The real endgame in Afghanistan | Michael Williams | Comment is free

 

• • Thursday 5 May 2011 15.00 BST

  • Article history

 

A protest in Quetta, Pakistan, after the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Photograph: Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images

The news of Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of US special forces has been greeted in Washington with the hope that the president can accelerate the withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan. The administration expects that it will be easier to split the Taliban away from al-Qaida now that Bin Laden is dead. As one unnamed American official, who was recently quoted in the Washington Post, put it: "Bin Laden's death is the beginning of the endgame in Afghanistan, it changes everything." Nothing could be farther from the truth.

For nearly a decade, the United States has pursued an unfocused war in Afghanistan based on tactics with seemingly no thought about the wider strategy. The Bush administration wandered into South Asia ill-informed and unwilling to think about the big picture; the Obama White House has sadly failed to provide a comprehensive rethink of the problem, disappointing many diehard Obama supporters.

The talk from the military and administration officials has been about "winning hearts and minds" and "talking to the Taliban" and "reducing kinetic operations". All of this is well and good, but these taglines and the tactics they refer to are about managing symptoms not fixing the problem. Bin Laden's death does not rectify the strategic problem.

The decapitation of the al-Qaida leadership may result in the collapse of the organisation – I hope that is the case. But terrorist organisations do not always collapse following such incidents. In this case, the death of Bin Laden should be a step in the right direction, given that the real hammer blows to al-Qaida's ideology have been dealt by the nascent democracy movements across the Middle East. While much uncertainty remains, most experts see these movements in Egypt, Syria and beyond as a rejection of al-Qaida's call to violence and extreme interpretations of Islam. Again, I hope they are right.

More importantly, however, the problem of a weak Afghanistan is not caused by Bin Laden, al-Qaida or the Taliban. The Taliban provided order to an Afghanistan plagued by internecine violence following the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and American involvement in 1992. Al-Qaida took advantage of the Taliban rule to use Afghanistan as a base for their global operations.

Afghanistan has always been a highly decentralised state, not easily governed by a central authority. This has not changed. This weakness has led other states to take advantage of Afghanistan. During the cold war, the country became the backdrop for a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. But a third player was always in the mix: Pakistan. The US thought that it was using Pakistan to advance the US national interest against the USSR, but Pakistan was working for Islamabad's interests, not American ones.

Pakistan wanted to settle their border dispute with Afghanistan to Pakistan's advantage. Furthermore, Pakistan has always viewed Afghanistan as "strategic depth" to be used by the military in a conflict with India. In fact, the Pakistani military and intelligence services actively fomented radical Islamist groups in the last quarter of the 20th century to create a cadre of irregular fighters that could be used in an irregular war against India in Kashmir. Pakistan also backed the rise of the Taliban in the mid 1990s, since they viewed them as a friendly ally. Since the partition of British India in 1947, India and Pakistan have been at odds, and Pakistan still greatly fears India. Whether or not this is a rational view through western eyes is irrelevant. This is the root of the problem – and Bin Laden's death changes none of it.

In the 2008 US election campaign, Barack Obama spoke about the need for a regional solution to the problem. In office, his administration has failed to pressure India and Pakistan to find common solutions to common problems. Right now, US goals for the region are directly opposed to Islamabad's goals. The US wants a stable Afghanistan, free of radical Islam. This means India should be involved in Afghanistan. Indian involvement in Afghanistan, however, means that Pakistan would be "surrounded" by "hostile" governments. Elements of the Pakistan military and intelligence will never allow this.

Unless President Obama can work to increase trust, no amount of military tactics or civilian development can change the strategic reality. India does not want to be forced to deal with Islamabad, especially following the Mumbai attacks, but the status quo is simply not tenable. It is not tenable for the US, it is not tenable for India and it is not tenable for Pakistan. The Pakistani polity is imploding: the gap between the Pakistani public and their leaders is wide and deep, not to mention the divisions among the leadership in Islamabad.

It does not matter if the US remains committed to Afghanistan with 100,000 troops or if we withdraw tomorrow; the result – the eventual implosion of Pakistan and chaos across South Asia – will be the same, unless President Obama addresses the imbalance of power and the perception of fear and threat between India and Pakistan.

Osama bin Laden killing was 'abhorrent', says Castro | World news

 

• Thursday 5 May 2011 18.44 BST

• Article history

 

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro called the death of Osama bin Laden abhorrent. Photograph: Adalberto Roque/AFP

Fidel Castro has accused the US of executing Osama bin Laden, violating Pakistani law and desecrating Muslim burial tradition in an "abhorrent" operation.

Killing the unarmed al-Qaida leader in front of his family and burying the body at sea would multiply "hatred and revenge" against the US rather than make it safer, said Cuba's former president.

"Whatever the actions attributed to him, the assassination of an unarmed human being while surrounded by his own relatives is something abhorrent," Castro wrote in a column published on Thursday in the communist party newspaper Granma.

"Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan … whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended and its religious traditions desecrated."

Castro's comments put him in company with Hamas and other Islamic groups that have criticised the killing. There is growing international unease over the way the White House's original version of a firefight during the navy Seal raid in Abbottabad last Sunday has changed.

Assassinating Bin Laden and plunging his corpse into the ocean showed "fear and insecurity" that would turn him into a "far more dangerous person" via an anti-US backlash, Castro said. He predicted that after initial euphoria even the US public would end up criticising the operation.

The 84-year-old leader stressed that Cuba expressed solidarity with the US after the 11 September attacks but that Washington then pursued "unjust wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing countless innocents, and tortured suspects at Guantánamo Bay.

His criticism followed a statement from Venezuela's government that the US was fighting "terror with terror" and had used Bin Laden as a pretext to occupy central Asia. It demanded a US withdrawal from the region.

Venezuela's vice-president, Elías Jaua, said the US was using assassination as an instrument to resolve problems. "I never cease to be surprised by how crime and murder has been naturalised and how it's celebrated," he said.

Taliban join the Twitter revolution | World news | The Guardian

•  

  Thursday 12 May 2011 15.43 BST

• Article history

 

Members of the Taliban once turned their backs on most modern technology, but have now embraced microblogging. Photograph: Reuters

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they eschewed most modern technology, including television and music players.

But in the latest sign of the hardline movement's rapprochement with at least some areas of the modern world, the Taliban have embraced microblogging.

Their Twitter feed, @alemarahweb, pumps out several messages a day, keeping 993 followers up to date with often highly exaggerated reports of strikes against the "infidel forces" and the "Karzai puppet regime". Most messages are in Pashtu, with links to news stories on the elaborate and multilingual website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban's shadow government likes to style itself.

Today, the feed broke into English for the first time, with a tweet about an attack on police in Farah province: "Enemy attacked in Khak-e-Safid, 6 dead."

There is not much lively banter between the "emirate" and its Twitter followers, save for a cheerful "asalam alekum" sent last week to the Kavkaz Centre, a militant news site covering jihad in the Caucasus.

Many of the story links are broken as the Taliban's official website, regularly evicted from servers or shut down by authorities, is constantly on the move.

Presumably operating on the grounds that it is best to know one's enemies – 140 characters at a time – the first feed the Taliban signed up to follow was that of @Afghantim, who describes himself as a US air force logistics officer currently deployed working as a combat adviser to the Afghan army.

The Taliban are also following @afghanHeroesUK, a charity supporting British troops in Afghanistan.

Torture legal aid case is a triumph of the rule of law | Daniel Carey | Comment is free

 

• • Thursday 12 May 2011 16.14 BST

  • Article history

 

Documents from Bob Ainsworth were disclosed in the high court legal aid case brought by Maya Evans. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

A high court judgment handed down on Thursday strikes a blow in the fight against torture and, just as importantly, against impunity for illegal but secretive decisions of central government.

The high court has quashed changes made to the legal aid rules by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to eliminate funding for "pure public interest cases" – cases brought by claimants who do not derive a personal benefit from the litigation. They are a small but important minority of judicial review actions: for example, when a habeas corpus action is necessary to locate a prisoner held in incommunicado detention or subjected to rendition outside the UK, or when the UK is handing over prisoners to torture by the Afghan intelligence service and refuses to allow those prisoners to access the courts. The latter example is a description of the case brought by the peace and human rights campaigner Maya Evans in 2009/2010: in a significant victory the court imposed stringent conditions on future Afghan prisoner handovers and prevented any further handovers to a notorious torture centre in Kabul – conditions that are still in place.

It was during that litigation that defence ministers repeatedly pressurised the MoJ, in secret, to cut off funding for torture litigation. The documents disclosed in Thursday's court case demonstrate a chilling complacency. In one communication Bob Ainsworth, then defence secretary, wrote to a justice minister: "The Ministry of Defence has been faced with a series of judicial review applications arising out of the intervention in Iraq. In most of these cases the consequences of an adverse judgment could be extremely serious for our defence, security, and foreign policy interests … This … leads me to wonder whether the time is right for a look at the rules …"

These documents reveal something new about government complicity in torture – that, after Baha Mousa and Binyam Mohamed, the MoD was so desperate to avoid accountability that it stooped to secretly cutting off litigation at its source. Serious questions now have to be asked of these ministers: if they weren't prepared to defend the UK's actions in court, how clean were their consciences regarding the torture allegations? It appears that government complicity in torture extends to attempts to cover it up, and that this complicity goes to the very top of government.

Lord Justice Laws condemned these actions in his judgment on Thursday, stating: "For the State to inhibit litigation by the denial of legal aid because the court's judgment might be unwelcome or apparently damaging would constitute an attempt to influence the incidence of judicial decisions in the interests of government … frankly inimical to the rule of law."

The judge goes on to criticise the way the amendments were presented to the public as innocuous cost-cutting measures. He declares that consultation to have been unlawful as well. In doing so he has underlined the need for judicial vigilance amid the current wave of deficit reduction cuts – they are the perfect cover for decision-makers to eliminate bothersome services such as legal aid, or aspects of the state that don't fit within their own agendas such as libraries, Sure Start centres, services to the vulnerable etc. It is right and proper that the courts form the last line of defence against these kinds of arbitrary and ideologically driven cuts.

In Thursday's victory, Maya Evans has proved the worth of the very cause that she was fighting: this too was a public interest case, from which she derived no personal benefit. Without it, we would have no idea of government's attempts to avoid accountability to the courts for torture. WikiLeaks and investigative journalism have their place, but so does judicial review and the duty of disclosure, which is imposed on government in such cases. It was only through disclosure that these documents were revealed and only through the courts that these rule changes were quashed. This judgment is an important victory for the rule of law.

Afghanistan: war without end? | David Swanson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

• • Thursday 12 May 2011 19.31 BST

  • Article history

 

General David Petraeus, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, greets US defence secretary Robert Gates upon his arrival in Kabul, March 2011. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

Afghanistan was supposed to be the campaign promise that President Barack Obama actually kept. He said he would escalate that war, and sure enough he did. Is he now going back on promises he's made as president, by proposing to withdraw 2.5% of US forces in July?

Here are the relevant promises:

"After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home … [O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." – President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009

"I'm confident that the withdrawal will be significant. People will say this is a real process of transition; this is not just a token gesture." – President Barack Obama, 15 April 2011

"In July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it." – Vice President Joe Biden, quoted in Jonathan Alter's The Promise

But let's first review how we got here. When loyal Democrats heard candidate Obama say he would escalate the war as president, they mistakenly understood him to say he would end it. Progressive bloggers have planned a panel for next month to discuss their disappointment with this "broken promise" that was actually kept.

President Obama sent the first additional 17,000 troops before he'd been in office a month and explicitly before coming up with any plan for Afghanistan. Sending the troops was, apparently, an end in itself. Then, Obama sent more. He got the total up from 33,700 US troops in late 2008 to 68,000 in late 2009. These numbers do not include tens of thousands of European troops, untold numbers of "intelligence" personnel, mercenaries hired through the US state department and US defence department contractors almost equal in number to the US troops.

Obama's 2009 "surge", which more than doubled the US troop presence in Afghanistan preceded any public debate on an Afghanistan surge. The publicly debated surge, actually Obama's second, was "debated" between the commander-in-chief and his supposed subordinates, and then executed in 2010. By the end of 2010, according to the US defence department (pdf), there were 96,900 US troops and 87,483 supporting contractors in Afghanistan. In rough terms, there are 200,000 Americans now in Afghanistan, against the will of the American people. Here are some recent polls from the weeks and months preceding the killing of Osama bin Laden:

• By 73% to 21%, Americans say: withdraw a substantial number of US combat forces from Afghanistan this summer – ABC/Washington Post
• By 63% to 30%, Americans want complete withdrawal – Bloomberg (pdf)
• By 72% to 25%, Americans want to speed up the withdrawal – USA Today/Gallup
• By 53% to 39%, Americans say US troops should not be involved in Afghanistan – CBS
• By 50% to 44%, Americans say: remove all troops ASAP – Pew
• By 64% to 31%, Americans say the war has not been worth fighting – ABC/Washington Post
• By 58% to 40%, Americans oppose the war – CNN/Opinion Research Corporation (pdf)

That first poll, with the 73% in favour of a "substantial" withdrawal this summer, is a poll on whether the president should keep a promise. On 1 December 2009, President Obama said of his upcoming second "surge" in Afghanistan:

"Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011."

This deadline for "beginning" the withdrawal has been repeated for a year and a half. In May 2010, Obama said he was "confident" he could meet the deadline, but that it would just be a beginning. Many observers believed July 2011 was a promised date for completing a withdrawal, but in reality, it was always a promised date for beginning it. Still, most people assumed that beginning a withdrawal would involve a substantial number of troops leaving. After all, if a pair of "surges" of 70,000 troops lasts for years, in what sense are they "surges" rather than ordinary escalations?

In November 2010, the White House started talking about December 2014, leading the Washington Post to print this headline: "When it comes to Afghanistan policy, December 2014 is the new July 2011." It wasn't. July 2011 was still the date to start the withdrawal, and 2014 was the date by which a pretence would be established of Afghan "sovereignty", despite the ongoing presence of tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands, of foreign troops.

In President Obama's 25 January 2011 state of the union address, July was still the start date: "This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home." Yes, but how many troops, and how many contractors? Of 200,000 people, will you bring home three-quarters? Half? A quarter?

Apparently, the answer is 2.5%.

We learned this week that: "US military officers in Afghanistan have drawn up preliminary proposals to withdraw as many as 5,000 troops from the country in July and as many as 5,000 more by the year's end, the first phase of a US pullout promised by President Barack Obama, officials say." This is what you call a trial balloon. It could easily be revised upward if the American people or the United States' allies raised enough hell. It could go away entirely if we meekly accept it. The Wall Street Journal report continued:

"The proposals, prepared by staff officers in Kabul, are likely to be the subject of fierce internal debate in the White House, state department and Pentagon – a discussion influenced by calculations about how Osama bin Laden's death will affect the Afghan battlefield. The plans were drafted before the US killed the al-Qaida leader, and could be revised. They have yet to be formally presented to General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who must then seek White House approval for a withdrawal."

And this trial balloon is smaller than the 5% withdrawal it appears to be. You might assume that 5,000 troops from a total of 100,000 would mean 5,000 contractors departing as well, for a total of 10,000 people out of 200,000. But you'd be wrong. The 5,000 seems to be a total of troops and contractors:

"If approved by top military officers and the president, an initial withdrawal of 5,000 would represent a modest reduction from the current 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, allowing the military to preserve combat power through this summer's fighting season. Some of the troops that leave in July will be combat troops but commanders hope to minimise the impact by culling support staff as well."

In other words, 5,000 out of 200,000 – or 2.5% of US forces – would be withdrawn under this plan. Does that seem like a substantive beginning to you? It does to some anonymous military officials: "Some military officials believe a cut of 10,000 troops this year would be significant because it would represent one-third of the troop surge." The only thing significant here is the fudging of the numbers. We've "surged" close to 70,000, not 30,000, troops, plus a similar number of contractors.

According to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, "the announcement of such a paltry troop withdrawal is an Orwellian attempt to appear to drawdown the war without actually ending the war." Kucinich pointed out that at this pace of withdrawal, the Afghanistan war would drag on for another full decade. The proposal may actually be better than that, and worse as well. The plan that has now been floated publicly would supposedly withdraw 70,000 troops by 2014, meaning the pace of withdrawal would pick up. But 20,000 to 30,000 US troops would remain indefinitely. As would British troops. And multi-year plans are notoriously subject to revision.

I'm glad to be working with groups in the US and in the UK that intend to reject this latest plan. Now is the moment to put an end to the "global war on terror", not to ease our way into its permanent establishment.

* o Chris Cole

• • Friday 13 May 2011

  • Article history

Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, is right to question the morality and legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan (The Predator paradox, 6 May). As he states, in 2010 alone there were 118 US drone strikes in Pakistan with estimates of up to 1,000 people killed. Some of these may well have been aimed at so-called "high-value targets"; but as Macdonald rightly points out, "several hundred innocent people of all ages have also died".

So it is a shame that this rare critique of unmanned drone strikes says nothing about Britain's own use of armed drones. There is a virtual wall of silence surrounding such strikes. We do know that between June 2008 and December 2010, more than 124 people were killed in Afghanistan by British drones. We know this not because of any ministerial statement, parliamentary question, or Freedom of Information (FoI) request, but because of a boastful, off-the-cuff remark to journalists by the prime minister during his last visit to Afghanistan.

I have repeatedly tried to obtain information about the circumstances of British drone strikes under FoI legislation, but all requests have been refused as being "prejudicial to the defence of our armed forces" or, more recently, simply ignored. A parliamentary question asked by my MP, Andrew Smith, about whether British drones were firing the thermobaric variant of the Hellfire missile – a variant that British forces are known to possess – was refused as "its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the capability, effectiveness or security of our armed forces".

Macdonald suggests that "tossing a dime would be a better way of identifying a 'high-value terrorist' than relying on US military intelligence", and that "Guantánamo proves the tragic inability of the US military to differentiate between an enemy and an incidental bystander".

I have heard similar sentiments in my investigations from British military officers and officials – the implicit assumption being, of course, that British forces would never be so inaccurate with their targeting or reckless with their drone strikes.

However, without accountability and scrutiny, without proper information about the circumstances of these strikes, we cannot pretend to be legally or ethically superior to the US in this matter. Macdonald would no doubt agree with Philip Alston, the then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, writing for the Guardian website last year, who said of drone strikes that "accountability is an independent requirement of international law. When complete secrecy prevails, it is negated".

With controversy growing, it is high time that the defence secretary, Liam Fox, makes a full statement to the House of Commons, giving as much detail as possible about Britain's drone strikes. In particular we need to know whether all those killed in the strikes were directly participating in hostilities at the time; whether the UK has or would use drones for assassinations of so-called high-value targets; and whether any civilians are known to have been killed or injured by UK drones.

Response: We mustn't ignore the fact that British drones kill too | Chris Cole | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

• • Friday 13 May 2011

  • Article history

Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, is right to question the morality and legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan (The Predator paradox, 6 May). As he states, in 2010 alone there were 118 US drone strikes in Pakistan with estimates of up to 1,000 people killed. Some of these may well have been aimed at so-called "high-value targets"; but as Macdonald rightly points out, "several hundred innocent people of all ages have also died".

So it is a shame that this rare critique of unmanned drone strikes says nothing about Britain's own use of armed drones. There is a virtual wall of silence surrounding such strikes. We do know that between June 2008 and December 2010, more than 124 people were killed in Afghanistan by British drones. We know this not because of any ministerial statement, parliamentary question, or Freedom of Information (FoI) request, but because of a boastful, off-the-cuff remark to journalists by the prime minister during his last visit to Afghanistan.

I have repeatedly tried to obtain information about the circumstances of British drone strikes under FoI legislation, but all requests have been refused as being "prejudicial to the defence of our armed forces" or, more recently, simply ignored. A parliamentary question asked by my MP, Andrew Smith, about whether British drones were firing the thermobaric variant of the Hellfire missile – a variant that British forces are known to possess – was refused as "its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the capability, effectiveness or security of our armed forces".

Macdonald suggests that "tossing a dime would be a better way of identifying a 'high-value terrorist' than relying on US military intelligence", and that "Guantánamo proves the tragic inability of the US military to differentiate between an enemy and an incidental bystander".

I have heard similar sentiments in my investigations from British military officers and officials – the implicit assumption being, of course, that British forces would never be so inaccurate with their targeting or reckless with their drone strikes.

However, without accountability and scrutiny, without proper information about the circumstances of these strikes, we cannot pretend to be legally or ethically superior to the US in this matter. Macdonald would no doubt agree with Philip Alston, the then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, writing for the Guardian website last year, who said of drone strikes that "accountability is an independent requirement of international law. When complete secrecy prevails, it is negated".

With controversy growing, it is high time that the defence secretary, Liam Fox, makes a full statement to the House of Commons, giving as much detail as possible about Britain's drone strikes. In particular we need to know whether all those killed in the strikes were directly participating in hostilities at the time; whether the UK has or would use drones for assassinations of so-called high-value targets; and whether any civilians are known to have been killed or injured by UK drones.