W. Glazier’s statement before the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs on April 28, 2010. The Subcommittee hearings addressed the topic “Rise of the Drone II: Examining the Legality of Unmanned Targeting.” Glazier is a Professor of Law at the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. You can find the full six page testimony at: www.fas.org/irp/2010_hr/042810glazier.pdf - In finishing his statement, Glazier says:
“But some matters, such as the use of CIA personnel to conduct armed attacks clearly fall outside the scope of permissible conduct and ought to be reconsidered, particularly as the United States seeks to prosecute members of its adversaries for generally similar conduct.”
Drone attacks may generate instability in Pakistan and backlash against the US.
Anatol Lieven offers his assessment of the implications in a long, informative article published in The Nation magazine, January 3, 2011issue. Lieven is “a professor in the war studies department of King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New American Foundation in Washington.” His thought: we are playing with fire. Here are a few of his paragraphs from the article, highlighting various issues on why Pakistan is important in the US-led Afghanistan war/occupation and generally for the stability of the region and globally.
“The top leadership of the Afghan Taliban is based in Pakistani Baluchistan under the protection of Pakistani military intelligence, and Pakistan has prevented the United States from launching drone attacks on them there (in contrast with the intensive campaign against targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to the north). Taliban forces use Pakistani territory for rest and recuperation, with the support of the local Pashtun population. Pakistan also has close ties to the two other Afghan Pashtun Islamist forces allied to the Taliban, the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network in the Afghan region of Greater Paktika. All of this gives Pakistan considerable influence over the Afghan Taliban—though it must be stressed that this influence is also limited. Any settlement brokered by Pakistan would have to be one the Taliban could accept without humiliation.
“But if Pakistan is vital to a settlement, Pakistan is also vital in itself. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the survival of Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the most important issue for Western and global security in that region. With six times Afghanistan's population, plus nuclear weapons, a highly trained 500,000-man army and a huge diaspora (especially in Britain), Pakistan would increase the international terrorist threat by orders of magnitude if it collapsed. There is a widespread (though exaggerated) view in the West that the weakness of the Pakistani state and the strength of Islamist support makes the country's collapse a real possibility. Leaving aside the danger (as exposed by WikiLeaks) of nuclear materials and skills reaching terrorist groups, the disintegration of the Pakistani army, with its highly trained engineers and anti-aircraft forces, would vastly increase the "conventional" terrorist threat to India and the West.
“It was therefore with horror that I recently heard that the diminished threat from Al Qaeda means that some Western security officials are suggesting that the West can afford to put much more pressure on Islamabad to attack Taliban strongholds in Pakistan's border region, even though this may lead to greater destabilization within Pakistan. This is lunatic reasoning. The diminished power of Al Qaeda should be cause for the United States and NATO to find ways to withdraw from Afghanistan, not step up the fight against the Taliban—since it was to fight Al Qaeda that we went there in the first place. As for the terrorist threat to the West, this has never come from the Afghan Taliban—but it increasingly comes from the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, as the case of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad demonstrates.
“Unfortunately, the current US strategy is headed in the opposite direction from using Pakistan to broker a settlement, and toward an intensified fight against the Taliban and intensified pressure on Pakistan. Even worse, there are barely the rudiments of a Plan B if that strategy fails. If it proves impossible to strengthen the Afghan National Army sufficiently within the next two years, the options will be stark: either US forces will have to fight on in Afghanistan indefinitely or they will have to accept the probable loss of the south and east of the country and either unending civil war or de facto partition through bloody war rather than negotiated agreement. Among other things, all these options will be bad for Pakistan, especially if India is drawn into much greater support for the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. This would in effect lead to an Indo-Pakistani proxy war in Afghanistan.”
[….]
In his concluding paragraph, Lieven writes:
“Behind all these questions lies once again the issue of Pakistan’s role, Pakistan’s future and the US role in that future. Since our options for coercing Pakistan are so limited – at least, without actions that would risk destroying Pakistan and involving us in far worse disasters – we should try to make the best of an admittedly very difficult situation and seek Pakistan’s help in finding a settlement to the Afghanistan conflict.”
In sum, the US is prosecuting a war/occupation in Afghanistan by expanding it into Pakistan, increasing the use of drones, which are of dubious legality, violating the sovereignty of Pakistan, causing civilian casualties, raising the level of anger and hatred of Pakistanis toward the US, potentially undermining the fragile stability of the Pakistan state, and avoiding real negotiations with the Taliban leaders. As Anatol Lieven notes, “This [or something like this] is lunatic reasoning.”
Showing posts with label drones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drones. Show all posts
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Indications that the war in Afghanistan will last for years to come
Rick Rozoff's article on Global Research.ca today describes developments in Afghanistan that indicate US military and allied forces will remain in the country for many years to come, as the number of occupational forces increase, the number of bases in Afghanistan and in surrounding countries increase, as military actions become more multifaceted, and despite the rising deaths and casualties among US and allied troops. Rozoff notes also that US troop and drone attacks in Pakistan are causing some tension in Pakistan-US relations. This, along with massive government corruption, increasing insurgent and Taliban advances, a lack of progress in meeting the needs of the great majority of Afghans, appear to conflict with the US generals' dreams of success.
Still, there is strong bipartisan support in the US Congress for the funding of this war. Last July, the Senate supported by a voice vote supplemental funding of over $30 billion for US military forces in Afghanistan. The House passed the request by a vote of 308 to 114. Obama then signed it. A few months later General Patraeus tested the waters, unofficially suggesting even more troops were needed. Congress has not dealt with any further requests. But, sadly, the Obama administration and the US Congress have a proven record of supporting American war efforts and increased military budgets when asked. A rubber-stamp. The US government and military appear not to be deterred in this unending war by rising US troop casualties and seem little concerned about Afghan deaths and the continuing devastation to that country's infrastructure, economy, education, health care, water, and other basic services.
Here are some paragraphs from Rozoff's article.
[....]
"October 7 will mark the advent of the tenth year of the US war in Afghanistan. NATO joined the war on September 12, 2001, "invoking its Article 5 collective military assistance clause." The combined US and NATO forces are referred to as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
[There is little doubt, though, that this is an American-led military occupation.]
"There are now at least 152,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 under NATO command [US dominates the command], according to several recent statements by American and NATO officials most if not all of them will remain there byond the 2011 withdrawal date announced by the American administration last year."
[....]
American and Alliance military bases have expanded into other central Asian countries - "Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - and the elaboration of networks for the transit of troops, military equipment and supplies and for combat and training and bombing runs from Estonia and Latvia on the Baltic Sea to Georgia on the Black Sea and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistand on the Casbian Sea as well as in several other nations from Eastern Europe to the so-called Broader Middle East, including Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Diego Garcia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Kazakhstan."
[....]
"US and NATO deaths for 2009 and so far this year account for over half of the total of 2,129 killed since the beginning of the war: 1,082."
[....]
Drone attacks are increasing. Rozoff: "The Washington Post...disclosed that massive intensification of drone warfare 'represents a significant evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program, run by the CIA, which in the past month...has been delivering what amounts to a cross-border bombing campaign in coordination with the conventional military operations a few miles away."
[....]
"The integrated strategy the US and NATO are purusing is threefold: Counterinsurgency operations, including targeted assassinations, in Afghanistan's eastern and southern povinces bordering Pakistan; an unprecedented escalation of drone missile strikes in northwestern Pakistan; and attacks by helicopter gunships in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in combination with drone strikes."
[....]
"The Pakistan government has 'halted NATO supply trucks and oil tankers from entering Afghanistan, which policy remainsin force with 160 vehicles stopped near the border on Oct. 5."
Still, there is strong bipartisan support in the US Congress for the funding of this war. Last July, the Senate supported by a voice vote supplemental funding of over $30 billion for US military forces in Afghanistan. The House passed the request by a vote of 308 to 114. Obama then signed it. A few months later General Patraeus tested the waters, unofficially suggesting even more troops were needed. Congress has not dealt with any further requests. But, sadly, the Obama administration and the US Congress have a proven record of supporting American war efforts and increased military budgets when asked. A rubber-stamp. The US government and military appear not to be deterred in this unending war by rising US troop casualties and seem little concerned about Afghan deaths and the continuing devastation to that country's infrastructure, economy, education, health care, water, and other basic services.
Here are some paragraphs from Rozoff's article.
[....]
"October 7 will mark the advent of the tenth year of the US war in Afghanistan. NATO joined the war on September 12, 2001, "invoking its Article 5 collective military assistance clause." The combined US and NATO forces are referred to as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
[There is little doubt, though, that this is an American-led military occupation.]
"There are now at least 152,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 under NATO command [US dominates the command], according to several recent statements by American and NATO officials most if not all of them will remain there byond the 2011 withdrawal date announced by the American administration last year."
[....]
American and Alliance military bases have expanded into other central Asian countries - "Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - and the elaboration of networks for the transit of troops, military equipment and supplies and for combat and training and bombing runs from Estonia and Latvia on the Baltic Sea to Georgia on the Black Sea and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistand on the Casbian Sea as well as in several other nations from Eastern Europe to the so-called Broader Middle East, including Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Diego Garcia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Kazakhstan."
[....]
"US and NATO deaths for 2009 and so far this year account for over half of the total of 2,129 killed since the beginning of the war: 1,082."
[....]
Drone attacks are increasing. Rozoff: "The Washington Post...disclosed that massive intensification of drone warfare 'represents a significant evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program, run by the CIA, which in the past month...has been delivering what amounts to a cross-border bombing campaign in coordination with the conventional military operations a few miles away."
[....]
"The integrated strategy the US and NATO are purusing is threefold: Counterinsurgency operations, including targeted assassinations, in Afghanistan's eastern and southern povinces bordering Pakistan; an unprecedented escalation of drone missile strikes in northwestern Pakistan; and attacks by helicopter gunships in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in combination with drone strikes."
[....]
"The Pakistan government has 'halted NATO supply trucks and oil tankers from entering Afghanistan, which policy remainsin force with 160 vehicles stopped near the border on Oct. 5."
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Drone attacks kill civilians in Waziristan
Juan Cole makes it clear today in the following report from his blog, Informed Comment, that there is not just one monolithic insurgent group of Taliban. Rather, there are five or so such groups. He refers to "fighters of the Haqqani network" as one non-Taliban group. Ironically, Cole writes, the Haqqani network was one of the group's identified by Ronald Reagan as "Freedom Fighters" during the 1980s. Now they are the target of US drone attacks, and in the process unmanned drone weapons are killing more civilians than insurgents. Drone warfare and counterinsurgency, Gen. Patraeus' strategy in Afghanistan, appear in essential ways to be contradictory and hardly to advance the goal of "winning hearts and minds."
Juan Cole, "US Drone Strikes kill 15 [60] in N. Waziristan"
http://www.juancole.com/, Sept. 15, 2010
The Associated Press does an important story about an intensive drone strike campaign by the US military since September 2 in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s North Waziristan that has left 60 persons dead, among them innocent civilians.
On Tuesday alone, US drone attacks targeted suspected militants killed some 15 persons in the village of Dargah Mandi village on the outskirts of Miranshah, N. Waziristan’s main city.
The drone strikes have targeted fighters of the Haqqani network, one of five or so major insurgent groups fighting against the US & NATO presence in Afghanistan and against the Karzai government. Jalaluddin Haqqani is one of Ronald Reagan’s “Freedom Fighters,” who battled the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s with American aid. He could not accept the US invasion and occupation of his country, either, and organized an insurgency now mainly led by his son Siraj. The Haqqani group is not Taliban but rather Mujahidin and has only a vague tactical alliance with Mulla Omar’s Taliban and similar groups.
Pakistani opposition to the US incursions against Pakistani sovereignty has been muted because of the vast flooding that has affected much of the country, and dealing with which has pinned down the Pakistani military. Another 25 villages in the Sindh province were submerged by flood waters on Tuesday. Hundreds of more villages are menaced by the waters of Manchhal Lake, which is now full to capacity and could overflow. Incredibly, the flooding continues to displace Sindhi villagers on a massive scale without generating much in the way of news in the US. The displaced are facing lack of potable water and food shortages.
Juan Cole, "US Drone Strikes kill 15 [60] in N. Waziristan"
http://www.juancole.com/, Sept. 15, 2010
The Associated Press does an important story about an intensive drone strike campaign by the US military since September 2 in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s North Waziristan that has left 60 persons dead, among them innocent civilians.
On Tuesday alone, US drone attacks targeted suspected militants killed some 15 persons in the village of Dargah Mandi village on the outskirts of Miranshah, N. Waziristan’s main city.
The drone strikes have targeted fighters of the Haqqani network, one of five or so major insurgent groups fighting against the US & NATO presence in Afghanistan and against the Karzai government. Jalaluddin Haqqani is one of Ronald Reagan’s “Freedom Fighters,” who battled the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s with American aid. He could not accept the US invasion and occupation of his country, either, and organized an insurgency now mainly led by his son Siraj. The Haqqani group is not Taliban but rather Mujahidin and has only a vague tactical alliance with Mulla Omar’s Taliban and similar groups.
Pakistani opposition to the US incursions against Pakistani sovereignty has been muted because of the vast flooding that has affected much of the country, and dealing with which has pinned down the Pakistani military. Another 25 villages in the Sindh province were submerged by flood waters on Tuesday. Hundreds of more villages are menaced by the waters of Manchhal Lake, which is now full to capacity and could overflow. Incredibly, the flooding continues to displace Sindhi villagers on a massive scale without generating much in the way of news in the US. The displaced are facing lack of potable water and food shortages.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Bombings by US air force and Taliban, increase in violence and casualties
As usual, Juan Cole provides information that keeps readers up-to-date on events in Afghanistan and across the region and in the Middle East. The substance of Juan's post today, June 20, 2010, is captured by his headlines: "U.S. Strikes Kill Civlians in Khost. Bombings Rock Helmand Capital. Roadside Bombings Double."
Juan Cole, Informed Comment, June 20, 2010
Things are not going well for the Obama administration in Afghanistan, and the only good news for the White House is that almost no one in the United States seems to be paying attention.
Supposedly precision strikes by the US air force against the militant Haqqani Network in Khost province in the south of the country appear to have gone awry and killed 10 civilians. Errant fighter-jet and drone strikes that kill civilians is the number one complaint of Afghans against the growing US military presence, and this incident will further fan the flames of that fuel.
The USG Open Source Center translated an article about the innocent civilians being mistakenly bombarded, which appeared in the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto on Saturday June 19. It claims not 10 dead but 20, and note that it is getting these figures from officials of the Karzai government.
Khost, 19 June: A bombardment has inflicted heavy civilian casualties.Last night, from 18 to 19 June, foreign aircraft bombarded some villages in Mosakhel District of Khost Province, inflicting civilian casualties.
The Khost security commander, Abdol Hakim Ishaqzai, told Afghan Islamic Press in this regard that foreign aircraft had bombarded Mosakhel District during an operation, as a result of which five civilians were killed. The security commander confirmed that women and children were also among the killed people.
On the other hand, the head of the provincial council in Khost, Mohammad Shafiq Mojahed, told Afghan Islamic Press about civilian casualties that based on his primary information, six civilians had been killed and four others wounded in the bombardments. He added that the bombardments continued by the foreign aircraft this morning as well, but he did not know why the foreign aircraft bombarded the area.
The ISAF press office in Khost told Afghan Islamic Press that the foreign aircraft had dropped only one bomb on a military training centre of the Taleban in the area, which inflicted no casualties to civilians.
While the NATO press office denies civilian casualties, a resident of Mosakhel District, Hazrat Wali, told Afghan Islamic Press this afternoon that at least 20 civilians had been killed and 16 others wounded in the bombardments. Speaking angrily to the Afghan Islamic Press, Hazrat Wali added “The aircraft started bombardments on four villages in the areas of Madar, Tishanki, Lezhagi and Khairi at 2200 (local time; 1730 gmt) while the helicopters still fly over the area.”
He said: “We have taken 20 bodies from under debris so far. The killed include women, children and old people who are all civilians and there are no Taleban among them.”Giving more details, Hazrat Wali said: “We took five dead bodies from under debris in Madar village, four of whom were children and one of them was a woman. We also took seven bodies out of debris in Tishanki village, three bodies in Khairi village and four bodies in Lezhagi village. Also, a young kid who was running away from the bombardment near Lezhagi village was martyred.”
Hazrat Wali further said that 16 wounded people had also been taken out of debris in these villages and taken to nearby health centres in the area for treatment.
Regarding the current situation in the area, he said: “Some people have packed their belongings and escaped to different directions. They do not know where to go and do not know why they were bombarded.”
The Taleban have not commented on the incident.
(Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans, that describes itself as an independent “news agency” but whose history and reporting pattern reveal a perceptible pro-Taliban bias; the AIP’s founder-director, Mohammad Yaqub Sharafat, has long been associated with a mujahidin faction that merged with the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate” led by Mullah Omar; subscription required to access content; http://www.afghanislamicpress.com)
More bad news. On Sunday, two bombs rocked the provincial city of Lashkar Gah, killing 3 and wounding 23 other civilians. A bank and a school were the two targets.
The reason these bombings are bad news is that Lashkar Gah is the capital of Helmand province and is the city from which the Marjah campaign of this winter-spring was launched. Bombings in Lashkar Gah are a worrisome sign that the Marjah campaign did not entirely succeed. (That Marjah was not the success it was ballyhooed to be was first recognized by the McClatchy wire service reporters, who have consistently been ahead of the curve in both Afghanistan and Iraq.)
And then to cap it all off, the UN came out with a report this weekend that reveals that the number of suicide bombings has doubled in 2010 as opposed to 2009.z And, the number of assassinations is also up, to one a day.
Finally, the LAT reports that attempts by the US to set up anti-Taliban militias have not yielded the desired results.
Juan Cole, Informed Comment, June 20, 2010
Things are not going well for the Obama administration in Afghanistan, and the only good news for the White House is that almost no one in the United States seems to be paying attention.
Supposedly precision strikes by the US air force against the militant Haqqani Network in Khost province in the south of the country appear to have gone awry and killed 10 civilians. Errant fighter-jet and drone strikes that kill civilians is the number one complaint of Afghans against the growing US military presence, and this incident will further fan the flames of that fuel.
The USG Open Source Center translated an article about the innocent civilians being mistakenly bombarded, which appeared in the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto on Saturday June 19. It claims not 10 dead but 20, and note that it is getting these figures from officials of the Karzai government.
Khost, 19 June: A bombardment has inflicted heavy civilian casualties.Last night, from 18 to 19 June, foreign aircraft bombarded some villages in Mosakhel District of Khost Province, inflicting civilian casualties.
The Khost security commander, Abdol Hakim Ishaqzai, told Afghan Islamic Press in this regard that foreign aircraft had bombarded Mosakhel District during an operation, as a result of which five civilians were killed. The security commander confirmed that women and children were also among the killed people.
On the other hand, the head of the provincial council in Khost, Mohammad Shafiq Mojahed, told Afghan Islamic Press about civilian casualties that based on his primary information, six civilians had been killed and four others wounded in the bombardments. He added that the bombardments continued by the foreign aircraft this morning as well, but he did not know why the foreign aircraft bombarded the area.
The ISAF press office in Khost told Afghan Islamic Press that the foreign aircraft had dropped only one bomb on a military training centre of the Taleban in the area, which inflicted no casualties to civilians.
While the NATO press office denies civilian casualties, a resident of Mosakhel District, Hazrat Wali, told Afghan Islamic Press this afternoon that at least 20 civilians had been killed and 16 others wounded in the bombardments. Speaking angrily to the Afghan Islamic Press, Hazrat Wali added “The aircraft started bombardments on four villages in the areas of Madar, Tishanki, Lezhagi and Khairi at 2200 (local time; 1730 gmt) while the helicopters still fly over the area.”
He said: “We have taken 20 bodies from under debris so far. The killed include women, children and old people who are all civilians and there are no Taleban among them.”Giving more details, Hazrat Wali said: “We took five dead bodies from under debris in Madar village, four of whom were children and one of them was a woman. We also took seven bodies out of debris in Tishanki village, three bodies in Khairi village and four bodies in Lezhagi village. Also, a young kid who was running away from the bombardment near Lezhagi village was martyred.”
Hazrat Wali further said that 16 wounded people had also been taken out of debris in these villages and taken to nearby health centres in the area for treatment.
Regarding the current situation in the area, he said: “Some people have packed their belongings and escaped to different directions. They do not know where to go and do not know why they were bombarded.”
The Taleban have not commented on the incident.
(Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans, that describes itself as an independent “news agency” but whose history and reporting pattern reveal a perceptible pro-Taliban bias; the AIP’s founder-director, Mohammad Yaqub Sharafat, has long been associated with a mujahidin faction that merged with the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate” led by Mullah Omar; subscription required to access content; http://www.afghanislamicpress.com)
More bad news. On Sunday, two bombs rocked the provincial city of Lashkar Gah, killing 3 and wounding 23 other civilians. A bank and a school were the two targets.
The reason these bombings are bad news is that Lashkar Gah is the capital of Helmand province and is the city from which the Marjah campaign of this winter-spring was launched. Bombings in Lashkar Gah are a worrisome sign that the Marjah campaign did not entirely succeed. (That Marjah was not the success it was ballyhooed to be was first recognized by the McClatchy wire service reporters, who have consistently been ahead of the curve in both Afghanistan and Iraq.)
And then to cap it all off, the UN came out with a report this weekend that reveals that the number of suicide bombings has doubled in 2010 as opposed to 2009.z And, the number of assassinations is also up, to one a day.
Finally, the LAT reports that attempts by the US to set up anti-Taliban militias have not yielded the desired results.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Obama wants more money to support surge in Afghanistan
Published on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 by the Associated Press
Obama Wants $33 Billion More for Wars
Comes on top of record $708 billion request for next year
by Anne Gearan and Anne Flaherty
The Obama administration plans to ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.
US soldiers, members of the protection squad of a Provincial Reconstruction team walk near Bargram Air Base, about 60 kms from Kabul on January 11. (AFP/File/Joel Saget) The administration also plans to tell Congress next month that its central military objectives for the next four years will include winning the current wars while preventing new ones, and its core missions will include both counterinsurgency and counterterror operations.
The administration's Quadrennial Defense Review, the main articulation of U.S. military doctrine, is due in Congress on Feb. 1. Top military commanders were briefed on the document at the Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday. They also received a preview of the administration's budget plans through 2015.
The four-year review outlines six crucial mission areas and spells out capabilities and goals the Pentagon wants to develop. The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with a goal of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expansion of Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.
The extra $33 billion in 2010 would go mostly toward expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Obama ordered an extra 30,000 troops for that war as part of an overhaul of the war strategy late last year.
The request for that additional funding will be sent to Congress at the same time as the record spending request for next year, making financing the war an especially difficult pill for some of Obama's Democratic allies to swallow.
Military officials have suggested that the 2011 request would top $700 billion for the first time, but the precise figure has not been made public.
U.S. officials outlined the coming requests on condition of anonymity because the budget request will not be sent to Congress until later this month.
© 2010 Associated Press
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/13-1
Obama Wants $33 Billion More for Wars
Comes on top of record $708 billion request for next year
by Anne Gearan and Anne Flaherty
The Obama administration plans to ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.
US soldiers, members of the protection squad of a Provincial Reconstruction team walk near Bargram Air Base, about 60 kms from Kabul on January 11. (AFP/File/Joel Saget) The administration also plans to tell Congress next month that its central military objectives for the next four years will include winning the current wars while preventing new ones, and its core missions will include both counterinsurgency and counterterror operations.
The administration's Quadrennial Defense Review, the main articulation of U.S. military doctrine, is due in Congress on Feb. 1. Top military commanders were briefed on the document at the Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday. They also received a preview of the administration's budget plans through 2015.
The four-year review outlines six crucial mission areas and spells out capabilities and goals the Pentagon wants to develop. The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with a goal of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expansion of Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.
The extra $33 billion in 2010 would go mostly toward expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Obama ordered an extra 30,000 troops for that war as part of an overhaul of the war strategy late last year.
The request for that additional funding will be sent to Congress at the same time as the record spending request for next year, making financing the war an especially difficult pill for some of Obama's Democratic allies to swallow.
Military officials have suggested that the 2011 request would top $700 billion for the first time, but the precise figure has not been made public.
U.S. officials outlined the coming requests on condition of anonymity because the budget request will not be sent to Congress until later this month.
© 2010 Associated Press
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/13-1
Monday, January 11, 2010
Surge in the secret US war in Afghanistan
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse report on the secret operations in CIA (or black site) bases, including CIA Special Forces, non-CIA uniformed and civilian personnel serving with the Department of Defense, American contractors (often ex-military mercenaries), and privatized Afghan guard forces. The "forward-operating" bases are located in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan. They operate independently of the military chain-of-command. Members of this shadowy militarized intelligence force are involved in attempts to assassinate high-ranking members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, sometimes making night-raids on homes in villages and on some occassions killing innocent civilians, identify targets for drones, and engage in other "intelligence" gathering activities.
The number of the personnel involved in these covert activities will increase over the next eighteen months. Just the employees of private contractor are expected to rise by 56,000 over this time. The cost of these escalating operations are unknown. One thing is clear, according to Engelhardt and Turse, the personnel at these bases are involved in missions that are the antithesis of the counter-insurgency policy we hear so much about.
They also note that just last week seven of the operatives on one base were blown up by a suicide bomber, suggesting that the intelligence and special operations on the other side can be effective as well. Sad, but not too surprising since they speak the local language, know something about the village social structures, are familiar with the terrain, and perhaps are able to take advantage of the growing sentiment against the US-led occupation.
Bob
Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan
Posted By Tom Engelhardt On January 10, 2010 @ 11:00 pm
http://original.antiwar.com/englehardt/2010/01/the-new-cia-battlefield-in-afghanistan
It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case – except for the placement of the bomb material – almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.
That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, U.S. and NATO forces deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, released a report in which he labeled military intelligence in the war zone – but by implication U.S. intelligence operatives generally – “clueless.” They were, he wrote, “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced … and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers. … Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.”
As if to prove the general’s point, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor with a penchant for writing inspirational essays on jihadi Web sites and an “unproven asset” for the CIA, somehow entered a key Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan unsearched, supposedly with information on al-Qaeda’s leadership so crucial that a high-level CIA team was assembled to hear it and Washington was alerted. He proved to be either a double or a triple agent and killed seven CIA operatives, one of whom was the base chief, by detonating a suicide vest bomb, while wounding yet more, including the Agency’s number-two operative in the country. The first suicide bomber to penetrate a U.S. base in Afghanistan, he blew a hole in the CIA’s relatively small cadre of agents knowledgeable on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
It was an intelligence disaster splayed all over the headlines: “Taliban bomber wrecks CIA’s shadowy war,” “Killings Rock Afghan Strategy,” “Suicide bomber who attacked CIA post was trusted informant from Jordan.” It seemed to sum up the hapless nature of America’s intelligence operations as the CIA, with all the latest technology and every imaginable resource on hand, including the latest in Hellfire-missile-armed drone aircraft, was out-thought and out-maneuvered by low-tech enemies.
No one could say that the deaths and the blow to the American war effort weren’t well covered. There were major TV reports night after night and scores of news stories, many given front-page treatment. And yet lurking behind those deaths and the man who caused them lay a bigger American war story that went largely untold. It was a tale of a new-style battlefield that the American public knows remarkably little about, and that bears little relationship to the Afghan War as we imagine it or as our leaders generally discuss it.
We don’t even have a language to describe it accurately. Think of it as a battlefield filled with muscled-up, militarized intelligence operatives, hired-gun contractors doing military duty, and privatized “native” guard forces. Add in robot assassins in the air 24/7 and kick-down-the-door-style nighttime”intelligence” raids, “surges” you didn’t know were happening, strings of military bases you had no idea were out there, and secretive international collaborations you were unaware the U.S. was involved in. In Afghanistan, the American military is only part of the story. There’s also a polyglot “army” representing the U.S. that wears no uniforms and fights shape-shifting enemies to the death in a murderous war of multiple assassinations and civilian slaughter, all enveloped in a blanket of secrecy.
Black Ops and Black Sites
Secrecy is, of course, a part of war. The surprise attack is only a surprise if secrecy is maintained. In wartime, crucial information must be kept from an enemy capable of using it. But what if, as in our case, wartime never ends, while secrecy becomes endemic, as well as profitable and privitizable, and much of the information available to both sides on our shadowy new battlefield is mainly being kept from the American people? The coverage of the suicide attack on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman offered a rare, very partial window into that strange war – but only if you were willing to read piles of news reports looking for tiny bits of information that could be pieced together.
We did just that and here’s what we found:
Let’s start with FOB Chapman, where the suicide bombing took place. An old Soviet base near the Pakistani border, it was renamed after a Green Beret who fought beside CIA agents and was the first American to die in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It sits in isolation near the town of Khost, just miles from the larger Camp Salerno, a forward operating base used mainly by U.S. Special Operations troops. Occupied by the CIA since 2001, Chapman is regularly described as “small” or “tiny” and, in one report, as having “a forbidding network of barriers, barbed wire, and watchtowers.” Though a State Department provisional reconstruction team has been stationed there (as well as personnel from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and though it “was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction,” FOB Chapman is “well-known locally as a CIA base” – an “open secret,” as another report put it.
The base is guarded by Afghan irregulars, sometimes referred to in news reports as “Afghan contractors,” about whom we know next to nothing. (“CIA officials on Thursday would not discuss what guard service they had at the base.”) Despite the recent suicide bombing, according to Julian Barnes and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, a “program to hire Afghans to guard U.S. forward operating bases would not be canceled. Under that program, which is beginning in eastern Afghanistan, Afghans will guard towers, patrol perimeter fences, and man checkpoints.” Also on FOB Chapman were employees of the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), which has had a close relationship with the CIA in Afghanistan. We know this because of reports that two of the dead “CIA” agents were Xe operatives.
Someone else of interest was at FOB Chapman and so at that fateful meeting with the Jordanian doctor al-Balawi – Sharif Ali bin Zeid, a captain in the Jordanian intelligence service, the eighth person killed in the blast. It turns out that al-Balawi was an agent of Jordanian intelligence, which held (and abused) torture suspects kidnapped and disappeared by the CIA in the years of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. The service reportedly continues to work closely with the Agency and the captain was evidently running al-Balawi. That’s what we now know about the polyglot group at FOB Chapman on the front lines of the Agency’s black-ops war against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the allied fighters of the Haqqani network in nearby Pakistan. If there were other participants, they weren’t among the bodies.
The Agency Surges
And here’s something that’s far clearer in the wake of the bombing: among our vast network of bases in Afghanistan, the CIA has its own designated bases – as, by the way, do U.S. Special Operations forces and, according to Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill, even private contractor Xe. Without better reporting on the subject, it’s hard to get a picture of these bases, but Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal tells us that a typical CIA base houses no more than 15-20 Agency operatives (which means that al-Balawi’s explosion killed or wounded more than half of the team on FOB Chapman).
And don’t imagine that we’re only talking about a base or two. In the single most substantive post-blast report on the CIA, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times wrote that the Agency has “an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” most built in the last year. An archipelago? Imagine that. And it’s also reported that even more of them are in the works.
With this goes another bit of information that the Wall Street Journal seems to have been the first to drop into its reports. While you’ve heard about President Obama’s surge in American troops and possibly even State Department personnel in Afghanistan, you’ve undoubtedly heard little or nothing about a CIA surge in the region, and yet the Journal’s reporters tell us that Agency personnel will increase by 20-25 percent in the surge months. By the time the CIA is fully bulked up with all its agents, paramilitaries, and private contractors in place, Afghanistan will represent, according to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest “stations” in Agency history.
This, in turn, implies other surges. There will be a surge in base-building to house those agents, and a surge in “native” guards – at least until another suicide bomber hits a base, thanks to Taliban supporters among them, or one of them turns a weapon on the occupants of a base – and undoubtedly a surge in Blackwater-style mercenaries as well. Keep in mind that the latest figure on private contractors suggests that 56,000 more of them will surge into Afghanistan in the next 18 months, far more than surging U.S. troops, State Department employees, and CIA operatives combined. And don’t forget the thousands of non-CIA “uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country,” who will undoubtedly surge as well.
Making War
The efforts of the CIA operatives at Forward Operating Base Chapman were reportedly focused on “collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders,” especially those in the Haqqani network in North Waziristan just across the Pakistani border. They were evidently running “informants” into Pakistan to find targets for the Agency’s ongoing drone assassination war. These drone attacks in Pakistan have themselves been on an unparalleled surge course ever since Barack Obama entered office; 44 to 50 (or more) have been launched in the last year, with civilian casualties running into the hundreds. Like local Pashtuns, the Agency essentially doesn’t recognize a border. For them, the Afghan and Pakistani tribal borderlands are a single world.
In this way, as Paul Woodward of the Web site War in Context has pointed out, “Two groups of combatants, neither of whom wear uniforms, are slugging it out on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Each group has identified what it regards as high-value targets and each is using its own available means to hit these targets. The Taliban/Qaeda are using suicide bombers while the CIA is using Hellfire missiles.”
Since the devastating explosion at FOB Chapman, statements of vengeance have been coming out of CIA mouths – of a kind that, when offered, by the Taliban or al-Qaeda, we consider typical of a backward, “tribal” society. In any case, the secret war is evidently becoming a private and personal one. Dr. al-Balawi’s suicide attack essentially took out a major part of the Agency’s targeting information system. As one unnamed NATO official told the New York Times, “These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads. … [The CIA is] pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable.” And the Agency was already generally known to be “desperately short of personnel who speak the language or are knowledgeable about the region.” Nonetheless, drone attacks have suddenly escalated – at least five in the week since the suicide bombing, all evidently aimed at “an area believed to be a hideout for militants involved.” These sound like vengeance attacks and are likely to be particularly counterproductive.
To sum up, U.S. intelligence agents, having lost out to enemy “intelligence agents,” even after being transformed into full-time assassins, are now locked in a mortal struggle with an enemy for whom assassination is also a crucial tactic, but whose operatives seem to have better informants and better information.
In this war, drones are not the Agency’s only weapon. The CIA also seems to specialize in running highly controversial, kick-down-the-door “night raids” in conjunction with Afghan paramilitary forces. Such raids, when launched by U.S. Special Operations forces, have led to highly publicized and heavily protested civilian casualties. Sometimes, according to reports, the CIA actually conducts them in conjunction with Special Operations forces. In a recent American-led night raid in Kunar Province, eight young students were, according to Afghan sources, detained, handcuffed, and executed. The leadership of this raid has been attributed, euphemistically, to “other government agencies” (OGAs) or “non-military Americans.” These raids, whether successful in the limited sense or not, don’t fit comfortably with the Obama administration’s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy.
The Militarization of the Agency
As the identities of some of the fallen CIA operatives at FOB Chapman became known, a pattern began to emerge. There was 37-year-old Harold Brown, Jr., who formerly served in the Army. There was Scott Roberson, a former Navy SEAL, who did several tours of duty in Iraq, where he provided protection to officials considered at high risk. There was Jeremy Wise, 35, an ex-Navy SEAL who left the military last year, signed up with Xe, and ended up working for the CIA. Similarly, 46-year-old Dane Paresi, a retired Special Forces master sergeant turned Xe hired gun, also died in the blast.
For years, Chalmers Johnson, himself a former CIA consultant, has referred to the Agency as “the president’s private army.” Today, that moniker seems truer than ever. While the civilian CIA has always had a paramilitary component, known as the Special Activities Division, the unit was generally relatively small and dormant. Instead, military personnel like the Army’s Special Forces or indigenous troops carried out the majority of the CIA’s combat missions. After the 9/11 attacks, however, President Bush empowered the Agency to hunt down, kidnap, and assassinate suspected al-Qaeda operatives, and the CIA’s traditional specialties of spycraft and intelligence analysis took a distinct back seat to Special Activities Division operations, as its agents set up a global gulag of ghost prisons, conducted interrogations-by-torture, and then added those missile-armed drone and assassination programs.
The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of “intelligence” is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized. This past summer, when a former CIA official suggested the agency might be backing away from risky programs, a current official spit back from the shadows: “If anyone thinks the CIA has gotten risk-averse recently, go ask al-Qaeda and the Taliban. … The agency’s still doing cutting-edge stuff in all kinds of dangerous places.” At around the same time, reports were emerging that Blackwater/Xe was providing security, arming drones, and “perform[ing] some of the agency’s most important assignments” at secret bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also emerged that the CIA had paid contractors from Blackwater to take part in a covert assassination program in Afghanistan.
Add this all together and you have the grim face of “intelligence” at war in 2010 – a new micro-brew when it comes to Washington’s conflicts. Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold War era). This is no longer “intelligence” as anyone imagines it, nor is it “military” as military was once defined, not when U.S. operations have gone mercenary and native in such a big way. This is pure “lord of the flies” stuff – beyond oversight, beyond any law, including the laws of war. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims that the drone war is knocking off mid-level enemies, it seems remarkably ineffective. All it may be doing is spreading the war farther and digging it in deeper.
Talk about “counterinsurgency” as much as you want, but this is another kind of battlefield, and “protecting the people” plays no part in it. And of course, this is only what can be gleaned from afar about a semi-secret war that is being poorly reported. Who knows what it costs when you include the U.S. hired guns, the Afghan contractors, the bases, the drones, and the rest of the personnel and infrastructure? Nor do we know what else, or who else, is involved, and what else is being done. Clearly, however, all those billions of “intelligence” dollars are going into the blackest of black holes.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His Web site is NickTurse.com.
[Note for Readers: Check out "CIA Takes on Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines," the Mark Mazzetti piece in the New York Times mentioned above. It's the only one we've seen in the mainstream that has focused in a clear-eyed way on the militarization of the CIA. In addition, we would especially like to recommend three Web sites that collect, sort, analyze, and frame the onslaught of fragmented news we get on our various wars in the Greater Middle East and Central and South Asia in a way that makes our job possible: Juan Cole's Informed Comment (his analyses have been absolutely on fire of late), the invaluable Antiwar.com, including the useful daily summaries of war news provided by Jason Ditz, and War in Context, which has an eye for the key piece and sharp comment.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
The number of the personnel involved in these covert activities will increase over the next eighteen months. Just the employees of private contractor are expected to rise by 56,000 over this time. The cost of these escalating operations are unknown. One thing is clear, according to Engelhardt and Turse, the personnel at these bases are involved in missions that are the antithesis of the counter-insurgency policy we hear so much about.
They also note that just last week seven of the operatives on one base were blown up by a suicide bomber, suggesting that the intelligence and special operations on the other side can be effective as well. Sad, but not too surprising since they speak the local language, know something about the village social structures, are familiar with the terrain, and perhaps are able to take advantage of the growing sentiment against the US-led occupation.
Bob
Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan
Posted By Tom Engelhardt On January 10, 2010 @ 11:00 pm
http://original.antiwar.com/englehardt/2010/01/the-new-cia-battlefield-in-afghanistan
It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case – except for the placement of the bomb material – almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.
That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, U.S. and NATO forces deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, released a report in which he labeled military intelligence in the war zone – but by implication U.S. intelligence operatives generally – “clueless.” They were, he wrote, “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced … and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers. … Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.”
As if to prove the general’s point, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor with a penchant for writing inspirational essays on jihadi Web sites and an “unproven asset” for the CIA, somehow entered a key Agency forward operating base in Afghanistan unsearched, supposedly with information on al-Qaeda’s leadership so crucial that a high-level CIA team was assembled to hear it and Washington was alerted. He proved to be either a double or a triple agent and killed seven CIA operatives, one of whom was the base chief, by detonating a suicide vest bomb, while wounding yet more, including the Agency’s number-two operative in the country. The first suicide bomber to penetrate a U.S. base in Afghanistan, he blew a hole in the CIA’s relatively small cadre of agents knowledgeable on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
It was an intelligence disaster splayed all over the headlines: “Taliban bomber wrecks CIA’s shadowy war,” “Killings Rock Afghan Strategy,” “Suicide bomber who attacked CIA post was trusted informant from Jordan.” It seemed to sum up the hapless nature of America’s intelligence operations as the CIA, with all the latest technology and every imaginable resource on hand, including the latest in Hellfire-missile-armed drone aircraft, was out-thought and out-maneuvered by low-tech enemies.
No one could say that the deaths and the blow to the American war effort weren’t well covered. There were major TV reports night after night and scores of news stories, many given front-page treatment. And yet lurking behind those deaths and the man who caused them lay a bigger American war story that went largely untold. It was a tale of a new-style battlefield that the American public knows remarkably little about, and that bears little relationship to the Afghan War as we imagine it or as our leaders generally discuss it.
We don’t even have a language to describe it accurately. Think of it as a battlefield filled with muscled-up, militarized intelligence operatives, hired-gun contractors doing military duty, and privatized “native” guard forces. Add in robot assassins in the air 24/7 and kick-down-the-door-style nighttime”intelligence” raids, “surges” you didn’t know were happening, strings of military bases you had no idea were out there, and secretive international collaborations you were unaware the U.S. was involved in. In Afghanistan, the American military is only part of the story. There’s also a polyglot “army” representing the U.S. that wears no uniforms and fights shape-shifting enemies to the death in a murderous war of multiple assassinations and civilian slaughter, all enveloped in a blanket of secrecy.
Black Ops and Black Sites
Secrecy is, of course, a part of war. The surprise attack is only a surprise if secrecy is maintained. In wartime, crucial information must be kept from an enemy capable of using it. But what if, as in our case, wartime never ends, while secrecy becomes endemic, as well as profitable and privitizable, and much of the information available to both sides on our shadowy new battlefield is mainly being kept from the American people? The coverage of the suicide attack on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman offered a rare, very partial window into that strange war – but only if you were willing to read piles of news reports looking for tiny bits of information that could be pieced together.
We did just that and here’s what we found:
Let’s start with FOB Chapman, where the suicide bombing took place. An old Soviet base near the Pakistani border, it was renamed after a Green Beret who fought beside CIA agents and was the first American to die in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It sits in isolation near the town of Khost, just miles from the larger Camp Salerno, a forward operating base used mainly by U.S. Special Operations troops. Occupied by the CIA since 2001, Chapman is regularly described as “small” or “tiny” and, in one report, as having “a forbidding network of barriers, barbed wire, and watchtowers.” Though a State Department provisional reconstruction team has been stationed there (as well as personnel from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and though it “was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction,” FOB Chapman is “well-known locally as a CIA base” – an “open secret,” as another report put it.
The base is guarded by Afghan irregulars, sometimes referred to in news reports as “Afghan contractors,” about whom we know next to nothing. (“CIA officials on Thursday would not discuss what guard service they had at the base.”) Despite the recent suicide bombing, according to Julian Barnes and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, a “program to hire Afghans to guard U.S. forward operating bases would not be canceled. Under that program, which is beginning in eastern Afghanistan, Afghans will guard towers, patrol perimeter fences, and man checkpoints.” Also on FOB Chapman were employees of the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), which has had a close relationship with the CIA in Afghanistan. We know this because of reports that two of the dead “CIA” agents were Xe operatives.
Someone else of interest was at FOB Chapman and so at that fateful meeting with the Jordanian doctor al-Balawi – Sharif Ali bin Zeid, a captain in the Jordanian intelligence service, the eighth person killed in the blast. It turns out that al-Balawi was an agent of Jordanian intelligence, which held (and abused) torture suspects kidnapped and disappeared by the CIA in the years of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. The service reportedly continues to work closely with the Agency and the captain was evidently running al-Balawi. That’s what we now know about the polyglot group at FOB Chapman on the front lines of the Agency’s black-ops war against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the allied fighters of the Haqqani network in nearby Pakistan. If there were other participants, they weren’t among the bodies.
The Agency Surges
And here’s something that’s far clearer in the wake of the bombing: among our vast network of bases in Afghanistan, the CIA has its own designated bases – as, by the way, do U.S. Special Operations forces and, according to Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill, even private contractor Xe. Without better reporting on the subject, it’s hard to get a picture of these bases, but Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal tells us that a typical CIA base houses no more than 15-20 Agency operatives (which means that al-Balawi’s explosion killed or wounded more than half of the team on FOB Chapman).
And don’t imagine that we’re only talking about a base or two. In the single most substantive post-blast report on the CIA, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times wrote that the Agency has “an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” most built in the last year. An archipelago? Imagine that. And it’s also reported that even more of them are in the works.
With this goes another bit of information that the Wall Street Journal seems to have been the first to drop into its reports. While you’ve heard about President Obama’s surge in American troops and possibly even State Department personnel in Afghanistan, you’ve undoubtedly heard little or nothing about a CIA surge in the region, and yet the Journal’s reporters tell us that Agency personnel will increase by 20-25 percent in the surge months. By the time the CIA is fully bulked up with all its agents, paramilitaries, and private contractors in place, Afghanistan will represent, according to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest “stations” in Agency history.
This, in turn, implies other surges. There will be a surge in base-building to house those agents, and a surge in “native” guards – at least until another suicide bomber hits a base, thanks to Taliban supporters among them, or one of them turns a weapon on the occupants of a base – and undoubtedly a surge in Blackwater-style mercenaries as well. Keep in mind that the latest figure on private contractors suggests that 56,000 more of them will surge into Afghanistan in the next 18 months, far more than surging U.S. troops, State Department employees, and CIA operatives combined. And don’t forget the thousands of non-CIA “uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country,” who will undoubtedly surge as well.
Making War
The efforts of the CIA operatives at Forward Operating Base Chapman were reportedly focused on “collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders,” especially those in the Haqqani network in North Waziristan just across the Pakistani border. They were evidently running “informants” into Pakistan to find targets for the Agency’s ongoing drone assassination war. These drone attacks in Pakistan have themselves been on an unparalleled surge course ever since Barack Obama entered office; 44 to 50 (or more) have been launched in the last year, with civilian casualties running into the hundreds. Like local Pashtuns, the Agency essentially doesn’t recognize a border. For them, the Afghan and Pakistani tribal borderlands are a single world.
In this way, as Paul Woodward of the Web site War in Context has pointed out, “Two groups of combatants, neither of whom wear uniforms, are slugging it out on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Each group has identified what it regards as high-value targets and each is using its own available means to hit these targets. The Taliban/Qaeda are using suicide bombers while the CIA is using Hellfire missiles.”
Since the devastating explosion at FOB Chapman, statements of vengeance have been coming out of CIA mouths – of a kind that, when offered, by the Taliban or al-Qaeda, we consider typical of a backward, “tribal” society. In any case, the secret war is evidently becoming a private and personal one. Dr. al-Balawi’s suicide attack essentially took out a major part of the Agency’s targeting information system. As one unnamed NATO official told the New York Times, “These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads. … [The CIA is] pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable.” And the Agency was already generally known to be “desperately short of personnel who speak the language or are knowledgeable about the region.” Nonetheless, drone attacks have suddenly escalated – at least five in the week since the suicide bombing, all evidently aimed at “an area believed to be a hideout for militants involved.” These sound like vengeance attacks and are likely to be particularly counterproductive.
To sum up, U.S. intelligence agents, having lost out to enemy “intelligence agents,” even after being transformed into full-time assassins, are now locked in a mortal struggle with an enemy for whom assassination is also a crucial tactic, but whose operatives seem to have better informants and better information.
In this war, drones are not the Agency’s only weapon. The CIA also seems to specialize in running highly controversial, kick-down-the-door “night raids” in conjunction with Afghan paramilitary forces. Such raids, when launched by U.S. Special Operations forces, have led to highly publicized and heavily protested civilian casualties. Sometimes, according to reports, the CIA actually conducts them in conjunction with Special Operations forces. In a recent American-led night raid in Kunar Province, eight young students were, according to Afghan sources, detained, handcuffed, and executed. The leadership of this raid has been attributed, euphemistically, to “other government agencies” (OGAs) or “non-military Americans.” These raids, whether successful in the limited sense or not, don’t fit comfortably with the Obama administration’s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy.
The Militarization of the Agency
As the identities of some of the fallen CIA operatives at FOB Chapman became known, a pattern began to emerge. There was 37-year-old Harold Brown, Jr., who formerly served in the Army. There was Scott Roberson, a former Navy SEAL, who did several tours of duty in Iraq, where he provided protection to officials considered at high risk. There was Jeremy Wise, 35, an ex-Navy SEAL who left the military last year, signed up with Xe, and ended up working for the CIA. Similarly, 46-year-old Dane Paresi, a retired Special Forces master sergeant turned Xe hired gun, also died in the blast.
For years, Chalmers Johnson, himself a former CIA consultant, has referred to the Agency as “the president’s private army.” Today, that moniker seems truer than ever. While the civilian CIA has always had a paramilitary component, known as the Special Activities Division, the unit was generally relatively small and dormant. Instead, military personnel like the Army’s Special Forces or indigenous troops carried out the majority of the CIA’s combat missions. After the 9/11 attacks, however, President Bush empowered the Agency to hunt down, kidnap, and assassinate suspected al-Qaeda operatives, and the CIA’s traditional specialties of spycraft and intelligence analysis took a distinct back seat to Special Activities Division operations, as its agents set up a global gulag of ghost prisons, conducted interrogations-by-torture, and then added those missile-armed drone and assassination programs.
The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of “intelligence” is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized. This past summer, when a former CIA official suggested the agency might be backing away from risky programs, a current official spit back from the shadows: “If anyone thinks the CIA has gotten risk-averse recently, go ask al-Qaeda and the Taliban. … The agency’s still doing cutting-edge stuff in all kinds of dangerous places.” At around the same time, reports were emerging that Blackwater/Xe was providing security, arming drones, and “perform[ing] some of the agency’s most important assignments” at secret bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also emerged that the CIA had paid contractors from Blackwater to take part in a covert assassination program in Afghanistan.
Add this all together and you have the grim face of “intelligence” at war in 2010 – a new micro-brew when it comes to Washington’s conflicts. Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold War era). This is no longer “intelligence” as anyone imagines it, nor is it “military” as military was once defined, not when U.S. operations have gone mercenary and native in such a big way. This is pure “lord of the flies” stuff – beyond oversight, beyond any law, including the laws of war. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims that the drone war is knocking off mid-level enemies, it seems remarkably ineffective. All it may be doing is spreading the war farther and digging it in deeper.
Talk about “counterinsurgency” as much as you want, but this is another kind of battlefield, and “protecting the people” plays no part in it. And of course, this is only what can be gleaned from afar about a semi-secret war that is being poorly reported. Who knows what it costs when you include the U.S. hired guns, the Afghan contractors, the bases, the drones, and the rest of the personnel and infrastructure? Nor do we know what else, or who else, is involved, and what else is being done. Clearly, however, all those billions of “intelligence” dollars are going into the blackest of black holes.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His Web site is NickTurse.com.
[Note for Readers: Check out "CIA Takes on Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines," the Mark Mazzetti piece in the New York Times mentioned above. It's the only one we've seen in the mainstream that has focused in a clear-eyed way on the militarization of the CIA. In addition, we would especially like to recommend three Web sites that collect, sort, analyze, and frame the onslaught of fragmented news we get on our various wars in the Greater Middle East and Central and South Asia in a way that makes our job possible: Juan Cole's Informed Comment (his analyses have been absolutely on fire of late), the invaluable Antiwar.com, including the useful daily summaries of war news provided by Jason Ditz, and War in Context, which has an eye for the key piece and sharp comment.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
Monday, December 21, 2009
US-led war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is illegal, from response to 9/11 through the entire occupation
Marjorie Cohn, a well-known lawyer, writer, and activist, reviews some of the reasons why the war in Afghanistan (spilling over into Pakistan) is illegal according to widely and long accepted international legal agreements. She raises questions about the validity of a "war on terrorism" focused on Al Qaeda or Muslim extremism. 9/11 does not justify either the war in Iraq or the war now being escalated in Afghanistan. Cohn reminds us that there specific and limiting rules that permit military attacks on other nations and that peaceful resolution is always preferred. She also emphasizes that international treaties rule out the use of certain weapons, especially when civilians are likely to be among the victims. Her points on drones as strike weapons are eye-opening and dismaying.
Why the Af/Pak War is Illegal
By MARJORIE COHN
http://counterpunch.org/ December 21, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The UN Charter is based on the principles of international peace and security as well as the protection of human rights. But the United States, one of the founding members of the UN, has often flouted the commands of the charter, which is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans saw it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The cover of Time magazine called it "The Right War." Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war but escalating the war in Afghanistan. But a majority of Americans now oppose that war as well.
The UN Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.“Operation Enduring Freedom” was not legitimate self-defense under the charter because the 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11, or President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly.
Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. After Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted proof that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him, according to the Washington Post. That proof was not forthcoming, the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden, and Bush began bombing Afghanistan.Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense.Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan was not the answer. It has lead to growing U.S. and Afghan casualties, and has incurred even more hatred against the United States.
Conspicuously absent from the national discourse is a political analysis of why the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. We need to have that debate and construct a comprehensive strategy to overhaul U.S. foreign policy to inoculate us from the wrath of those who despise American imperialism. The "global war on terror" has been uncritically accepted by most in this country. But terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. One cannot declare war on a tactic. The way to combat terrorism is by identifying and targeting its root causes, including poverty, lack of education, and foreign occupation.
In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.”
The use of these drones in Pakistan violates both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit willful killing. Targeted or political assassinations—sometimes called extrajudicial executions—are carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. As a 1998 report from the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Extrajudicial executions also violate a longstanding U.S. policy. In the 1970s, after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed that the CIA had been involved in several murders or attempted murders of foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. Although there have been exceptions to this policy, every succeeding president until George W. Bush reaffirmed that order.
Obama is trying to make up for his withdrawal from Iraq by escalating the war on Afghanistan. He is acting like Lyndon Johnson, who rejected Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s admonition about Vietnam because LBJ was “more afraid of the right than the left,” McNamara said in a 2007 interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post.
Approximately 30% of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have occurred during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the war, including the 30,000 new troops he just ordered, will be about $100 billion a year. That money could better be used for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and creating jobs and funding health care in the United States.
Many congressional Democrats are uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. We must encourage them to hold firm and refuse to fund this war. And the left needs to organize and demonstrate to Obama that we are a force with which he must contend.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her latest book is Rules of Disengagement.
Why the Af/Pak War is Illegal
By MARJORIE COHN
http://counterpunch.org/ December 21, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The UN Charter is based on the principles of international peace and security as well as the protection of human rights. But the United States, one of the founding members of the UN, has often flouted the commands of the charter, which is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans saw it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The cover of Time magazine called it "The Right War." Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war but escalating the war in Afghanistan. But a majority of Americans now oppose that war as well.
The UN Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.“Operation Enduring Freedom” was not legitimate self-defense under the charter because the 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11, or President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly.
Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. After Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted proof that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him, according to the Washington Post. That proof was not forthcoming, the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden, and Bush began bombing Afghanistan.Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense.Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan was not the answer. It has lead to growing U.S. and Afghan casualties, and has incurred even more hatred against the United States.
Conspicuously absent from the national discourse is a political analysis of why the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. We need to have that debate and construct a comprehensive strategy to overhaul U.S. foreign policy to inoculate us from the wrath of those who despise American imperialism. The "global war on terror" has been uncritically accepted by most in this country. But terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. One cannot declare war on a tactic. The way to combat terrorism is by identifying and targeting its root causes, including poverty, lack of education, and foreign occupation.
In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.”
The use of these drones in Pakistan violates both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit willful killing. Targeted or political assassinations—sometimes called extrajudicial executions—are carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. As a 1998 report from the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Extrajudicial executions also violate a longstanding U.S. policy. In the 1970s, after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed that the CIA had been involved in several murders or attempted murders of foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. Although there have been exceptions to this policy, every succeeding president until George W. Bush reaffirmed that order.
Obama is trying to make up for his withdrawal from Iraq by escalating the war on Afghanistan. He is acting like Lyndon Johnson, who rejected Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s admonition about Vietnam because LBJ was “more afraid of the right than the left,” McNamara said in a 2007 interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post.
Approximately 30% of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have occurred during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the war, including the 30,000 new troops he just ordered, will be about $100 billion a year. That money could better be used for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and creating jobs and funding health care in the United States.
Many congressional Democrats are uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. We must encourage them to hold firm and refuse to fund this war. And the left needs to organize and demonstrate to Obama that we are a force with which he must contend.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her latest book is Rules of Disengagement.
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