U.S. Keeps Silent as Afghan Ally Removes War Crime Evidence

By Tom Lasseter

December 12, 2008 "McClatchy Newspapers" -- DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses.. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum's men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.

Earlier this year, bulldozers and backhoes returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June.

Faqir Mohammed Jowzjani, a former Dostum ally and the deputy governor of Jowzjan province, where the graves were located, told McClatchy that it's common knowledge that Dostum sent in the bulldozers.

He speculated that Dostum wanted to destroy the evidence because of local political trouble that could have made him more prone to prosecution for the killings.

Last year, Dostum and the then-Jowzjan governor became embroiled in a feud that killed seven people and wounded more than 40. This year, Dostum and his men kidnapped and reportedly beat a rival Afghan leader.

"Maybe General Dostum did it because of a fear of prosecution in the future," Jowzjani said.

Another local Afghan official said that Dostum had begun to worry that the 2001 killings could come back to haunt him. "Everyone in the city (Sheberghan) knows that the evidence has been removed," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries about being killed for talking about the subject.

"When the crime happened, (Dostum and his commanders) didn't think they would ever be prosecuted," the official said. "But later they began to worry . . . they have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river" that's about half a mile from the graves.

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum's alleged war crimes.

"The truth is that General Dostum went out with bulldozers and dug up those graves," Jowzjani charged. "I don't know why UNAMA" — the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — "hasn't said anything in this regard . . . maybe because of fears about his power, or maybe they made a deal."

Gen. Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, the commander of Afghanistan's national police in the north, said that he knew that the graves had been emptied. He noted that "the digging was done very professionally" and said that U.N. and NATO-led teams in the area were also aware. (While provincial reconstruction teams are led by individual nations, their military components are under NATO command.)

"I don't understand why they didn't secure the area," Patang said in an interview. Perhaps, he said, Western officials "are nervous" about the power that Dostum has locally and don't want to upset local security by pushing him on the matter.

Dostum was unavailable for comment, and one of his senior aides, Gen. Ghani Karim Zada, declined several interview requests.

The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum's reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law.

American officials say that Dostum's alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.

However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.

The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement or presence during the 2001 incident. If there was an investigation, however, its findings have never been made public.

"At the time, we had a handful of special forces and CIA, and there was no way we could have exercised any oversight" of the thousands of detainees under Afghan control, said Joseph Collins, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations.

When he was asked about the detainees suffocating in metal shipping containers, Collins, who's now a professor at the National War College, said that "I think most people just took for granted what he (Dostum) said: that it was a horrible accident."

McClatchy interviewed eight Pakistani men last year who said that Dostum's gunmen had stuffed them in the containers. The men, mostly low-level Taliban volunteers, said they'd had to climb over dozens of dead bodies to get out of the containers.

"We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless," said Abdul Haleem, who said that many of the approximately 200 men in his container died. "An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there."

Another man who said he'd made the trip to Sheberghan in a container full of dead and dying men was Tariq Khan. He said that when Dostum's men shot into the metal box, "some people were shot in the eye; some were shot in the neck."

Dostum offered to take Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was then the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on a tour of the grave site in late 2002, but Prosper declined. He was pressing a reluctant Afghan government and the U.N. to take the lead in investigating the killings.

"We felt the Afghans needed to play a role," Prosper said in a telephone interview. "If you're a new government, and you want to move forward, you have to deal with the past."

However, no investigation was likely without strong U.S. backing, and Prosper said that he couldn't recall whether Washington ever gave funding for a probe.

Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum's power in northern Afghanistan.

Mutaqi said there'd been threats on his life and those of his staff members from Dostum. There are rumors that the site was mined and that Dostum's men would torture or kill people if they were caught researching in the area. At least three Afghans who witnessed the original digging of the mass grave or who investigated it later reportedly were killed, and a handful of others were beaten.

Mutaqi said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum's men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.

Now, Mutaqi said, "You can see only a hole. In the area around it you can find a few bones or some clothes. The site is gone . . . as for evidence, there is nothing."

A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.

"You're right that we don't always make public statements, but that's because we're in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk," the statement said. "It's a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones." Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.

The spokesman for the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said that while he didn't know the details of the digging at the site, "there cannot be impunity for war crimes of this nature and scale . . . it's a real shame."

Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.

"We have no information about bulldozers or digging at the site," said Lt. Cmdr. James Gater, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. general who heads NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, wouldn't do an interview, Gater said.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Stroh said that he'd checked with several officials at the embassy and "nobody seemed to have any visibility on this." Stroh added that "We don't necessarily monitor all of Dostum's behavior."

A McClatchy reporter, traveling without official escort, took GPS readings of the open pits last month, and a forensic investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, a group contracted by the U.N. to examine the site, confirmed that they were in the same area where the grave site was found in early 2002.

In May 2002, the U.N. announced that a Physicians for Human Rights team had dug a test trench in the area and found 15 bodies, three of which had been exhumed and found to have died recently of asphyxiation

In November 2002, amid the Physicians for Human Rights findings and news reports, a top-secret cable from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that the number of people killed during transport to Sheberghan "may approach 2,000."

The cable also said that while there was no security at Dasht-e Leili, U.N. personnel from Mazar-e-Sharif were monitoring the grave " 'every few days' for signs of tampering." There'd been plans for a detailed forensic investigation of the site in spring 2003.

"The hope had been to do a full exhumation in 2003," said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights. "It didn't happen."

The U.N. monitoring of the site stopped. Edwards, the U.N. spokesman, said that he was still trying to reach officials who'd been present to get an explanation. The U.N., NATO, U.S. forces and the Afghan government never took any formal responsibility for patrolling the grave site.

Physicians for Human Rights made several requests to top U.S. officials to secure the mass graves, including an August 2002 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking that he "reconsider the position of the Defense Department and assure security at the grave site." Four months later, the organization sent a letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz saying that it was crucial to provide a small security detachment.

"From the time we discovered the site in January 2002, we had been advocating privately and publicly to the United Nations, the U.S. and the Afghan government to ensure consistent site protection and protection of forensic evidence," Frank Donaghue, the chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement to McClatchy. "And clearly that did not happen."

Dostum has long experience with mass graves being used in the Afghan political arena. In 1997, he revealed the discovery of mass graves of Taliban members killed by a former ally turned rival, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, in the Dasht-e Leili desert. The grave sites, which Dostum's men brought in international journalists to document, helped cement Pahlawan's exile from the area at the time.

Afghanistan's attorney general, its top law enforcement official, said that given the bad security conditions in the country it was hard to think about investigating possible war crimes.

"So for the time being, we have put these issues off for the future," Mohammed Ishaq Aloko said in an interview at his Kabul office.

Aloko, who's seen as being very close to President Karzai, didn't respond directly to repeated questions about Dostum.

"I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day," Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.

Forgotten Victims: Inside Kandahar's Main Hospital

Civilians in Afghanistan have paid the heaviest price for the conflict in their country, caught up almost daily in both Taliban attacks and air raids by US force.

Al Jazeea's David Chater has been to the main hospital in the Afghan city of Kandaha , where he heard some of their stories.

 

US charges defense contractor with killing Afghan civilian after attack on fellow team member

By MATTHEW BARAKAT |Associated Press Writer

5:33 PM EST, November 20, 2008

McLEAN, Va. (AP) _ A defense contractor who once provided personal security for Afghanistan's president was charged with shooting a handcuffed Afghani civilian after hearing the man had inflicted serious burns on a fellow contractor, prosecutors said.

Don M. Ayala, 46, of New Orleans was charged with second-degree murder in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Thursday that Ayala is in Afghanistan awaiting transfer to Virginia.

It is the first case in which federal prosecutors have brought murder charges against a military contractor serving in Iraq or Afghanistan under the 2000 law that allows such prosecutions, according to the Justice Department.

Messages left Thursday for Ayala's attorney, John Tranberg, were not immediately returned.

According to an affidavit, Ayala worked for contractor BAE Systems as security for what the Army calls a Human Terrain Team, in which social scientists and anthropologists are embedded with combat brigades to help soldiers understand local culture.

On Nov. 4, Ayala was on patrol about 50 miles west of Kandahar when an Afghan civilian named Abdul Salam ignited a pitcher of fuel and threw it on social scientist Paula Loyd, according to the affidavit.

Ayala helped subdue and arrest Salam, who was restrained and placed in plastic handcuffs, according to the affidavit.

About 10 minutes later, after a soldier said Loyd had been badly burned, Ayala pointed a pistol at Salam's head and shot him dead, according to court records.

Loyd had second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of her body, according to the affidavit.

Before working for BAE systems, Ayala was a contractor providing personal security to both Afghanistan's president and Iraq's prime minister, according to the affidavit.

Ayala is charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), a 2000 law that allows the prosecution of civilian contractors who commit crimes while working for the U.S. overseas. The U.S. Attorney in Alexandria has overseen a number of MEJA prosecutions.

Critics have said the Justice Department has been reticent to prosecute contractor misconduct.

While the Ayala prosecution is the first murder case under MEJA involving a military contractor, there have been similar cases against nonmilitary contractors.

In 2007, CIA contractor David Passaro was sentenced to more than eight years in prison after being convicted of assault for beating an Afghani detainee who later died. A former soldier, Steven Dale Green, is facing murder and aggravated sexual assault charges in federal court in Kentucky for allegedly raping an Iraqi teenager in 2006 and shooting and killing her family.

Prosecutors are also reviewing possible charges against employees of State Department contractor Blackwater Worldwide for their role in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians last year.

BAE Systems Inc., based in Rockville, Md., is the U.S. subsidiary of London-based BAE Systems plc. A company spokesman did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.

The Case for U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Mr. President-Elect, are you listening?

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’.” – George W. Bush

In recent history, two concepts of justice have stood out. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed in a kind of justice that could only be achieved when systematic oppression had been eliminated from the world. Along the way, people would have to be held accountable for their crimes. Those who had done wrong would have to admit that they had done wrong and pay some appropriate restitution for their crimes, as happened decades later in South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commissions. But justice was forever intertwined with a changing of the human spirit for Dr. King. It was the societal uplifting of love over hate, of human dignity over human debasement. It was a coming to terms with our violent history and affirming values of love and compassion over those of hate and retribution.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, believed in the justice of old Western movies and gunfights.

When he inherits the Bush legacy on January 21st, 2009, Barack Obama will have to choose between these two approaches. The decision he makes will reverberate around the world and be one of the first indicators of whether “Change We Can Believe In” was merely good sloganeering.

Ending Bush’s imperial misadventures in Iraq will certainly be a top priority for the incoming administration, but Obama will also be tested in Afghanistan. His words so far — calling Afghanistan the “central front” in the “War on Terror” and demanding more military action against insurgents allied with the Taliban — don’t inspire confidence that he would chose the King doctrine over the Bush doctrine.

Reckless Interventions

In 1996, the Taliban, a faction of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen with fundamentalist Wahabi Muslim beliefs, took control of Kabul and most of Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, supported the Mujahideen (who from the very beginning had fundamentalist tendencies) as part of the “Afghan trap” which succeeded in fatally wounding the Soviet empire. While many Afghans greeted the Taliban’s rise to power with delight, their theocratic government soon began to grate on the people of Afghanistan, for whom fundamentalist Islam was almost as foreign as Mormonism.

After the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration portrayed the Taliban as deeply connected with al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that claimed responsibility for the attacks, and therefore argued for going to war against Afghanistan. When the Taliban countered that they were happy to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, if the U.S. could produce any evidence for the allegation, the U.S. scoffed. Then the U.S. invaded.

The invasion succeeded in two things: First, it brought down a terrible fundamentalist regime while taking an inordinately heavy toll in civilian causalities. The Taliban had instituted a brutal form of shariah law and forced minorities to wear identification tags. They had even destroyed ancient Buddhist carvings claiming that the depiction of the human form is “unislamic.” Many Afghans — particularly the half of the population who happen to be women — were excited to see the Taliban ousted. While this is an accomplishment, it’s worth remembering that expectations for improvement in women’s lives were largely unmet.

The second and even more dangerous accomplishment of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was to elevate the Taliban, al-Qaeda and anyone willing to resist U.S. aggression to the status of heroes or freedom fighters.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what most Afghans and many South Asians, Muslims, and others around the world felt after the invasion is to remember how Americans felt after the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush was a deeply unpopular president. The election that brought him to power had split the population, with shady dealings in Florida and an activist Supreme Court ultimately deciding the race in favor of Bush. Many of my liberal compatriots despised the president, who was already acquiring a reputation for spending his presidency on vacation.

But after the 9/11 attacks, those same liberals were rallying around Bush. The logic was simple: in a time of crisis, with your country under attack, you support those who are going to defend you. You may not like George W. Bush, but his policies his armed forces stand between you and whoever caused significant damage to New York and Washington, DC.

By the same logic, who stood between Afghan civilians and the NATO aerial bombardments that killed about 3,000 people? The Taliban. Every bomb that detonated on a wedding party led to tens, perhaps hundreds of young people — mostly young boys and many of them orphans — joining the resistance movement under the flag of the Taliban.

And it’s not just that the Afghan population believes that the Taliban resistance is legitimate; that resistance is legitimate under international law. No less important a document than the United Nations charter gives the Taliban and other Afghans the right to legitimate self-defense against U.S. aggression.

The Real War against Fundamentalism

So if aerial bombardments and occupations give legitimacy to those very fundamentalists who Afghans would remove from power, what does the real war on fundamentalism look like?

In 1999 I was the first staff person of the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, a group that was combating “honor crimes” along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. These were incidences of domestic violence, often against a wife, a sister, a daughter or even a mother who was accused of having some kind of illicit sexual relationship. We understood that these crimes were on the rise because of the spread of Taliban-style Wahabi Islam into tribal areas that already had an extremely patriarchal view of women’s bodies.

What was our weapon of choice in fighting against the Talibanization of what has traditionally been a tolerant, ecumenical form of Islam? Education. We taught women their rights under Pakistani and Afghani law, we taught about the passages in the Quran that mentioned women’s rights, and we also tried to educate people about other traditions — whether they be secular humanist traditions or the Hindu and Christian traditions of neighboring countries and tribes. In other words we tried to undermine the hatred, the xenophobia, the fear upon which fundamentalism is built.

Such efforts may take generations, and they almost always require the state to play a role in education, development and ensuring employment for all. But ultimately education is the only way to combat religious fundamentalism, just as negotiation is ultimately the only way to end war.

Buying into a Failed Solution

While Obama’s election may indicate a shift in U.S. foreign policy (and hopefully a rejection of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war), Obama has prescribed more military operations in Afghanistan.

For more than a year, Obama has argued for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. He has called Afghanistan the “central front in the War on Terror” and has even threatened to bomb Pakistan should there be evidence that Afghan warlords are hiding there and the Pakistani government isn’t “doing enough” about it. (On this last point, Bush has already bombed Pakistan several times over the last few months, prompting the Pakistani government to publicly rebuke the U.S. for violating its sovereignty.)

While Obama’s rhetoric in arguing for increased involvement in Afghanistan makes some sense — he claims that Bush has been so involved with Iraq that the al-Qaeda leaders who allegedly orchestrated the September 11 attacks are still at large — his proposed methodology doesn’t.

Instead of scaling up an already disastrous war, the United States could change course in a way that would ultimately do a lot more to ensure the world’s safety. Such measures should include:

bq.1. Withdrawing troops. International law is clear on this subject. No country may occupy another indefinitely and certainly not without the will of the people being occupied. If an Obama administration truly thinks that withdrawing U.S. and NATO troops would be a bad thing for Afghans, hold a referendum to see who would like the troops to remain.

2. Working with the various Afghan factions to begin negotiations. Wars are rarely stopped on the battlefield, and those that are have a tendency to break out again after a few years. The recent history of Afghanistan illustrates this point. It’s better by far for enemies and friends, Pashtun, Tajik, and others to settle differences through negotiation based on mutual respect and the rule of law.

3. Once stability and security are guaranteed in Afghanistan, beginning the attack on fundamentalism in earnest. Working to incorporate Afghanistan into the international human rights framework through enforcing UN measures which Afghanistan has already ratified, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is one step that can be taken in this regard. Another is major investment in social infrastructure and particularly health and education measures which will ultimately help Afghanistan recover from being bombed “into the stone age.”

If the idea of immediately stopping all military operations in Afghanistan sounds radical, it shouldn’t. No less than President Hamid Karzai pleaded for an end to the bombings immediately after the U.S. election, as yet another wedding party fell victim to bombs from the sky.

For the sake of all us, Afghan and American, let’s hope President Barack Obama heeds his call.

Sameer Dossani, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the director of 50 Years is Enough and blogs at shirinandsameer.blogspot.com.

This article is republished with permission from our friends at FPIF.org.

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism.

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney
Hasht-e-Sobh
Friday, October 3, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney

Text of article, "Bin-Ladin on the run? The rumour which was fact", by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 29 September

So, the rumour was right: French soldiers trapped Usamah Bin-Ladin, but were not allowed by the Americans to arrest the apparent fugitive leader of Al-Qa`idah. A Bin-Ladin documentary just released by French documentary cinema examines this issue, an issue which has led to heated debate in the French media.

This French documentary shows how the Americans are interested in continuing the game, a bloody and expensive game whose victims are only the unprotected and local people of our dry and dusty country. It was last year that rumours spread about this report in Kabul, but it has not been taken seriously by the media. But watching this revealing French documentary changes the rumours into disturbing facts. "Bin Laden, the failings of a manhunt", produced by Emmanuel Razavi and Eric de Lavarene, two French filmmakers and reporters, assesses and confirms the claims of French soldiers that they could have killed Usamah within two operations, but the American forces prevented them. This film has not been broadcast publicly yet and is to be broadcast by Planet, a French network.

Even though French soldiers have insisted on this in the battlefield many times, the Elysees Palace in Paris and the White House in America have rejected this, and the Afghan leadership does not have any information about it yet!

The main question that arises is the extent to which the "Bin Laden on the run" project is a problem for America and Afghanistan. Seven years of suicide bombing and explosions, blood and violence, unmanned fighter planes, and old vehicles full of explosives, all to catch a long-bearded Arab whom America apparently hates? And an Arab who worked for the CIA in the name of Allah, and who now, also in the name of that same Allah, has conducted a jihad against that same CIA?

Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood's imagination. But it is not. The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form. The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa'idah terrorist network.

George Bush, with his "war on terror" project, has transformed the middle east and Afghanistan into an inflamed bomb ready to explode, but has not found out anything about his beloved lost Usamah Bin-Ladin so far.

What is seen, and the film also emphases this, is that all these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control. Apparently, it is a game of cat and mouse, just like "Tom and Jerry", the famous cartoon. But it is a reality that the stubborn one from Texas does not want to catch the mouse - unlike credulous Tom - and that the long-bearded Wahhabi Arab does not want to hide - unlike the intelligent and roaming Jerry. Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood.

There have always been questions that neither the politicians have been willing to answer, nor the independent western media to raise. If Usamah is not the lost one of the Americans, then who is? What are the Americans searching for in Afghanistan and who are they looking for? The main media in the West remained silent before the report of the Usamah Bin-Ladin arrest by French soldiers. And, through a news boycott, they reduced a certain fact to a rumour.

Certainly, they will do the same before this film, too. But instead they will try to complicate the scenario. More painful than anything else is the political fair in Kabul, a poor fair where everyone offers his despicable commodity - a combination of generous western customers and thankful sellers of the country. Everyone knows the fact, like "an obvious secret", but no one wants to irritate the delicate minds of their nervous guests, guests who will be staying at home until the new year.
Politicians try to forget such news in Kabul, and this is the advice they give to the people. Forgetting and ignoring such facts is possible, but how can we forget and ignore the bombs exploding next to our houses every day?

Bombs which sometimes rise from the ground and sometimes descend from the air.
(Description of Source: Kabul Hasht-e-Sobh in Dari Kabul Hasht-e Sobh in Dari - Eight-page secular daily launched in May 2007; editor-in-chief, Qasim Akhgar, is a political analyst and Head of the Association for the Freedom of Speech. )

Guantanamo Treatment for US Civilian Human Terrain Team Member

By John Stanton

Don Ayala of Human Terrain Team AF-4 Blue is being held in detention at Bagram AB in Afghanistan under excruciating circumstances. The Commanding General, Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, 101st Airborne Division and Lieutenant Colonel Roger Neil reportedly control Ayala’s legal fate and are responsible for the quality of Ayala’s treatment while incarcerated. According to sources, Ayala is receiving treatment akin to that of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Enemy Combatants. He is apparently being denied limited or any form of due process under US military or US civilian law.

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Ayala is imprisoned, according to sources, for allegedly tracking down, shooting and killing an Afghani national that doused fellow Human Terrain Team member Paula Loyd with flammable liquid and set her to flames. They report that Ayala is being kept in solitary confinement in a cage, not a cell, that does not meet US military or US federal government standards. Ayala is reportedly in leg irons and is harassed nightly by non-military police personnel assigned by 101^st Airborne Command.

Ayala was allegedly held for four days before being allowed to talk to his lawyer or anyone in his chain of command. He has not been allowed to use shower facilities on a consistent basis, sometimes as long as a three day period. He is not allowed any exercise, socialization or entertainment privileges and remains under a 24-hour-a-day watch.

Sources allege that the fair hearing to determine confinement or protective custody was pure theater. They also indicate that the US military may have no legal jurisdiction over Ayala due to details involved in deployment and chain-of-command orders.

Reportedly the US Department of Justice (USDOJ) has the ability to assert jurisdiction. USDOJ has thirty days from incident report date in order to do so or the case will remain in the lap of the US military. Sources indicate that Ayala has not been assigned military counsel (due to venue matters) and the cognizant military magistrate determined that he should remain incarcerated at Bagram AB.

Human Terrain System management has derailed and wrecked the train. When will they be held accountable?

Part VI of the Series. Part I is titled US Army's Human Terrain System in Disarray. Part II is titled US Army's Human Terrain System: From Super Concept to Absolute Farce. Part III is titled US Army’s Human Terrain System: Madness, Mayhem and Troughs of Cash. Part IV is titled Cleaning UP US Army TRADOC’s Human Terrain System. Part V is Law Breaking, Fraud Alleged at Imploding Human Terrain System Program.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in political in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

Fort Irwin prepares to shift focus to Afghanistan

November 16, 2008 - 1:36PM

By ABBY SEWELL, staff writer

FORT IRWIN • A convoy of military vehicles bumps along over the rutted desert road, kicking up dust in its wake, while gunners scan the route for improvised explosive devices.

With the arid landscape and craggy mountains on the horizon, the soldiers on board could be on a mission in Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, which is where they will be in just a few months.

But this convoy was carrying soldiers and supplies from one forward operating base to another at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center Saturday. Some 3,500 soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division out of Fort Richardson in Alaska were in their eighth day of training at the NTC, preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in February.

The NTC has replicated both Iraq and Afghanistan in the past, but as the United States prepares to shift resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, Fort Irwin will be increasingly responsible for preparing troops to fight in Afghanistan.

“That’s what’s coming out of Washington, D.C., so obviously as a national training center we adapt, and that’s what we’re good at,” Fort Irwin spokesman Etric Smith said.

In the past year, only two out of 10 training rotations at the NTC have focused on Afghanistan, with the rest using an Iraqi scenario, Smith said. In the future, he said, Fort Irwin commanding general Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard plans to request that the Army begin sending more troops to Fort Irwin’s NTC to train for Afghanistan.

Many of the soldiers training at the NTC to fight in Afghanistan are already veterans of the conflict in Iraq. The situation they will face in Afghanistan is both similar yet separate. In both countries, U.S. forces are fighting insurgencies rather than an organized military force. But U.S. commanders and Afghani nationals alike said that training for Afghanistan presents a different set of challenges.

The mountainous terrain in Afghanistan, the fact that — unlike in Iraq — fighting takes place in rural areas rather than in cities, the lack of infrastructure, and the fact that tribes move back and forth freely across the Afghan/Pakistan border while U.S. troops cannot, all present challenges, said deputy brigade commander Lt. Col. Stephen Hughes. So do the Afghani people, who have been fighting one enemy or another for the past 30 years.

Najiv Mommandi plays an Afghan National Army commander working with U.S. forces in the role-playing scenario at Fort Irwin. In reality, he is a native of Afghanistan who flew helicopters against the Soviets during the Cold War before emigrating to the United States almost 21 years ago.
Communication is still the biggest issue between the U.S. troops and Afghani civilians, he said.

“I think more gun barrels are not going to solve the problem, because (the Afghanis) are very proud, and they are also good with guns,” he said. “... I don’t think they want war, because there’s been war for 30 years, but if you push someone into a corner, they’ll fight back.”

Another Afghani national who gave only his role-playing name, Akhar Omari, out of fear of repercussions for aiding the United States, said the training at NTC is fairly realistic if the soldiers take it seriously. But he warned that it will be difficult to prepare the soldiers for the culture they will encounter.

“The language, the culture — people from Afghanistan are different from people here,” he said. “It’s like black and white.”

The lack of jobs, electricity, water and roads in many areas are sources of discontent that lead people to the insurgents, Hughes said. A key part of the U.S. mission is a multi-agency reconstruction effort involving the Department of State, United States Agency for International Development, and the Department of Agriculture, he said. Civil Affairs units from the Army act as a liaison between the U.S. forces, the Afghan civilians, police, and military, and the other U.S. agencies and non-governmental organizations.

But the strategy can’t work without buy-in from even the newest private among the U.S. troops, said Lt. Rob Campbell with the 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Airborne division.

“What a private does at the lowest level has a strategic impact,” he said. “If he doesn’t act respectful to the people, if he doesn’t act professionally, you start to turn the clock back.”

That message has filtered down to many of the soldiers, like Pfc. James Beach, who is preparing for his first deployment. Beach was stationed at a small command outpost outside of the “village” of Lab-e in the NTC, a village with a discontented population and a large insurgent presence.

“The whole point is to make relationships with the civilians that are affected by the war,” he said.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or asewell@desertdispatch.com

Reckless Soldiers, Slappers and Smack

By Yvonne Ridley in Afghanistan

November 09, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- The day after US war planes bombed an Afghan wedding party killing more than 30 women and children, I drove from Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas to the border crossing.

Feeling rather sensitive towards my own security as a white westerner who could easily be mistaken for an American, I decided to throw on an all-enveloping burka and make my way across in the anonymity this garment gives women travelers.

As I walked across the border at Torkham towards the Afghan passport control office I heard someone barking in a loud, aggressive American accent at one of the drivers held up at the US-controlled checkpoint.

I looked up and watched as a heavily armoured, helmeted soldier pointed his gun and continued screaming in a rude manner for the driver to get in line.

It obviously did not occur to him that most of the people in earshot could only understand Pashto.

I really despaired and felt sorry for those Afghans who were being greeted by this obnoxious alien in uniform as they entered their own country.

Now I know most Americans don’t do humility, but a little sensitivity should have been called for on that day … it was the day after nearly 90 wedding guests had been wiped out in yet another US airstrike.

I have now spent several days in Afghanistan as an unembedded journalist, travelling around freely without an armed or military escort.

Yes, it’s risky and at times nerve-wracking but if I want to find out what is really happening on the ground I’m not going to get it hiding in some hotel compound or army barracks being briefed by an army spokesman who knows even less than me.

So far I’ve spoken to men and women from all backgrounds, cultures and Islamic ideologies and without exception they’re hacked off with the American presence.

All the goodwill I saw after the fall of the Taliban has been squandered by the military presence of the US as well as the British (no one really distinguishes between the two) and it is crystal clear they have overstayed their welcome.

The Taliban are in control of large swathes of the country and are now bordering on Kabul having already carried out several raids on the capital where Afghan leader Hamid Karzai is under virtual siege.

Since his installation as president he has often been accused of being a US puppet, but even he is attempting to break free from those in Washington pulling the strings.

Without a doubt, the continued presence of US and British forces has swung violently from being regarded as the solution to becoming the cause of most of the problems. And promises by various army chiefs to bring in more troops to enforce a Baghdad-style surge causes one of two reactions depending your political stance.

Peacemakers view the arrival of more troops with spiralling despair while the Taliban and their supporters rub their hands with glee reckoning a larger enemy presence will make an easier target.

Of course moronic comments by the likes of Commander Jeff Bender, a US forces spokesman, don’t help. After the Kandahar wedding attack he said: "The coalition and Afghan authorities are investigating reports of non-combatant casualties in the village of Wech Baghtu.

"If innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologise and express our condolences to the families and the people of Afghanistan."

What does he mean “if innocent people were killed”. It seems this US insensitivity isn’t just confined to the uniformed grunts at the Torkham border.

Does Commander Jeff Bender think that the 33 dead women and children his warplanes wiped out were enemy combatants?

Scores of Afghans have been killed in American air strikes this year, fuelling the resentment against the presence of foreign troops and widening the rift between President Karzai and his western puppet masters.

The only winners emerging from Afghanistan these days are the drug barons who preside over the world’s largest heroin trade and the pimps who control the Chinese prostitutes operating from the scores of bordellos and brothels which have emerged since the US military occupation.

So there you have it – the story of Afghanistan ... a country in the grip of reckless soldiers, slappers and smack.

Despite the Threat of Harsh Punishment, Soldier Says "No" to Deployment in Afghanistan

By Sarah Lazare

How 21-year-old soldier Blake Ivey came to see war as "flat-out murder."

"I believe war is the crime of our times," Blake Ivey, a specialist in the U.S. Army, said over the phone in a slow, deliberate voice.

Ivey, currently stationed in Fort Gordon, Ga., is publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. The 21-year-old soldier filed for conscientious objector status in July but was ordered to deploy while his application was being processed. He is determined not to go, and as of our last phone call, was still actively serving on his base, weighing his options for refusal.

Ivey joins what appears to be a growing number of troops refusing to fight in the so-called Global War on Terror. While there is no way to tell the exact number of resisters, military statistics indicate that resistance is on the rise. Since 2002, the Army has court-martialed twice as many soldiers for desertion and other unauthorized absences per year than for each year between 1997 and 2001. The Associated Press reports AWOL rates in the Army at its highest since 1980, with the desertion rate (defined as 30 or more days of unauthorized absence) having jumped 80 percent since the start of the Iraq War. More than 150 soldiers have publicly refused to fight in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an estimated 200 war resisters are living in Canada.

Many war resisters are conscientious objectors (C.O.s) who were deterred at early stages of the C.O. application process or ordered to deploy before their C.O. paperwork went through. Just last week, 19-year-old conscientious objector Tony Anderson at Fort Carson, Colo., publicly shared his experience. Anderson had been discouraged by his commanding officers from applying for C.O. status, and he disobeyed orders to deploy to Iraq. He now faces steep punishment at the hands of the military.

Ivey, who grew up in Augusta, Ga., just a few miles from the Fort Gordon base where he is now stationed, joined the Army willingly. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he felt that it was "his generation's time to stand up in defense of the country." He states, "I went to the recruiter myself. No one approached me." So, in 2005 he joined the service out of high school, despite his mother's pleas that he take more time to think it over.

Yet once Ivey was in the military, his feelings about war changed. He found it unsettling to chant "Blood, blood, blood makes the grass grow" in basic training, and he wrote a letter home to his mother describing his discomfort. When he was deployed to Korea in 2006, he started questioning the value of military service. Halfway through his yearlong deployment, he began studying anarchist philosophers and nonviolent thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

The refusal of close friend Ryan Jackson to deploy to Iraq led Ivey to re-evaluate his own situation. They got to know each other in Advanced Individual Training in 2005 and were in the same unit together in Fort Gordon after Ivey's return from Korea. They discussed at length their reluctance to go to war. Ivey provided simple advice to Jackson: "I told him, you've got to do what you believe in." So, Jackson decided not to go. He attempted to gain administrative leave, but when his paperwork failed to go through, he decided to go AWOL rather than face deployment. Ivey remained close with Jackson throughout the process, giving him emotional support when he went AWOL in 2007 and was court-martialed and sentenced to 100 days of confinement. "When I talked to Jackson before he went to court-martial, that's when I decided I was going to start on my conscientious objector paperwork," says Ivey.

Meanwhile, Ivey continued to research alternatives to war, immersing himself in the texts of nonviolent philosophers. He also got involved in his local community, helping start a chapter of Food Not Bombs, a collective movement to serve free food, mostly vegan and vegetarian, to others. "I want to make a difference in people's lives," he says.

While his conscientious objector paperwork was being processed, Ivey was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan. Application for C.O. status cannot forestall deployment, but applicants are supposed to be assigned tasks that do not conflict with their C.O. convictions. However, this military directive is subject to ambiguous interpretation, and the commanding officer has considerable discretion in determining appropriate assignments. Furthermore, many conscientious objectors consider deployment to a combat zone by definition ethically compromising.

If Ivey refuses to deploy, he could be charged with "Missing Movement" -- Article 87 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- by a general court martial, punishable by up to two years in the stockade, loss of pay and a dishonorable discharge. There is also the danger that the military might try to pile on charges against him, such as Article 90, "willfully disobeying superior officer," and General Article 134, which covers all conduct "unbecoming" a service member.

Ivey is determined not to go to Afghanistan, and he is working with a civilian lawyer to explore his options. He has also enlisted the support of Courage to Resist, an organization that supports the troops who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and has worked with several GIs in similar situations, including Anderson and Jackson.

Ivey's mother, who lives in Augusta a few miles from where Ivey is stationed, is supportive but worried about her son. "I am concerned because any time someone you care about is in a situation that could cause them turmoil in their life or legal charges, whether they are right or wrong, I am going to worry," she says. "But I would in no way encourage him to do anything different. He is following his moral beliefs, and he has to do that."

Despite the threat of steep punishment, Ivey remains steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. "I am against organized war," he says. "It is flat-out murder."

See more stories tagged with: afghanistan, war resisters, courage to resist, blake ivey, conscientious objector st

Sarah Lazare is the project director of Courage to Resist, an organization that supports military war resisters.

Peace activists demand Canada leave Afghanistan

OTTAWA — Precious lives and scarce dollars are being wasted on the futile war in Afghanistan, peace activists cried out during marches and rallies across the country on Saturday.

Dozens of anti-war activists paraded onto Parliament Hill to demand an end to Canada's Afghan mission, part of a national day of action organized by peace groups that object to the human and financial costs of the bloody conflict.

Khalid Nasery was born in strife-torn Afghanistan and now calls Canada home.

The 28-year-old Ottawa student said it's time for Canadian soldiers to leave his native country, painting the troops as pawns of U.S. foreign policy.

"They should pull out of Afghanistan," he said. "It's not the soldiers' fault. I'm not against the soldiers, because they just follow orders. It's the politicians who want to please the Bush administration."

Among Canadian ranks, the effort has claimed the lives of 97 soldiers, a diplomat and two aid workers.

Nasery said that for every soldier who dies, many more civilians perish. "So on both sides, it's a lose-lose situation."

A report on the cost of the Afghan mission released earlier this month said that taxpayers will shell out between $14 billion and $18 billion - and possibly more - by the time troops are withdrawn in 2011.

"What we've seen is billions provided to the military and only a small amount to the local needs of Afghanistan," said Dylan Penner, an organizer with the Ottawa Peace Alliance. "And the reality is that what little does go beyond the military is going to a select few."

Sophie Harkat, whose husband Mohamed faces deportation on a national security certificate, was emcee of the Parliament Hill rally.

Demonstrations are being held this weekend in about 15 cities.

A few dozen protesters held signs with slogans like Aid not Arms for Afghanistan and Afghanistan is Bleeding in Edmonton's Churchill Square as they listened to speakers from the Edmonton Coalition Against War and Racism, the Council of Canadians and the Alberta Federation of Labour.

"We feel that the Canadian people have been lied to by the government as to the purpose and goals over there," said protester Paula Kirman.

"Taxpayers' money is being wasted and there's not a lot of progress going on over there."

Edda Loomes, 67, a member of the Raging Grannies protest group, said she doesn't think Canada is helping the average Afghan. "I think what they need in Afghanistan is schools and support. Many, many private citizens are getting killed and Canadians are getting killed."

She said Canada is only interested in preserving oil interests in the region and that's why it has sent soldiers.

Protester Greg Farrants called the war in Afghanistan a "never-ending venture" and said peace rallies are a way for average Canadians to support the troops.

"I feel the support-the-troops campaign has been co-opted by warmongers," he said.

Protesters in St. John's, N.L., met in Bannerman Park and marched through the downtown area.

Demonstrator Samantha Mills-Wiseman said the war has been a failure, resulting in greater support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In Montreal, hundreds turned out to demand Canadian troops come home and shine a light on the dollars-and-cents costs of a growing defence establishment.

"The majority of the population does not support any increases in military spending," said Raymond Legault, a spokesman from Quebec anti-war organization Echec a la guerre.

"This message is addressed to all political parties in Canada," Legault said. "We want the silence around military spending to end."

Legault said the protesters were not just a small group of people against the war. "We're the majority."

"Who are our governments serving?" he asked. "Is it NATO, the military industrial complex? Or are they there to answer to the Canadian people?"

How To Win Afghanistan's Opium War

The best way to deprive the Taliban of drug profits? The United States should buy Afghanistan's poppy crop instead of trying to eradicate it.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, at 1:31 PM ET

I used to know Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Her Majesty's ambassador in Kabul, and I have no reason to doubt that he was quoted correctly in the leaked cable from the deputy French ambassador to Afghanistan that has since appeared in the Parisian press. I think that he is right in saying that while there cannot be a straightforward "military victory" for the Taliban and other fundamentalist and criminal forces, nonetheless there is a chance that a combination of these forces can make the country ungovernable by the NATO alliance. He may also be correct in his assertion that an increase of troops in the country might have unwelcome and unintended consequences, in that "it would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets" for the enemy.

If Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated one point over another, it is that the quantity theory of counterinsurgency is very unsoundly based. If a vast number of extra soldiers had been sent to Baghdad before the disastrously conducted war had been given a new strategy and a new command, then it would have been a case of staying in the same hole without ceasing to dig (and there would have been many more "body bags" as a consequence of the larger number of uniformed targets). As it is, we have learned so many lessons in Iraq about how to defeat al-Qaida that we have the chance to apply them in Afghanistan. This is exactly the reverse of the glib and facile argument that used to counterpose the "good" Afghan war to the evil quagmire in Mesopotamia.

Speaking of quagmires, here are a few admittedly quantitative figures (taken from the testimony before Congress of Mark Schneider of the well-respected International Crisis Group). He quoted Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying that suicide bombings in Afghanistan were up 27 percent in 2007 over 2006, commenting that Mullen "should have added that they are up 600 percent over 2005, and that all insurgent attacks are up 400 percent over 2005." To darken the statistical picture further—this testimony was given last spring—one must also count the number of attacks on World Food Program convoys, on relief workers, and on prominent Afghan women. All of these show a steady upward curve, as does the ability of the Taliban to operate across the Pakistani border and to strike in the middle of the capital city as well as other cities, most notably its old stronghold of Kandahar. The final depressing figure is the index of civilian casualties caused by aerial bombardment from NATO forces: This year will show a large increase in these, as well, and that is one of the chief concerns underlying Sir Sherard's bleakly expressed view that the current U.S.-led strategy is "destined to fail."

Innumerable factors combine to constitute this depressing assessment, and many of them have to do with the sheer fact that Afghanistan, already extremely poor, scorched its own earth further in a series of civil wars and ethnic rivalries. I remember flying from Herat to Kabul on a U.N. plane a few years ago and being depressed by the rarity of even a splash of greenery in the mud-colored landscape. Thirty years ago, what was Afghanistan's most famous export? It was grapes, usually made into exceptionally fine raisins that were esteemed throughout the subcontinent. It was a country of vines and orchards. Now, even the vines and trees have mostly been cut down for firewood. Iraq could well be immensely rich in a decade or less: Afghanistan will be well-down even in "Third World" economic terms for a very long time to come.

This is why it is peculiar of us, if not bizarre and quasi-suicidal, to insist that its main economic lifeblood continues to be wholly controlled by our enemies. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime tells us that last year Afghanistan's poppy fields, on 193,000 hectares of land, produced 93 percent of all the world's opium. The potential production could be as high as 8,200 metric tons. And, unsurprisingly, UNODC also reports that the vast bulk of the revenue from this astonishing harvest goes directly to the Taliban or to local warlords and mullahs. Meanwhile, in the guise of liberators, NATO forces appear and tell the Afghan villagers that they intend to burn their only crop. And the American embassy is only restrained by the Afghan government from pursuing a policy of actually spraying this same crop from the air! In other words, the discredited fantasy of Richard Nixon's so-called "War on Drugs" is the dogma on which we are prepared to gamble and lose the country that gave birth to the Taliban and hospitality to al-Qaida.

Surely a smarter strategy would be, in the long term, to invest a great deal in reforestation and especially in the replanting of vines. While in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke, we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while altering the "hearts-and-minds" balance that has been tipping away from us. I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.