Afghanistan The True Story

Professor Noam Chomsky - in interview

2011-11-08T05:55:00.001-01:00

by Dean Carroll

28 October 2011

World-renowned polymath Professor Noam Chomsky speaks to PublicServiceEurope.com in the first of two interviews on international affairs, geopolitics, the Arab spring and the economic crisis plaguing Europe and America

You have been a leading critic of United States foreign policy in the past – what view do you take on Barack Obama's performance as President in this area since he took office, I know you were critical of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden?
"There used to be a principle in Anglo-American law called presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law. When a suspect is apprehended and can easily be brought to trial, to assassinate him is simply a crime. Incidentally, the invasion of Pakistan was also a violation of international law."

So is there any possible moral justification for the CIA's drone strikes in countries like Yemen and Pakistan, which have allegedly occurred under Obama's leadership of the White House?
"There is no justification for targeted assassination. There were things going on before, under the last president, but the Obama administration has extended earlier procedures to a global assassination campaign directed at people suspected of encouraging others to carry out what the US calls terrorist acts. What are called 'terrorist acts' also raises rather serious questions and that's an understatement. Take, for example, the Guantanamo Bay case of a 15-year-old boy – who was accused of having picked up a rifle to defend his village, in Afghanistan, when it was being attacked by American soldiers. He was accused of terrorism and then sent to Guantanamo for a total of eight years. After eight years of imprisonment, where what happens is no secret, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to another eight years in prison. This is terrorism, a 15-year-old boy defending his village from terrorism?"

So you think that, potentially, Obama's foreign policy approach has been worse than that of George W. Bush – in certain areas?
"In terms of state terror and that's what I would call this, I have to say yes – and that has already been pointed out by military analysts. The Bush administration policy was to kidnap suspects, send them to secret prisons where they were not treated very nicely as we know. But the Obama administration has escalated that policy to you don't kidnap them, but you kill them. Now remember, these are suspects – even, in the case of Osama bin Laden. It is plausible that he did plan and organise the 9/11 attacks, but plausible and proven are two different things. It is worth remembering that eight months after the attacks, in April 2002, the head of the FBI – in his most detailed statement to the press was only able to say that they believed that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan by bin Laden but implemented in the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the US, No firm evidence has been presented, at least publicly, since that time. The government-created 9/11 commission had a lot of material that was circumstantial evidence that was reasonably plausible, but it's doubtful that any of it would have held up in an independent court. The evidence they had was provided to them by the government on the basis of interrogation of suspects under very cruel conditions, as we know. It is highly unlikely that an independent tribunal could have considered such evidence seriously."

How do you see the Libya conflict – were western forces, particularly Europe, right to intervene?
"The three traditional imperial powers of Britain, France and the US participated in a civil war on the side of the rebels that had nothing to do with the United National Security Council resolution. Was the imperial triumvirate acting appropriately, I think that is a question that has to be discussed and debated. It certainly was not a popular move internationally. I mean it's called the international community, but most of the world opposed it. Libya is an African country and the African Union was calling for negotiations and diplomacy, and they were disregarded. Brazil, Russian, India and China – the BRIC countries – had a conference in China at the time, and they also issued a declaration calling for diplomacy and negotiations. Even Turkey, at the beginning, was tepid and Egypt didn't support it, and there was practically no support in the Arab world.

"The real question is - could the mandate to protect civilians have been carried out through diplomacy? Libya is a highly tribal society and there is a lot of conflict among the tribes, who knows what is going to come out of all this. The transitional government has already stressed that there will be strict adherence to Sharia law and denying the rights of women and so on and so forth. Very few people in the west understand much about all this. On the other hand, there was tremendous popular support for getting rid of Gaddafi - who was a terrible thug."

And do you see a widening and deepening of the Arab spring as time goes by and rebels in states like Syria and Iran gain heart from the achievements of the once oppressed citizens in Libya?
"Iran is a different case – it has a harsh regime, but quite different circumstances. Syria is an extremely ugly situation that is descending into violent civil war. Nobody has proposed a sensible policy to deal with it. In large parts of the Arab world, the pro-democracy uprisings have been very quickly crushed. In Saudi Arabia, the most extreme radical Islamist state and closest ally of the US and Britain, there were mild efforts at protest and they were crushed pretty quickly – so much so that people were afraid to come out on the streets again. The same is true of Kuwait and that whole region – the oil region. In Bahrain, protests were initially tolerated before being violently crushed with the assistance of a Saudi-led invasion force in very ugly ways, like invading a hospital and attacking patients and doctors.

"In Egypt and Tunisia, there has been significant progress – but it is limited. In Egypt, the military has shown no intention of relaxing its control of society – although, the country now has a free press and a labour movement has been able to organise and act independently. Tunisia also has a history of labour activism. And so, the progress towards democracy and freedom is pretty closely correlated with the rise of long-term militant activism. That shouldn't surprise westerners because that is exactly what happened in the west."

How do you see geopolitics playing out over the coming decades with the rise of the BRICs, the lack of stability in the Middle East and the decline of the west?
"The US and Europe have somewhat different problems. Europe is facing quite severe financial problems, that is no secret, that are in part traceable to the relatively human approach towards integrating the poorer countries together with the richer nations. Before the European Union was established and the poorer southern countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain were brought in, there were efforts to made to reduce the sharp differences between the rich advanced countries and poorer ones – so that northern European workers wouldn't have to face competition from an impoverished and exploited working class in the south. There was compensatory funding and other measures, which – of course – didn't eliminate the gap but removed it sufficiently so that the poorer countries could be brought in without a very harsh effect on the rich northern ones.

"Europe is now paying the price of its relatively humane approach and its failure to deal with some very serious problems such as the extraordinary independence of the European Central Bank and its religious dedication to anti-inflation policies – which are not the ones that should be followed at a time of decline and recession. Europe should be doing the opposite like the US where the policies are somewhat more realistic."

What role do you think Europe and the US will play in this new world order – potentially, reflecting multi-polarity rather than western hegemony?
"Europe and the US are still a huge part of the global economy; there is no doubt about that. If Europe can get its house in order, and I think it will have to change its economic policies, it has options. What Europe needs now is not an austerity programme, but a stimulus package to restore growth so that down the road you can take care of the debt problem. The same is true in the US. There is plenty of money for a stimulus programme in both regions. It might increase debt, but that is a much longer-term problem. There is plenty of wealth in our societies; the question is how it is going to be used.

"The common theme all over the international affairs literature is what's called western decline and the corollary conclusion that global power is once again shifting to the rising powers of China and India. That argument is implausible, economic growth in China has been quite spectacular in many ways – but these are very poor countries. Per capita income is well below that in the west and they have enormous internal problems. China, considered to be the main economic engine, is still today largely an assembly plant. If you calculate the US trade deficit with China accurately in terms of value added, you find that the figure declines by about 25 per cent and increases with Japan, Taiwan and Korea by approximately the same. The reason is that parts, components and high technology are flowing into China from the peripheral, more industrialised, societies as well as the US and Europe – and China is assembling them. If you buy an iPad or something that says 'exported from China', very little of the value added is in China.

"Certainly, later on, China will climb up the technology ladder – but it's a hard climb and the country has very serious internal problems including a demographic problem. The country's growth period has been associated with a big bulge in young workers in their twenties and thirties, but that is changing – partly, because of the 'one child' policy. What is coming is a decline in the working-age population and an increase in the elderly population. The Chinese will doubtless grow and be important, but India is even more impoverished with hundreds of millions of people living in misery. The world is becoming more diverse and a more diverse century is coming. With the rise of the BRICs, there is a diffusion of power coming. As far as American decline is concerned, it began in the 1940s. The US reached the peak of its powers in 1945, when it literally had half the world's wealth and production with incredible security – there was nothing like it in history. That began to decline very quickly and the so-called 'loss of China' occurred in 1949. It was taken for granted that we possessed the world, that we owned it. Pretty soon, there was the 'loss of South East Asia'. That's what the inter-China wars were about and the coup in Indonesia

"In the last decade, we have seen what is called the 'loss of South America'. South America has started to move towards independence and integration and the US has been expelled from every military base there. And there are unions being created in Latin America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. The west and its allies are trying hard to control this, but its continuing. And, in China, there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - which includes the central Asian states, with Russia, India and Pakistan being observers. The US has been excluded and so far it is an energy-based, economic-based international organisation. Yet, it is another part of this diversification of power in the world.

"American decline is to a significant extent self-inflicted. Since the 1970s, western economies took a sharp turn. Throughout history, the tendency has been towards growth and hopefulness. That changed in the 1970s, when there was a shift in the economy towards financialisation and offshoring of production because of the declining rate of profit in manufacturing. What has happened is very high concentration of wealth – mostly, in a tiny part of the financial sector – and stagnation and decline for the larger part of the population. You have slogans today like the "99 per cent and the 1 per cent". The numbers aren't entirely correct, but the general picture is. It is very serious as it has led to spectacular wealth in very few pockets – although, it is very harmful to the countries involved. The protests we are seeing around the world at the moment are another symptom of that."

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the US. He has authored more than one hundred books including Current Issues in Linguistic Theory

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

2011-05-09T18:37:00.001-01:00

May 6, 2011

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W.
Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

By Noam Chomsky

It's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects." In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it "believed" that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn't know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn't have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda."

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington's anger that Pakistan didn't turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's like naming our murder weapons after victims of our

crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It's as if the Luftwaffe were to

call its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's, and he is not a "suspect" but uncontroversially the "decider" who gave the orders to commit the "supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There's more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the "Bush doctrine" that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It's like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It's as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy."

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.

2011-04-10T18:18:00.000-01:00

Photos show US soldiers in Afghanistan posing with dead civilians

'Trophy' pictures show US soldiers posing with corpses of Afghan civilians they are accused of killing for sport

Jon Boone in Kabul

guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 21.56 GMT

Article history

A US soldier poses with the corpse of an Afghan boy one of three
photographs published by German magazine Der Spiegel.

The face of Jeremy Morlock, a young US soldier, grins at the camera, his hand holding up the head of the dead and bloodied youth he and his colleagues have just killed in an act military prosecutors say was premeditated murder.

Moments before the picture was taken in January last year, the unsuspecting victim had been waved over by a group of US soldiers who had driven to his village in Kandahar province in one of their armoured Stryker tanks.

According to testimony collected by Der Spiegel magazine the boy had, as a matter of routine, lifted up his shirt to reveal that he was not hiding a suicide bomb vest.

That was the moment Morlock, according to a pre-arranged plan, threw a grenade at the boy that exploded while other members of the rogue group who called themselves the "kill team" opened fire.

They would later tell military investigators that the boy, a farmer's son, had threatened them with the grenade.

The pictures include a similar photograph of a different soldier posing with the same victim and a photograph of two other civilians killed by the unit.

There was no sign on Monday of the anticipated public outrage. But with Afghanistan on holiday for the Persian new year celebrations, and media outlets initially unable to get hold of the images, anger may yet build.

The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, recently confided to officials that he feared it might trigger the same kind of scandal as that at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where images of prisoners being abused by US soldiers sparked anti-American protests.

For weeks the US government has been working to pre-empt any outrage, with top officials, including the US vice president Joe Biden, in talks with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Despite being a setback in the propaganda war between the western coalition and its insurgent enemies, Nato will be relieved that for the time being only a tiny sample of a total collection of roughly 4,000 images and video clips have found their way into the public domain.

The publication of the photos will also mark the ultimate disgrace of the group of young US soldiers, who are currently facing military justice for killing innocent civilians for sport and mutilating their bodies by cutting off fingers and ripping out teeth to keep as trophies.

Morlock has turned on his former colleagues, agreeing to testify against them in return for a reduced jail sentence. Some of the activities of the group are already public, with 12 men currently on trial in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians. Morlock has told investigators that Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs was the ringleader. In videotaped evidence, he has said Gibbs would pick out a possible target with a comment such as: "You guys wanna wax this guy or what?"

Gibbs, if found guilty, could receive a life sentence.

Hans-Ulrich Stoldt, a spokesman for Der Spiegel, said the magazine had other, more graphic photos.

"We published three but not others, and we even pixilated those we did print so that the victims could not be identified," Stoldt said. "We needed to document [the accusations] in some form, and were as restrained as possible."

Lost Voices of Afghanistan

2011-01-30T17:09:00.002-01:00

21 January, 2011 - 14:17 GMT

Lost Voices of Afghanistan 22 mins

When the BBC's War correspondent Jonathan Charles made an appeal for Afghan civilians to send in their war poetry, little did he anticipate the flood of writing it would inspire.

Here, he explores a selection of those poems and interviews the authors. The writers have many stories to tell which have inspired haunting poetry. Verse has, for some, become the best way of expressing not only the sights and sounds of the war, but the emotions.

This is poetry of witness, of anger, propaganda, and it's a catharsis. While Jonathan was interviewing one poet, the writer suddenly revealed that he had been the finance minister of Afghanistan in the 1970s and later lived under house arrest. He has turned away from politics and is now writing poetry.

Most shockingly of all, Jonathan talks to a woman now in exile in Canada who witnessed a couple trying to sell two of their children to feed the rest of their family. Her powerful poem The Queen of the World sees her imagining having the power to stop such awful events. With the back-drop of a great poetry tradition in the area, there is an explosion of new poetry in Afghanistan. In each state, we hear that poetry reading evenings are flourishing. There is even a story of British troops transporting people to these events and guarding them, while inside the poets recite angry verse about the visiting soldiers.

First broadcast on 21 January, 2011

WikiLeaks cables say, US convinced Karzai half-brother is corrupt

2010-12-07T21:50:00.001-01:00

Leaked dispatches allege 'kingpin of Kandahar' is engaged in illicit enterprises in Afghanistan's second city

Jonathan Steele

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 December 2010 21.30 GMT

Ahmed Wali Karzai (left), the Afghan president's half-brother, speaks with tribal leaders. WikiLeaks cables allege he conducts illicit business through a network of politican clans. Photograph: Ed Wray/AP

The US is convinced that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's younger half-brother and a senior figure in Kandahar, is corrupt, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

His immense power in Afghanistan's second city is well illustrated in a cable from June 2009 from the US embassy in Kabul that analyses the city's politics and describes the Karzai family's position as a "semi-modern aristocracy".

Under the heading "Kandahar politics complicate US objectives in Afghanistan", it says: "As the kingpin of Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage, and protection. Much of the real business of running Kandahar takes place out of public sight, where AWK operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises."

AWK is described as the city's "unrivaled strongman" who rules over political deal- and decision-making at the provincial level. According to the cable, the "overriding purpose that unifies his political roles as chairman of the Kandahar provincial council and as the president's personal representative to the south is the enrichment, extension and perpetuation of the Karzai clan, and along with it their branch of the Popalzai tribe. This applies equally to his entrepreneurial and his alleged criminal activities. AWK derives authority and legitimacy from his relationship to President Karzai, from the relative discipline and elite position of the Popalzai tribe and from his access to resources."

Karzai family-run businesses include the alleged control of trucking on Highway 1, Afghanistan's national ring road, through Kandahar province and beyond, as well as private security contracting and real estate, the cable says. It mentions Ayno Mina, which is described as an ostentatious Karzai property development for Afghan elites east of Kandahar City, built on land obtained from the government at rock bottom prices, with financing guaranteed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a US government agency that sells investment services to assist US companies.

The cable says that AWK is unlike other Afghan strongmen who have public support because they fund useful projects and deliver services. By contrast, "AWK is widely unpopular in Kandahar, because he rules exclusively rather than inclusively; he is not perceived as caring about the population at large but rather, as a traditional Pashtun Khan using his power to 'feed his tribe'."

One of the most lucrative projects in the region is Canada's rehabilitation of the Dahla dam and irrigation works which were originally constructed by the US in the 1950s. Land values are expected to increase dramatically in the Arghandab river valley which the dam serves.

The cable says: "Karzai businesses are also set to acquire multiple patronage benefits from Dahla dam construction and security contracts, but the main prize will be political control over long-term allocation of water flows … It is no accident that AWK lobbied the project's Canadian sponsors on behalf of the Watan Group, the eventual winner of the Dahla dam security contract, whose CEO is his cousin, US national Rashid Popal."

More than business is involved; Karzai tribal allies will control security. "A follow-on to warlord militias, private security companies today also serve personal interests as camouflaged vehicles for protection rackets in construction, transportation and drug smuggling," it adds.

The cable suggests the Karzais may be trying to create a private regional army to protect themselves from rivals. It points out that AWK has been trying to get the interior ministry to authorise him to license all contractors and their weapons through the Kandahar provincial council. This "has the potential to arm the Karzai clan with a non-state entity that can insure against whoever should come to power in Afghanistan".

The cable highlights the difficulties the US faces in tackling the Karzai family. "Initiatives that rely on the Afghan government to take the lead in bringing to justice major corrupt figures or negative influences in Kandahar contain a serious dilemma: they would include some of Karzai's closest relatives and allies and require the prosecution of people on whom we often rely for assistance and/or support. Second, any efforts to bring these individuals to justice could compromise the informal governing networks to which Kandaharis have become accustomed, without necessarily replacing them with effective government officials or improving the delivery of services."

In February the US finally began to consider steps to deal with AWK. According to the cables, a US committee known as the Nexus-Corruption Leadership Board, co-chaired by a US diplomat in the Kabul embassy and a US intelligence general, met on 4 February to discuss what measures to take "against criminal and corrupt Afghan officials in an effort to change their behaviour … and end tacit American support for corrupt Afghan officials".

The aim was to show that the US was going "to change its policy on corruption", having been criticised for turning a blind eye to allegations that senior Afghan officials are involved in drug-dealing and money-laundering. The cable said the board would recommend various measures "including possible law enforcement actions against three prominent malign actors in southern Afghanistan, Abdul Razziq, Ahmed Wali Karzai, Asadullah Sherzad".

Apart from prosecutions, the board would consider shunning corrupt officials, denying them photo opportunities with senior US officials, including visiting members of Congress, refusing any exchanges of gifts, and blocking them from US-funded travel, training and speaking engagements.

So far, no prosecution of AWK has taken place. He consistently rejects all allegations as politically motivated charges from rivals. In a conversation with Frank Ruggiero, the top US civilian official in southern Afghanistan, AWK dismissed allegations that he was involved in drug-smuggling as "like a spice added to a dish to make it more enticing to eat", according to another cable. He told the official he was ready to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence.

In spite of these assurances, the cable ends with the US official commenting on AWK: "While he presented himself as a partner to the United States and is eager to be seen as helping the coalition, he also demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs. He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities, and that the coalition views many of his activities as malign, particularly relating to his influence over the police. We will need to monitor his activity closely".

WikiLeaks cables: The Afghans simply want to know who will be in charge

2010-12-03T14:19:00.001-01:00

The WikiLeaks cables show that US diplomats miss the point: without a political strategy, all this bloodshed is for nothing

Sherard Cowper-Coles

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 December 2010 22.30 GMT

For me, the leaked American cable traffic on Afghanistan contains few surprises. The cables show a great global foreign service doing its job: reporting, dutifully and sometimes at greater length than strictly necessary, what was happening and what it was hearing. Truths inconvenient for the power in Washington – about US allies and associates in the Afghan enterprise – are told.

As ambassador in Kabul from 2007 to 2009 I knew, and reported to ministers in London, that President Hamid Karzai was suspicious of British efforts and motives in Helmand. On that, as on so many other issues, Karzai is the authentic voice of many of his people. No secret there. I also reported American concerns about the level of military resources Britain was devoting to the vast task of stabilising Afghanistan's most dangerous province. No secret there either.

We knew too that the Americans in general, and the US marines in particular, believed they could do a better job in Helmand than British forces: in their view it was a matter of attitude as well as of resources. Competition between allied armies in war is neither unusual nor necessarily unwelcome (though we couldn't help noticing how criticism of the British effort subsided once the Americans came to see for themselves just how tough the challenges in Helmand really were).

The real tragedy about these telegrams is that they miss the point: that the entire western military effort in Afghanistan will in the end be for nothing unless it is part of a wider political strategy. Such a strategy should bring together all the internal parties – not just the Taliban – to a decades-old conflict, and systematically engage Afghanistan's neighbours in gradually stabilising the country, from which the whole of south-west Asia would benefit.

In that broader strategic perspective, debating troop levels in Helmand is a bit like arguing over how much aspirin to give a cancer patient. Garrisoning the town of Sangin more efficiently may produce more relief from pain (or violence). But without action to treat the underlying disease (which is political, not military), such relief can be only local, and temporary.

The long-suffering people of Helmand know this well. What they really want is not more schools and clinics, or roads and irrigation ditches (although all of those would be welcome), but to know who will be in charge of their village or valley five months or five years from now. They will back the probable winner. But, in the absence of a political solution, the fatal flaw in our whole counter-insurgency "strategy" is that for the average Pashtun peasant farmer, caught between the Taliban and the narco-mafia, the Afghan government is not necessarily the long-term winner.

As ambassador, I was guarded day and night by a close protection team founded by the Royal Military Police. Many of the 20-year-old corporals who protected me had come to Kabul from tours in Helmand. If I ever need a definition of sheer courage, it is those young RMPs accompanying the Afghan police on patrol through the fields and tracks of Helmand's "green zone", as the province's fertile central area is known. But all their work will have been wasted if the politicians and diplomats, in Washington at least as much as Kabul, do not deliver the political approach essential for stabilising Afghanistan.

The leaked cables refer to a visit that Joe Biden, then America's vice-president elect, paid to Helmand in January 2009, just before the inauguration. At the time I had an exchange with him, over lunch with the US marines. Like many American politicians meeting a Brit, the senator felt the need to quote Churchill, mentioning – apropos of nothing obvious – his view that democracy was the worst form of government – except for all the others. My response was to remind Biden that Churchill had also observed that one could rely on America to do the right thing – once it had exhausted all the alternatives.

For the sake of our soldiers, so many of whom have fought and died or been wounded in Helmand – and above all for the sake of the countless Afghans, in and out of uniform, who have been killed and injured in this conflict, and for whom there is no Selly Oak hospital or Walter Reed army medical centre – I have a devout hope: that president Obama and his national security team show in this month's policy review the courage of their original conviction; and that, in the end, the problems of Helmand, of Afghanistan and of the region are political, not military.

Drawing on our history, our political and diplomatic expertise, and the huge sacrifice of blood and treasure we have made in Afghanistan, Britain's role should be to help give the Obama administration the confidence and the courage it needs to do that right thing. As Obama's Democratic predecessor might have said: "Afghanistan: it's the politics, stupid."

Afghanistan Money Probe Hits Close to the President

2010-08-17T19:39:00.001-01:00

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

KABUL, Afghanistan—When U.S.-trained agents from an anticorruption task force raided the headquarters of the nation's largest "hawala" money-transfer business, they caught many people by surprise: the company's politically connected executives, the nation's top law-enforcement officer, even Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Joël van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal
The Kabul office of New Ansari Exchange,
Afghanistan's largest money-transfer business,
was shuttered after a raid by an anticorruption
task force. Money changers work the street in
front of the building.

Tens of thousands of pages of documents were carted out of the New Ansari Exchange on Jan. 14. Armed with those records, investigators have been digging into the movement of billions of dollars in and out of Afghanistan.

U.S. and Afghan officials say they have found evidence that New Ansari was helping to launder profits from the illicit opium trade and moving money earned by the Taliban through extortion and drug trafficking. The officials also say they have found links between the money transfers and some of the most powerful political and business figures in the country, including relatives of Mr. Karzai.

The New Ansari probe is now threatening to disrupt relations between the Afghan president and his U.S. allies. Last week, Mr. Karzai took more direct control of the task force that staged the raid, the Sensitive Investigative Unit, and another U.S.-advised anticorruption group, the Major Crimes Task Force. He ordered a handpicked commission to review scores of past and current anticorruption inquests.

Senior U.S. military and civilian officials with direct knowledge of the events regard Mr. Karzai's move as an effort to protect those close to him and, in the process, to quash the investigation into New Ansari. The officials describe it as a blow to American-backed anticorruption efforts. Members of the Sensitive Investigative Unit are vetted and trained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Major Crimes Task Force is trained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Joël van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal
Money changers in a financial-trading
street market in Kabul. Money transfers
are handled separately by a network of
businesses called 'hawalas.'

One of the U.S. officials called the situation "a real reality check" for the U.S. and its European allies. Mr. Karzai promised for years to clean up high-level corruption, and U.S. officials have in recent months been publicly supportive of the Afghan leader.

Their thinking is that a soft touch, rather than the more critical tone adopted previously, might convince Mr. Karzai that a crackdown is in his interest, U.S. officials say.

Senior Afghan officials pledged to investigate the money transfers after The Wall Street Journal reported in June that huge sums of cash were being flown out of the country. "We need to investigate whose money it is and whether it is legal," Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said in July.

Afghan officials have known since the January raid, if not earlier, that New Ansari has played a central role in moving cash, U.S. officials say. Before the raid, so much money was passing through New Ansari in so many different currencies that it effectively set Afghanistan's exchange rates, says an official at Afghanistan's central bank and the senior U.S. official.

Afghan customs documents reviewed by the Journal indicate that $3.18 billion of cash was flown out of the country between the start of 2007 and February 2010. Couriers identified by U.S. and Afghan officials as working for New Ansari carried $2.78 billion of it, according to the documents.

One New Ansari courier, identified by the documents only as Rahmatullah, personally carried at least $2.3 billion out of the Kabul airport between the start of 2008 and the middle of 2009, much of it to the United Arab Emirates financial center of Dubai, a senior U.S. official said.

New Ansari's manager, Haji Muhammad Khan, said in a recent interview the company did nothing wrong. The money being flown out of the country was declared, so moving it was legal.

Preliminary evidence collected by Afghan and U.S. investigators indicates that while some of the money came from legitimate businesses, some was diverted Western aid and logistics money, opium profits and Taliban funds, according to the U.S. and Afghan officials. Investigators are trying to uncover the exact sources of the money and determine who is benefiting.

U.S. officials say the customs records are incomplete, and that the sum carried out over that period likely is much larger than $3.18 billion. Following the Journal article in June, a U.S. Congress panel froze some $4 billion in nonurgent aid to Afghanistan.

Corruption in the Afghan government and business establishment has become a major source of tension between Mr. Karzai and the U.S. government, threatening to derail the U.S.-led coalition's counterinsurgency strategy. U.S. officials say it is crucial to restore the trust of ordinary Afghans in their own government, which has been shaken by pervasive commercial and government graft.

Because law enforcement is so lax, "anybody can choose his or her own law. New Ansari is not unique," says Amrullah Saleh, former chief of Afghanistan's intelligence service, who was dismissed in June over disagreements related to the president's efforts to start peace talks with the Taliban.

Hawalas like New Ansari move money globally using a network of dealers. A customer in Kabul, for example, might hand cash to a local hawala with instructions to send it to someone in Dubai. Five minutes later, the designated recipient can walk into a hawala in Dubai and pick up the money.

When New Ansari was founded in the southern city of Kandahar in the early 1990s, it was one of dozens of hawalas scrambling for a piece of the money-transfer business, a lucrative industry in an economy that at the time had no formal banks, and even today remains largely cash-based.

The company's fortunes rose at least in part through the relationship it developed with the Taliban, whose senior leaders governed most of Afghanistan from a headquarters in Kandahar, according to a former Afghan official and a former senior Taliban military commander. Some senior Taliban leaders were among the hawala's biggest customers, according to the Afghan official and the former Taliban commander.

Haji Muhammad Jan, one of New Ansari's founding partners and the current chairman of Afghan United Bank, acknowledges working with the Taliban when they were in power. "Everybody did business with the Taliban," he says. "They were the rulers."

By the late 1990s, New Ansari was one of the major hawalas in Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion that ousted the Taliban in 2001, New Ansari developed relationships with those who assumed power, and it continued to grow, say current and former U.S. and Afghan officials. By 2007, New Ansari's owners opened Afghan United Bank, now the country's third-largest financial institution, by deposits.

Mr. Jan, the New Ansari founding partner who now is chairman of Afghan United Bank, is an investor in a suburban housing development that the president's brother, Mahmood Karzai, is building outside Kandahar.

Another key player in New Ansari, Haji Muhammad Rafi Azimi, Afghan United Bank's deputy chairman, is suspected of playing a role in a corruption case involving Afghanistan's former Islamic affairs and hajj minister, Sediq Chakari. Mr. Chakari was allowed to leave the country while under investigation for allegedly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to steer to certain airlines the business of flying pilgrims to Mecca, Islam's holiest city. Mr. Chakari has denied wrongdoing.

Afghan and U.S. investigators allege that Afghan United Bank's Mr. Azimi, who hasn't been charged, was the middleman passing some of the alleged bribes from the airlines to the minister. Mr. Azimi couldn't be reached for comment.

The Jan. 14 raid on New Ansari was so sensitive that the anticorruption task force and the U.S. officials who work with it didn't tell any senior members of the Afghan government. Information leaks last year had scuttled raids on other hawalas.

The chief of the anticorruption unit didn't inform the nation's top law-enforcement official at the time, Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, until moments before the raid commenced, when he telephoned the interior minister from the front door of New Ansari's Kabul office, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

Mr. Karzai was furious about the secret action, and after receiving phone calls from at least one senior New Ansari official, he hastily convened a meeting of senior cabinet ministers, according to a former Afghan official with direct knowledge of the events.

The interior minister, a close U.S. ally, had been briefed by then on the evidence that prompted the raid, but he never had a chance to present it. Instead, he was chastised for letting the raid take place, according to the former Afghan official and U.S. officials familiar with the events. The interior minister later was fired by Mr. Karzai over differences stemming from the peace overtures to the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai wanted to disband the Sensitive Investigative Unit, but he was talked out of it by his intelligence chief at the time, Mr. Saleh, said the former Afghan official and a U.S. official.

After the raid, New Ansari closed its Kabul headquarters. U.S. and Afghan investigators pored over the 42,000 seized documents as fast as possible. "We were afraid that if they couldn't get back into business, the financial sector could collapse," says a senior U.S. official whose staff helped oversee the document analysis.

Among other things, the documents revealed that between July 2009 and the day of the raid, New Ansari moved almost $1 billion out of Afghanistan, most of it to Dubai, U.S. officials say.

New Ansari's books were returned four days later, the senior U.S. official says. The company's Kabul offices soon reopened, only to close for good a few weeks later.

"Whatever I was doing was legal and in accordance with Afghan laws," says New Ansari's manager, Mr. Khan. The Americans, he says, "continued their pressure on me and forced me to leave my business once and for all."

In late July, the Sensitive Investigative Unit and the Major Crimes Task Force arrested Mohammed Zia Saleh, then head of Afghanistan's National Security Council. (He isn't related to the former spy chief.) Western officials say Mr. Saleh was a key link between the Karzai administration and New Ansari, and they say he was heard in a taped conversation soliciting a bribe—a $10,000 car for his son—in return for quashing the inquiries into New Ansari and the former Islamic affairs minister. Mr. Azimi, the deputy chairman of Afghan United Bank, or people speaking on his behalf are believed to have offered the car as part of a larger proposed payoff, the officials say.

Mr. Saleh couldn't be reached for comment. Officials in the Karzai administration have raised questions about the recording's authenticity.

Mr. Karzai has ordered the newly formed commission of inquiry to monitor all operations of the two anticorruption agencies, and to review all current and former investigations. The Afghan government says its goal is to ensure that the human rights of probe targets aren't violated, and that investigators respect Afghan laws.

It is unclear how the New Ansari investigation will be affected. New Ansari's manager, Mr. Khan, says the business remains closed, but there is evidence to the contrary. Although its headquarters in Kabul is shuttered, its office in Kandahar was up and running one recent day, with long lines of people waiting to send money.

U.S. and Afghan officials say New Ansari offices in other parts of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani city of Peshawar also are still open, as are the hawala's affiliates in the U.A.E. and other Middle Eastern and European countries.

Mr. Jan, the New Ansari founding partner and chairman of Afghan United Bank, says he cut ties to New Ansari in 2007. His claim is disputed by U.S. and Afghan investigators, current business associates and even political allies in Kandahar, where New Ansari got its start. They say he still owns a major portion of the business and oversees its operations, although day-to-day management falls to Mr. Khan.

Mr. Jan says neither the hawala nor Afghan United Bank has any current relationship with the Taliban.

U.S. investigators disagree, saying they have evidence the hawala has been moving money for the Taliban.

U.S. officials also say they have recorded phone conversations between Mr. Azimi, Afghan United Bank's deputy chairman, and members of the Taliban. In one conversation last year, U.S. officials say, a Taliban commander in Kandahar is heard apologizing for accidentally kidnapping Mr. Azimi's brother. The Taliban commander promised to release the man immediately, and pleaded with Mr. Azimi to forgive him, the officials say.

—Yaroslav Trofimov contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Rosenberg at matthew.rosenberg@wsj.com

At war over WikiLeaks

2010-07-31T00:41:00.001-01:00

DANIEL FLITTON

July 31, 2010

WHERE would we be without the internet? All the gritty detail of a near decade-long war is laid bare online, tens of thousands of once secret US military reports made public by a website specially designed to leak classified information. And in this same virtual realm, the top US commander fired back with an angry response to the revelations - via a blunt message on Twitter.

''Appalled by classified docs leak to WikiLeaks & decision to post. It changes nothing on Afghanistan strategy or our relationship w/Pakistan,'' wrote Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs.

Despite his brash declaration, such a massive leak does mark a change. This is an age where information is power. The disclosure this week tipped the balance away from officialdom - briefly at least - where control is an art perfected by countless checks, gatekeepers and systems. Unseen civilian casualties came to light, along with suspected use of heat-seeking missiles against coalition forces. Pakistan's perfidy again seemed plain.

The disclosure of the ''Kabul war diary'' - as WikiLeaks dubbed the reports - has once more charged the debate over Afghanistan. Supporters of the conflict have labelled the disclosure as treachery or belittled WikiLeaks for revealing nothing new, while at the same time claiming the documents endanger the troops.

Opponents have leapt to decry the cover-ups and blatant official spin the documents expose, while embracing as unvarnished truth single and often uncorroborated reports made in the field.

But due to its sheer size - amounting to more than 90,000 intelligence snippets, military contact reports and diplomatic cables - the full ramifications of this leak are only slowly becoming clear. Plenty of unanswered questions are swirling around in the aftermath.

For the Western public, the reports offer a fresh angle on this grinding and frustrating war. So far this appears to have merely amplified popular discontent with the conflict, rather than generating calls for a dramatic change of course or withdrawal. US President Barack Obama has even sought to use the leak - which covers 2004 to 2009, mostly the period when the Bush administration was in office - to justify his decision last year to throw an extra 30,000 American troops into the fray.

''The fact is these documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan. Indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy,'' he said this week.

''For seven years, we failed to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge in this region, the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned. That's why we've substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work, and put in place a team, including one of our finest generals, to execute that plan.''

This is the positive spin. Obama was forced to send a new commander to Afghanistan because last month the former top general, Stanley McChrystal, derided the President in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

And while the media focus this week has understandably been to sift the documents for anything new, over time the reports will build a much better sense of past difficulties faced and mistakes made by both the international community and the government in Kabul. As that fine detail gradually emerges, officials fear the disclosures could become a catalyst for wider public anger.

There are detailed reports, for example, about the Afghan army fighting Afghan police - so called ''green-on-green'' incidents between the same outfits to which the West hopes eventually to hand over responsibility for security in the country.

One report from October 2006 tells of foreign forces responding to a commotion at the Panjwayi bazaar in Kandahar province in the nation's south. Police were seen hassling a local vendor, trying to ''take/steal a propane cylinder'' from a stall. ''The vendor got upset so the [Afghan National Police] murdered him.'' Another man was injured in the fight. A group of Afghan soldiers who happened to be across the street then fired on the police, taking them into custody and searching their compound. They found rockets, mines and detailed maps of the district.

In another report, the Afghan army had set an ambush along the road to Gardez, not far from the Tora Bora redoubt of Osama bin Laden. But the police were not warned of the operation. The army fired on a police vehicle driving along the road, injuring the driver and killing a passenger.

What the documents make clear is the relentless battle to hold Afghanistan together. In a few picked at random, the reports show the persistent threat posed by insurgents - ''5 or 6 pop shots fired'' in one brief note - and helicopters forced to dodge a constant barrage of small-arms fire. ''Auto dispensed flares and manoeuvred away … no damage or injuries reported.''

In other documents, the infamous Taliban night letters that warn local villagers against collaborating with foreigners are transcribed and sent back to base. ''Noses and ears will be cut off from any women seen going to and from the school,'' is the grisly Taliban promise. A later threat is made to cut off a principal's head after he is accused of being an American spy.

The reports also shed light on the plight of Afghans displaced by the fighting and hint at the overflow of refugees that has become such a vexed issue in Australian politics. In May 2007, the American embassy in Kabul reported that Iran had deported some 52,000 Afghans living and working across the border. ''There are serious concerns about where and how they will be absorbed by communities in Afghanistan,'' the report says, speculating the deportation was designed to put pressure on Kabul.

At almost the same time, more than 200,000 Afghans were moving back across the border from Pakistan. While many had help from the United Nations, it was apparent that not all the refugees were willing. ''Pakistan began the process of physically closing two Afghan refugee camps by bulldozing several buildings,'' reported the American embassy in Islamabad.

MOSTLY, the reports are the view afforded when you lie flat on the ground and stare through the weeds. This is Afghanistan in thousands of small pieces, a shattered picture long-time CIA official Robert Baer finds depressing.

''The quality of the intelligence is just awful. Basically, we don't know who the enemy is,'' he tells The Age. ''In the country you're occupying, you should have a pretty good picture of what's going on.''

Baer, who has long experience in the Middle East and also worked in Afghanistan, believes much of the information looks to be the result of walk-in informers - ''intelligence pedlars'' - looking for a cash payment or some other reward for passing on gossip. In one report from 2005, a ''fairly reliable'' official contact gave coalition forces a letter supposedly written by Taliban leader Mullah Omar. By patching together vague references and fleeting sightings, a secret commando unit went on the hunt for 70 insurgent commanders.

''It's scary that they are using this intelligence to make raids,'' Baer says. While there were a number of successes, reports show these ''capture/kill'' operations also went badly awry, with civilian lives lost as a result.

The ramifications of the leak go much further than exposing the past failings in the war. For Afghan and foreign allies, such an unprecedented breach of national secrets puts strain on their trust in America. That faith will need to be rebuilt, from the informer on the ground all the way to the top levels of government.

Baer is sceptical of the many claims Pakistan is intimately bound to the Taliban. Certainly there is some involvement, he says, but the evidence remains scratchy. ''I want proof,'' he says, ''names, dates. I don't see that here.'' As to claims Pakistan's former spy chief Hamid Gul is the arch villain behind the Taliban, Baer simply laughs. In his retirement, Gul has become a television commentator, a prominent critic of the US and a relentless self-promoter.

Baer sees the release of the documents not so much as a policy setback as an intelligence setback. ''Anyone who is considering betraying the Taliban would have to think twice,'' he says.

Indeed, WikiLeaks has been criticised for releasing material that includes the names and in some cases the telephone numbers of informers. But the Australian founder of the website, Julian Assange, is unapologetic. ''We contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request,'' he told the ABC this week.

As with Obama's comments, this too is the positive spin. Assange admits WikiLeaks chose to release the documents before going through them entirely. That the US administration refused to assist is no excuse for publishing material that put lives in danger. And on this score, some allege the leaks will benefit a bitter enemy with insight into the day-to-day operations of its opponent. James Brown - a former Australian army captain who served in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009 - is one who fears the leak will cost soldiers' lives.

''I don't think WikiLeaks or the papers are actually qualified to make a judgment on what they can release and what they can't,'' he says. His concern centres on the inadvertent disclosure of coalition tactics. The reports give details about battle formations, such as how far convoys can travel or the way troops work in teams.

The volume of the material - and the fact the reports are in English - is no impediment to the Taliban scouring the documents, says Brown.

''In some sense it's almost easier for them. If you can search by location and date, say look up Tagab Valley, there's a lot of information.''

This battle for information is where the political debate over Afghanistan in the West has settled - showing progress in a long war, or signs of fatigue.

Curiously, Australia has produced two of the most prominent champions on either side of the debate: Assange, the ascetic computer hacker turned WikiLeaks founder, and David Kilcullen, the former army officer and fervent advocate of counter-insurgency warfare.

The WikiLeaks disclosure will not end the fight, but it will hasten all sides.

This story was found at:http://www.theage.com.au/world/at-war-over-wikileaks-20100730-10ztz.html

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

2010-07-26T19:35:00.001-01:00

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato

Nick Davies and David Leigh

Guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 July 2010 22.03 BST

The war logs reveal civilian killings by coalition forces, secret efforts to eliminate
Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, and discuss the involvement of Iran and Pakistan in
supporting insurgents. Photograph: Max Whittaker/Corbis

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story."

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?

2010-07-23T14:28:00.001-01:00

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

by Prof. David Ray Griffin

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite

company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

However, what can be designated the “McChrystal Moment” – the probably brief period during which the media are again focused on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Rolling Stone story about General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which led to his resignation – provides the best opportunity for some time to raise fundamental questions about this war. Various commentators have already been asking some pretty basic questions: about the effectiveness and affordability of the present “counterinsurgency strategy” and even whether American fighting forces should remain in Afghanistan at all. But I am interested in an even more fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This question has two parts: First, did these attacks provide a legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan? Second, if not, did they at least provide a moral justification?

I. Did 9/11 Provide Legal Justification for the War in Afghanistan?

Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, international law with regard to war has been defined by the UN Charter. Measured by this standard, the US-led war in Afghanistan has been illegal from the outset.

Marjorie Cohn, a well-known professor of international law, wrote in November 2001:

“[T]he bombings of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom are illegal.”2

In 2008, Cohn repeated this argument in an article entitled “Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War.” The point of the title was that, although it was by then widely accepted that the war in Iraq was illegal, the war in Afghanistan, in spite of the fact that many Americans did not realize it, was equally illegal.3 Her argument was based on the following facts:

First, according to international law as codified in the UN Charter, disputes are to be brought to the UN Security Council, which alone may authorize the use of force. Without this authorization, any military activity against another country is illegal.

Second, there are two exceptions: One is that, if your nation has been subjected to an armed attack by another nation, you may respond militarily in self-defense. This condition was not fulfilled by the 9/11 attacks, however, because they were not carried out by another nation: Afghanistan did not attack the United States. Indeed, the 19 men charged with the crime were not Afghans.

The other exception occurs when one nation has certain knowledge that an armed attack by another nation is imminent – too imminent to bring the matter to the Security Council. The need for self-defense must be, in the generally accepted phrase, "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” Although the US government claimed that its military operations in Afghanistan were justified by the need to prevent a second attack, this need, even if real, was clearly not urgent, as shown by the fact that the Pentagon did not launch its invasion until almost a month later.

US political leaders have claimed, to be sure, that the UN did authorize the US attack on Afghanistan. This claim, originally made by the Bush-Cheney administration, was repeated by President Obama in his West Point speech of December 1, 2009, in which he said: “The United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks,” so US troops went to Afghanistan “[u]nder the banner of . . . international legitimacy.”4

However, the language of “all necessary steps” is from UN Security Council Resolution 1368, in which the Council, taking note of its own “responsibilities under the Charter," expressed its own readiness “to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.”5

Of course, the UN Security Council might have determined that one of these necessary steps was to authorize an attack on Afghanistan by the United States. But it did not. Resolution 1373, the only other Security Council resolution about this issue, laid out various responses, but these included matters such as freezing assets, criminalizing the support of terrorists, exchanging police information about terrorists, and prosecuting terrorists. The use of military force was not mentioned.6

The US war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the UN Security Council in 2001 or at anytime since, so this war began as an illegal war and remains an illegal war today. Our government’s claim to the contrary is false.

This war has been illegal, moreover, not only under international law, but also under US law. The UN Charter is a treaty, which was ratified by the United States, and, according to Article VI of the US Constitution, any treaty ratified by the United States is part of the “supreme law of the land.”7 The war in Afghanistan, therefore, has from the beginning been in violation of US as well as international law. It could not be more illegal.

II. Did 9/11 Provide Moral Justification for the War in Afghanistan?

The American public has for the most part probably been unaware of the illegality of this war, because this is not something our political leaders or our corporate media have been anxious to point out.8 So most people simply do not know.

If they were informed, however, many Americans would be inclined to argue that, even if technically illegal, the US military effort in Afghanistan has been morally justified, or at least it was in the beginning, by the attacks of 9/11. For a summary statement of this argument, we can turn again to the West Point speech of President Obama, who has taken over the Bush-Cheney account of 9/11. Answering the question of “why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place,” Obama said:

“We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. . . . As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda – a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam. . . . [A]fter the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden - we sent our troops into Afghanistan.”9

This standard account can be summarized in terms of three points:

1. The attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim members of al-Qaeda.

2. The attacks had been authorized by the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, who

was in Afghanistan.

3. The US invasion of Afghanistan was necessary because the Taliban, which was in control of Afghanistan, refused to turn bin Laden over to US authorities.

On the basis of these three points, our political leaders have claimed that the United States had the moral right, arising from the universal right of self-defense, to attempt to capture or kill bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network to prevent them from launching another attack on our country.

The only problem with this argument is that all three points are false. I will show this by looking at these points in reverse order.

1. Did the United States Attack Afghanistan because the Taliban Refused to Turn Over Bin Laden?

The claim that the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden has been repeatedly made by political leaders and our mainstream media.10 Reports from the time, however, show the truth to be very different.

A. Who Refused Whom?

Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported:

“The Taliban . . . refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week's attacks on the United States. . . . The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan . . . said Friday that deporting him without proof would amount to an ‘insult to Islam.’"

CNN also made clear that the Taliban’s demand for proof was not made without reason, saying:

“Bin Laden himself has already denied he had anything to do with the attacks, and Taliban officials repeatedly said he could not have been involved in the attacks.”

Bush, however, “said the demands were not open to negotiation or discussion.”11

With this refusal to provide any evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility, the Bush administration made it impossible for the Taliban to turn him over. As Afghan experts quoted by the Washington Post pointed out, the Taliban, in order to turn over a fellow Muslim to an “infidel” Western nation, needed a “face-saving formula.” Milton Bearden, who had been the CIA station chief in Afghanistan in the 1980s, put it this way: While the United States was demanding, “Give up bin Laden,” the Taliban were saying, “Do something to help us give him up.”12 But the Bush administration refused.

After the bombing began in October, moreover, the Taliban tried again, offering to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the United States would stop the bombing and provide evidence of his guilt. But Bush replied: "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty." An article in London’s Guardian, which reported this development, was entitled: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand Bin Laden Over.”13 So it was the Bush administration, not the Taliban, that was responsible for the fact that bin Laden was not turned over.

In August of 2009, President Obama, who had criticized the US invasion of Iraq as a war of choice, said of the US involvement in Afghanistan: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”14 But the evidence shows, as we have seen, that it, like the one in Iraq, is a war of choice.

B. What Was the Motive for the Invasion?

This conclusion is reinforced by reports indicating that the United States had made the

decision to invade Afghanistan two months before the 9/11 attacks. At least part of the background to this decision was the United States’ long-time support for UNOCAL’s proposed pipeline, which would transport oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea region to the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan and Pakistan.15 This project had been stymied through the 1990s because of the civil war that had been going on in Afghanistan since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

In the mid-1990s, the US government had supported the Taliban with the hope that its military strength would enable it to unify the country and provide a stable government, which could protect the pipeline. By the late 1990s, however, the Clinton administration had given up on the Taliban.16

When the Bush administration came to power, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. During a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001, representatives of the Bush administration insisted that the Taliban must create a government of “national unity” by sharing power with factions friendly to the United States. The US representatives reportedly said: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”17

After the Taliban refused this offer, US officials told a former Pakistani foreign secretary that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”18 And, indeed, given the fact that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred when they did, the US military was able to mobilize to begin its attack on Afghanistan by October 7.

It appears, therefore, that the United States invaded Afghanistan for reasons far different from the official rationale, according to which we were there to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

2. Has Good Evidence of Bin Laden’s Responsibility Been Provided?

I turn now to the second point: the claim that Osama bin Laden had authorized the attacks. Even if it refused to give the Taliban evidence for this claim, the Bush administration surely – most Americans probably assume – had such evidence and provided it to those who needed it. Again, however, reports from the time indicate otherwise.

A. The Bush Administration

Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he expected “in the near future . . . to put out . . . a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack.”19 But at a joint press conference with President Bush the next morning, Powell withdrew this pledge, saying that “most of [the evidence] is classified.”20 Seymour Hersh, citing officials from both the CIA and the Department of Justice, said the real reason why Powell withdrew the pledge was a “lack of solid information.”21

B. The British Government

The following week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a document to show that “Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001.” Blair’s report, however, began by saying: “This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law.”22 So, the case was good enough to go to war, but not good enough to take to court. The next day, the BBC emphasized this weakness, saying: “There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks.”23

C. The FBI

What about our own FBI? Its “Most Wanted Terrorist” webpage on “Usama bin Laden” does not list 9/11 as one of the terrorist acts for which he is wanted.24 When asked why not, the FBI’s chief of investigative publicity replied: “because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”25

D. The 9/11 Commission

What about the 9/11 Commission? Its entire report is based on the assumption that bin Laden was behind the attacks. However, the report’s evidence to support this premise has been disowned by the Commission’s own co-chairs, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.

This evidence consisted of testimony that had reportedly been elicited by the CIA from al-Qaeda operatives. The most important of these operatives was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – generally known simply as “KSM” – who has been called the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. If you read the 9/11 Commission’s account of how bin Laden planned the attacks, and then check the notes, you will find that almost every note says that the information came from KSM.26

In 2006, Kean and Hamilton wrote a book giving “the inside story of the 9/11

Commission,” in which they called this information untrustworthy. They had no success, they reported, in “obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”27 Besides not being allowed by the CIA to interview KSM, they were not permitted to observe his interrogation through one-way glass. They were not even allowed to talk to the interrogators.28 Therefore, Kean and Hamilton complained:

“We . . . had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the truth?”29

They could not.

Accordingly, neither the Bush administration, the British government, the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission ever provided good evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the attacks.

E. Did Bin Laden Confess?

Some people argue, to be sure, that such evidence soon became unnecessary because bin Laden admitted his responsibility in a videotape that was discovered by the US military in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in November 2001. But besides the fact that bin Laden had previously denied his involvement many times,30 bin Laden experts have called this later video a fake,31 and for good reasons. Many of the physical features of the man in this video are different from those of Osama bin Laden (as seen in undoubtedly authentic videos), and he said many things that bin Laden himself would not have said.32

The FBI, in any case, evidently does not believe that this video provides hard evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11, or it would have revised its “Most Wanted Terrorist” page on him after this video surfaced.

So, to review the first two points: The Taliban said it would turn over bin Laden if our government would give it good evidence of his responsibility for 9/11, but our government refused. And good evidence of this responsibility has never been given to the public.

I turn now to the third claim: that, even if there is no proof that Osama bin Laden authorized the attacks, we have abundant evidence that the attacks were carried out by Muslims belonging to his al-Qaeda organization. I will divide the discussion of this third claim into two sections: Section 3a looks at the main support for this claim: evidence that Muslim hijackers were on the airliners. Section 3b looks at the strongest evidence against this claim: the collapse of World Trade Center 7.

3a. Evidence Al-Qaeda Muslims Were on the Airliners

It is still widely thought to have been established beyond question that the attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda. The truth, however, is that the evidence entirely falls apart upon examination, and this fact suggests that 9/11 was instead a false-flag attack - an attack that people within our own government orchestrated while planting evidence to implicate Muslims.

A. Devout Muslims?

Let us begin with the 9/11 Commission’s claim that the men who (allegedly) took over the planes were devout Muslims, ready to sacrifice their lives for their cause.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Atta and other hijackers had made “at least six trips” to Las Vegas, where they had “engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures.” The Chronicle then quoted the head of the Islamic Foundation of Nevada as saying: "True Muslims don't drink, don't gamble, don't go to strip clubs.”33

The contradiction is especially strong with regard to Mohamed Atta. On the one hand, according to the 9/11 Commission, he was very religious, even “fanatically so.”34 This characterization was supported by Professor Dittmar Machule, who was Atta’s thesis supervisor at a technical university in Hamburg in the 1990s. Professor Machule says he knew his student only as Mohamed Al-Emir – although his full name was the same as his father’s: Mohamed Al-Emir Atta. In any case, Machule says that this young man was “very religious,” prayed regularly, and never touched alcohol.35

According to the American press, on the other hand, Mohamed Atta drank heavily and, one night after downing five glasses of Vodka, shouted an Arabic word that, Newsweek said, “roughly translates as ‘F--k God.’”36 Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, who wrote a book about Atta, stated that Atta regularly went to strip clubs, hired prostitutes, drank heavily, and took cocaine. Atta even lived with a stripper for several months and then, after she kicked him out, she reported, he came back and disemboweled her cat and dismembered its kittens.37

Could this be the same individual as Professor Machule’s student Mohamed Al-Emir, who would not even shake hands with a woman upon being introduced, and who never touched alcohol? “I would put my hand in the fire,” said the professor, “that this Mohamed El-Amir I know will never taste or touch alcohol.” Could the Atta described by Hopsicker and the American press be the young man whom this professor described as not a “bodyguard type” but “more a girl looking type”?38 Could the man who disemboweled a cat and dismembered its kittens be the young man known to his father as a “gentle and tender boy,” who was nicknamed “nightingale”?39

We are clearly talking about two different men. This is confirmed by the differences in their appearance. The American Atta was often described as having a hard, cruel face, and the standard FBI photo of him bears this out. The face of the Hamburg student was quite different, as photos available on the Internet show.40 Also, his professor described him as “very small,” being “one meter sixty-two” in height41 – which means slightly under 5’4” – whereas the American Atta has been described as 5’8” and even 5’10” tall.42

One final reason to believe that these different descriptions apply to different men: The father of Mohamed al-Emir Atta reported that on September 12, before either of them had learned of the attacks, his son called him and they “spoke for two minutes about this and that.”43

There are also problems in relation to many of the other alleged hijackers. For example, the BBC reported that Waleed al-Shehri, who supposedly died along with Atta on American Flight 11, spoke to journalists and American authorities in Casablanca the following week.44 Moreover, there were clearly two men going by the name Ziad Jarrah – the name of the alleged hijacker pilot of United Flight 93.45

Accordingly, besides the fact the men labeled “the hijackers” were not devout Muslims, they may not have even been Muslims of any type.

And if that were not bad enough for the official story, there is no good evidence that these men were even on the planes - all the evidence for this claim falls apart upon examination. I will illustrate this point with a few examples.46

B. Passports at the Crash Sites

One of the purported proofs that the 19 men identified as the hijackers were on the planes was the reported discovery of some of their passports at crash sites. But the reports of these discoveries are not believable.

For example, the FBI claimed that, while searching the streets after the destruction of the World Trade Center, they discovered the passport of Satam al-Suqami, one of the hijackers on American Flight 11, which had crashed into the North Tower.47 But for this to be true, the passport would have had to survive the collapse of the North Tower, which evidently pulverized almost everything in the building into fine particles of dust – except the steel and al-Suqami’s passport.

But this claim was too absurd to pass the giggle test: “[T]he idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged,” remarked a British commentator, “would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism.”48 By 2004, the claim had been modified to say that “a passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed.”49 So, rather than needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower, the passport merely needed to escape from al-Suqami’s pocket or luggage, then from the plane’s cabin, and then from the North Tower without being destroyed or even singed by the giant fireball.

This version was no less ridiculous than the first one, and the other stories about passports at crash sites are equally absurd.

C. Reported Phone Calls from the Airliners

It is widely believed, of course, that we know that there were hijackers on the airliners, thanks to numerous phone calls from passengers and crew members, in which they reported the hijackings. But we have good reasons to believe that these calls never occurred.

Reported Calls from Cell Phones: About 15 of the reported calls from the airliners were said to have been made on cell phones, with about 10 of those being from United Flight 93 – the one that reportedly crashed in Pennsylvania. Three or four of those calls were received by Deena Burnett, who knew that her husband, Tom Burnett, had used his cell phone, she told the FBI, because she recognized his cell phone number on her Caller ID.

However, given the cell phone technology available in 2001, high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were not possible. They were generally not possible much above 1,000 feet, and were certainly impossible above 35,000 or even 40,000 feet, which was the altitude of the planes when most of the cell phone calls were supposedly made. Articles describing the impossibility of the calls were published in 2003 and 2004 by two well-known Canadians: A. K. Dewdney, formerly a columnist for Scientific American, and economist Michel Chossudovsky.50

Perhaps in response, the FBI changed the story. In 2006, it presented a report on the phone calls from the planes for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. In its report on United Flight 93, it said that cell phones were used for only two of the calls, both of which were made the plane, shortly before it crashed, had descended to a low altitude.51 These two calls were, in fact, the only two cell phone calls made from any of the airliners, the FBI report said.52 The FBI thereby avoided claiming that any high-altitude cell phone calls had been made.

But if the FBI’s new account is true, how do we explain that so many people reported receiving cell phone calls? Most of these people said that they had been told by the caller that he or she was using a cell phone, so we might suppose that their reports were based on bad hearing or faulty memory. But what about Deena Burnett, whose statement that she recognized her husband’s cell phone number on her Caller ID was made to the FBI that very day?53 If Tom Burnett used a seat-back phone, as the FBI’s 2006 report says, why did his cell phone number show up on his wife’s Caller ID? The FBI has not answered this question.

The only possible explanation seems to be that these calls were faked. Perhaps someone used voice morphing technology, which already existed at that time,54 in combination with a device for providing a fake Caller ID, which can be ordered on the Internet. Or perhaps someone used Tom’s cell phone to place fake calls from the ground. In either case, Tom Burnett did not actually call his wife from aboard United Flight 93. And if calls to Deena Burnett were faked, we must assume that all of the calls were – because if there had really been surprise hijackings, no one would have been prepared to make fake phone calls to her.

The Reported Calls from Barbara Olson: This conclusion is reinforced by the FBI’s report on phone calls from American Flight 77 – the one that supposedly struck the Pentagon. Ted Olson, the US Solicitor General, reported that his wife, Barbara Olson (a well-known commentator on CNN), had called him twice from this flight, with the first call lasting “about one (1) minute,”55 and the second call lasting “two or three or four minutes.”56 In these calls, he said, she reported that the plane had been taken over by hijackers armed with knives and box-cutters.

But how could she have made these calls? The plane was far too high for a cell phone to work. And American Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, and the 757s made for American Airlines – the 9/11 Truth Movement learned in 2005 – did not have onboard phones.57 Whether or not for this reason, the FBI’s report to the Moussaoui trial did not endorse Ted Olson’s story. Its report on telephone calls from American Flight 77 did mention Barbara Olson, but it attributed only one call to her, not two, and it said that this call was “unconnected,” so that it lasted “0 seconds.”58

This FBI report allows only two possibilities: Either Ted Olson engaged in deception, or he, like Deena Burnett, was duped by faked calls. In either case, the story about Barbara Olson’s calls, with their reports of hijackers taking over Flight 77, was based on deception.

The alleged phone calls, therefore, do not provide trustworthy evidence that there were hijackers on the planes.

D. Autopsy Reports and Flight Manifests

The public has widely assumed, due to misleading claims,59 that the names of the alleged hijackers were on the flight manifests for the four flights, and also that the autopsy report from the Pentagon contained the names of the hijackers said to have been on American Flight 77. However, the passenger manifests for the four airliners did not contain the names of any of the alleged hijackers and, moreover, they contained no Arab names whatsoever.60 Also, as a psychiatrist who was able to obtain a copy of the Pentagon autopsy report through a FOIA request discovered, it contained none of the names of the hijackers for American Flight 77 and, in fact, no Arab names whatsoever.61

E. Failure to Squawk the Hijack Code

Finally, the public has been led to believe that all the evidence about what happened on board the four airliners supported the claim that they were taken over by hijackers. This claim, however, was contradicted by something that did not happen. If pilots have any reason to believe that a hijacking may be in process, they are trained to enter the standard hijack code (7500) into their transponders to alert controllers on the ground. This is called “squawking” the hijack code. None of the eight pilots did this on 9/11, even though there would have been plenty of time: This act takes only two or three seconds and it would have taken longer than this for hijackers to break into the pilots’ cabins: According to official account of United Flight 93, for example, it took over 30 seconds for the hijackers to break into the cockpit.62

F. False-Flag Attack

It appears, therefore, that 9/11 was the most elaborate example yet of a false-flag attack, which occurs when countries, wanting to attack other countries, orchestrate attacks on their own people while planting evidence to implicate those other countries. Hitler did this when he was ready to attack Poland, which started the European part of World War II; Japan did it when it was ready to attack Manchuria, which started the Asian part of that war. In 1962, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed false-flag attacks killing American citizens to provide a pretext for invading Cuba.63 This proposal was not put into effect because it was vetoed by President Kennedy. But in 2001, the White House was occupied by an administration that wanted to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other predominantly Muslim countries,64 and so, it appears, evidence was planted to implicate Muslims.

3b. How the Collapse of WTC 7 Disproves the Al-Qaeda Theory

I turn now to the strongest evidence that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by insiders rather than foreign terrorists: the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center, which is the subject of my most recent book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False.65

A. Mysterious Collapse

I speak of the “mysterious collapse” because the collapse of this building was, from the very beginning, seen as more mysterious than that of the Twin Towers. Given the fact that those two buildings were hit by planes, which started big fires, most people evidently thought – if wrongly - that the fact that these buildings came down was not problematic. But Building 7 was not hit by a plane, and yet it came down at 5:21 that afternoon.

This would mean, assuming that neither incendiaries nor explosives were used to demolish this building, that it had been brought down by fire alone, and this would have been an unprecedented occurrence. New York Times writer James Glanz wrote, “experts said no building like it, a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire.” Glanz then quoted a structural engineer as saying: “[W]ithin the structural engineering community, [Building 7] is considered to be much more important to understand [than the Twin Towers],” because engineers had no answer to the question, “why did 7 come down?”66

Moreover, although Glanz spoke of an “uncontrolled fire,” there were significant fires on only six of this building’s 47 floors, and these fires were visible at most for three to four hours, and yet fires have burned in other steel-frame skyscrapers for 17 and 18 hours, turning them into towering infernos without causing collapse.67 So why did Building 7 come down? FEMA, which in 2002 put out the first official report on this building, admitted that its “best hypothesis” had “only a low probability of occurrence.”68

B. Reasons to Suspect Explosives

By its “best hypothesis,” FEMA meant the best hypothesis it could suggest consistent with the fact that it, as a government agency, could not posit the use of incendiaries and explosives. Why might anyone think that incendiaries and explosives brought this building down?

Precedent: One reason is simply that, prior to 9/11, every collapse of a steel-frame high-rise building was brought about by explosives, often in conjunction with incendiaries, in the procedure known as “controlled demolition.” Collapse has never been produced by fires, earthquakes, or any other cause other than controlled demolition.

Vertical Collapse: Another reason to posit controlled demolition is that this building came straight down, collapsing into its own footprint. For this to happen, all of this building’s 82 steel columns had to fail simultaneously. This is what happens in the type of controlled demolition known as “implosion.” It is not something that can be caused by fires.

Simply seeing a video of the building coming down makes it obvious to anyone with knowledge of these things that explosives were used to bring it down. On 9/11 itself, CBS News anchor Dan Rather said:

“[I]t’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen . . . on television . . . , where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down.”69

In 2006, a filmmaker asked Danny Jowenko, the owner of a controlled demolition company in the Netherlands, to comment on a video of the collapse of Building 7 without telling him what it was. (Jowenko had never heard that a third building had collapsed on 9/11.) After viewing the video, Jowenko said: “They simply blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . This is controlled demolition.” When asked if he was certain, he replied: “Absolutely, it’s been imploded. This was a hired job. A team of experts did this.”70

An organization called “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,” which was formed in 2007, now has over 1,200 members. Many of them, as one can see by reading their statements, joined after they saw a video of Building 7’s collapse.71

In light of all of these considerations, a truly scientific investigation, which sought the truth about Building 7, would have begun with the hypothesis that it had been deliberately demolished.

C. NIST’s Report as Political, Not Scientific

However, this hypothesis did not provide the starting point for NIST – the National Institute of Standards and Technology – which took over from FEMA the responsibility for writing the official report on the destruction of the World Trade Center. Rather, NIST said:

“The challenge was to determine if a fire-induced floor system failure could occur in WTC 7 under an ordinary building contents fire.”72

So, although every other steel-frame building that has collapsed did so because explosives (perhaps along with incendiaries) were used to destroy its support columns, NIST said, in effect: “We think fire brought down WTC 7.” To understand why NIST started with this hypothesis, it helps to know that it is an agency of the Commerce Department, which means that all the years it was working on its World Trade Center reports, it was an agency of the Bush-Cheney administration.

Also, a scientist who had worked for NIST reported that by 2001 it had been “fully hijacked from the scientific into the political realm,” so that scientists working there had “lost [their] scientific independence, and became little more than ‘hired guns.’”73

One manifestation of NIST’s political nature may be the fact that it delayed its report on Building 7 year after year, releasing it only late in 2008, when the Bush-Cheney administration was preparing to leave office.

Be that as it may, NIST did in August of 2008 finally put out a report in the form of a draft for public comment. Announcing this draft report at a press conference, Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead investigator, said:

“Our take-home message today is that the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives.”74

Sunder added that “science is really behind what we have said.”75

However, far from being supported by good science, NIST’s report repeatedly makes its case by resorting to scientific fraud. Two of the major types of scientific fraud, as defined by the National Science Foundation, are fabrication, which is “making up results,” and falsification, which means either “changing or omitting data.”76 I will begin with falsification.

D. NIST’S Falsification of Testimonial Evidence Pointing to Explosives

Claiming that it “found no evidence of a . . . controlled demolition event,”77 NIST simply omitted or distorted all such evidence, some of which was testimonial.

Two city officials, Barry Jennings of the Housing Authority and Michael Hess, the city’s corporation counsel, reported that they became trapped by a massive explosion in Building 7 shortly after they arrived there at 9:00 AM. NIST, however, claimed that what they called an explosion was really just the impact of debris from the collapse of the North Tower, which did not occur until 10:28. But Jennings explicitly said that they were trapped before either of the Twin Towers came down, which means that the explosion that he and Hess reported occurred before 9:59, when the South Tower came down. NIST rather obviously, therefore, distorted these men’s testimonial evidence.

Other people reported that explosions went off in the late afternoon, when the building started to come down. Reporter Peter Demarco of the New York Daily News said:

“[T]here was a rumble. The building's top row of windows popped out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray.”78

NIST dealt with such testimonies by simply ignoring them.

E. NIST’s Omission of Physical Evidence for Explosives

NIST also ignored a lot of physical evidence that Building 7 was brought down by explosives.

Swiss-Cheese Steel: For example, three professors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute discovered a piece of steel from Building 7 that had melted so severely that it had holes in it, making it look like Swiss cheese.79 The New York Times, pointing out that the fires in the building could not have been hot enough to melt steel, called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”80 The three professors, in a report included as an appendix to the 2002 FEMA report, said: “A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed.”81

When NIST’s report on Building 7 appeared, however, it did not mention this mysterious

piece of steel. It even claimed that no recovered steel from this building had been identified.82 And this was just the beginning of NIST’s omission of physical evidence.

Particles of Metal in the Dust: The nearby Deutsche Bank building was heavily contaminated by dust produced when the World Trade Center was destroyed. But the bank’s insurance company refused to pay for the clean-up, claiming that the dust in the bank was ordinary building dust, not dust that resulted from the destruction of the WTC. So Deutsche Bank hired the RJ Lee Group, a scientific research organization, to do a study, which showed that the dust in this building was WTC dust, with a unique chemical signature. Part of this signature was “[s]pherical iron . . . particles,”83 and this meant, the RJ Lee Group said, that iron had “melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles.”84

Iron does not melt until it reaches 2,800°F (1,538°C), which is about 1,000 degrees F (540 degrees C) higher than the fires could have been. The RJ Lee study also found that temperatures had been reached “at which lead would have undergone vaporization”85 – meaning 3,180°F (1,749°C).86

Another study was carried out by scientists at the US Geological Survey. Besides also finding iron particles, these scientists found that molybdenum had been melted87 – even though its melting point is extremely high: 4,753°F (2,623°C).88

These two studies proved, therefore, that something had produced temperatures many times higher than the fires could have produced. NIST, however, made no mention of these studies. But even this was not the end of the physical evidence omitted by NIST.

Nanothermite Residue: A report by several scientists, including University of Copenhagen chemist Niels Harrit, showed that the WTC dust contained unreacted nanothermite. Whereas ordinary thermite is an incendiary, nanothermite is a high explosive. This report by Harrit and his colleagues did not appear until 2009,89 several months after the publication of NIST’s final report in November 2008. But NIST should have, as a matter of routine, tested the WTC dust for signs of incendiaries, such as ordinary thermite, and explosives, such as nanothermite.

When asked whether it did, however, NIST said that it did not. When a reporter asked Michael Newman, a NIST spokesman, why not, Newman replied: “[B]ecause there was no evidence of that.” “But,” asked the reporter, “how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?” Newman replied: “If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time . . . and the taxpayers’ money.”90

F. NIST’s Fabrication of Evidence to Support Its Own Theory

Besides omitting and distorting evidence to deny the demolition theory of Building 7’s collapse, NIST also fabricated evidence – simply made it up – to support its own theory.

No Girder Shear Studs: NIST’s explanation as to how fire caused Building 7 to collapse starts with thermal expansion, meaning that the fire heated up the steel, thereby causing it to expand. An expanding steel beam on the 13th floor, NIST claimed, caused a steel girder attached to a column to break loose. Having lost its support, this column failed, starting a chain reaction in which the other 81 columns failed, causing a progressive collapse.91 Ignoring the question of whether this is even remotely plausible, let us simply ask: Why did that girder fail? Because, NIST claimed, it was not connected to the floor slab with sheer studs. NIST wrote: In WTC 7, no studs were installed on the girders.92 Floor beams . . . had shear studs, but the girders that supported the floor beams did not have shear studs.93 This was a fabrication, as we can see by looking at NIST’s Interim Report on WTC 7, which it had published in 2004. That report, written before NIST had developed its girder-failure theory, stated that girders as well as the beams had been attached to the floor by means of shear studs.94

A Raging Fire on Floor 12 at 5:00 PM: Another case of fabrication is a graphic in NIST’s report showing that at 5:00 PM, there were very big fires covering much of the north face of Floor 12.95 This claim is essential to NIST’s explanation as to why the building collapsed 21 minutes later. However, if you look back at NIST’s 2004 report, you will find this statement:

“Around 4:45 PM, a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9, and 11 near the middle of the north face; Floor 12 was burned out by this time.”96

Other photographs even show that the 12th floor fire had virtually burned out by 4:00. And yet NIST, in its final report, claims that fires were still raging on this floor at 5:00 PM.

G. NIST’s Affirmation of a Miracle

In addition to omitting, falsifying, and fabricating evidence, NIST affirms a miracle. You have perhaps seen the cartoon in which a physics professor has written a proof on a chalkboard. Most of the steps consist of mathematical equations, but one of them simply says: “Then a miracle happens.” This is humorous because one thing you absolutely cannot do in science is to appeal to a miracle, even implicitly. And yet that is what NIST does. I will explain:

NIST’S Denial of Free Fall: Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had long been pointing out that Building 7 came down at the same rate as a free-falling object, at least virtually so.

In NIST’s Draft for Public Comment, put out in August 2008, it denied this, saying that the time it took for the upper floors – the only floors that are visible on the videos - to come down “was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time and was consistent with physical principles.”97

As this statement implies, any assertion that the building did come down in free fall would not be consistent with physical principles – meaning the laws of physics. Explaining why not, Shyam Sunder said:

“[A] free fall time would be [the fall time of] an object that has no structural components below it. . . . [T]he . . . time that it took . . . for those 17 floors to disappear [was roughly 40 percent longer than free fall]. And that is not at all unusual, because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case. And you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place. Everything was not instantaneous.”98

In saying this, Sunder was presupposing NIST’s rejection of controlled demolition – which could have produced a free-fall collapse by causing all 82 columns to fail simultaneously – in favor of NIST’s fire theory, which necessitated a theory of progressive collapse.

Chandler’s Challenge: In response, high-school physics teacher David Chandler challenged Sunder’s denial of free fall, pointing out that Sunder’s “40 percent longer” claim contradicted “a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity.”99 Chandler then placed a video on the Internet showing that, by measuring this publicly visible quantity, anyone knowing elementary physics could see that “for about two and a half seconds. . . , the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from freefall.”100

NIST Admits Free Fall: Amazingly, in NIST’s final report, which came out in November, it admitted free fall. Dividing the building’s descent into three stages, NIST described the second phase as “a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25 s[econds].”101 (“Gravitational acceleration” is a synonym for free fall acceleration.)

So, after presenting over 600 pages of descriptions, graphs, testimonies, photographs, charts, analyses, explanations, and mathematical formulae, NIST says, in effect: “Then a miracle happens.”

Why this would be a miracle was explained by Chandler, who said: “Free fall can only

be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion.”102 In other words, the upper portion of Building 7 could have come down in free fall only if something had suddenly removed all the steel and concrete in the lower part of the building, which would have otherwise provided resistance. If everything had not been removed and the upper floors had come down in free fall anyway, even for only a second or two, a miracle – meaning a violation of the laws of physics - would have happened.

That was what Sunder himself had explained the previous August, saying that a free-falling object would be one “that has no structural components below it” to offer resistance.

But then in November, while still defending the fire theory of collapse, NIST admitted

that, as an empirical fact, free fall happened. For a period of 2.25 seconds, NIST admitted, the descent of WTC 7 was characterized by “gravitational acceleration (free fall).”103

Knowing that it had thereby affirmed a miracle, NIST no longer claimed that its analysis was consistent with the laws of physics. In its August draft, in which it had said that the collapse occurred 40 percent slower than free fall, NIST had said three times that its analysis was “consistent with physical principles.”104 In the final report, however, every instance of this phrase was removed. NIST thereby almost explicitly admitted that its report on WTC 7, by admitting free fall while continuing to deny that explosives were used, is not consistent with the principles of physics.

Conclusion about WTC 7: The science of World Trade Center 7 is, therefore, settled. This fact is reflected in the agreement by many hundreds of professionals with various forms of expertise – architects, engineers, firefighters, physicists, and chemists – that this building was deliberately demolished.

This truth has also recently been recognized by a symposium in one of our leading social science journals, which treats 9/11 as an example of what its authors call State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs).105 Criticizing the majority of the academic world for its “blithe dismissal of more than one law of thermodynamics” that is violated by the official theory of the World Trade Center collapses, these authors also criticize the academy for its failure to protest when “Professor Steven Jones found himself forced out of tenured position for merely reminding the world that physical laws, about which there is no dissent whatsoever, contradict the official theory.”106

And now the world can see, if it will only look, that even NIST, in its final report, did not dissent: By admitting that Building 7 came down in free fall for over two seconds, while simultaneously removing its previous claim that its report was consistent with physical principles, NIST implicitly admitted that the laws of physics rule out its non-demolition theory of this building’s collapse. NIST thereby implicitly admitted that explosives were used.

H. Implications for the Al-Qaeda Theory of 9/11

And with that implicit admission, NIST undermined the al-Qaeda theory of 9/11. Why?

For one thing, the straight-down nature of the collapse of WTC 7 means that it was subjected to the type of controlled demolition known as “implosion,” which is, in the words of a controlled demolition website, “by far the trickiest type of explosive project,” which “only a handful of blasting companies in the world . . . possess enough experience . . . to perform.”107 Al-Qaeda terrorists would not have had this kind of expertise.

Second, the only reason to go to the trouble of bringing a building straight down is to avoid damaging nearby buildings. Had WTC 7 and the Twin Towers – which also came straight down, after initial explosions at the top that ejected sections of steel outward several hundred feet108 - instead toppled over sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in Lower Manhattan, destroying dozens of other buildings and killing tens of thousands of people. Does anyone believe that, even if al-Qaeda operatives had had the expertise to make the buildings come straight down, they would have had the courtesy?

A third problem is that foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have taken to plant explosives. Only insiders could have done this.109

The science of the collapse of World Trade Center 7, accordingly, disproves the claim - which from the outset has been used to justify the war in Afghanistan – that America was attacked on 9/11 by al-Qaeda Muslims. It suggests, instead, that 9/11 was a false-flag operation to provide a pretext to attack Muslim nations.

Conclusion

In any case, the official rationale for our presence in Afghanistan is a lie. We are there for other reasons. Critics have offered various suggestions as to the most important of those reasons.110 Whatever be the answer to that question, however, we have not been there to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Besides never being legally justified, therefore, the war in Afghanistan has never been morally justified.

This war, moreover, is an abomination. In addition to the thousands of US and other NATO troops who have been killed or impaired for life, physically and/or mentally, the US-led invasion/occupation of Afghanistan has resulted in a huge number of Afghan casualties, with estimates running from several hundred thousand to several million.111 But whatever the true number, the fact is that the United States has produced a great amount of death and misery – sometimes even bombing funerals and wedding parties - in this country that had already suffered terribly and that, even if the official story were true, had not attacked America. The fact that the official story is a lie makes our war crimes even worse.112

But there is a way out. As I have shown in this paper and even more completely elsewhere,113 the falsity of the official account of WTC 7 has now been demonstrated, leaving no room for reasonable doubt. In his inaugural address, President Obama said, “We will restore science to its rightful place,”114 thereby pledging that in his administration, unlike that of his predecessor, science would again be allowed to play a determinative role in shaping public policy. By changing his administration’s policy with regard to Afghanistan in light of the science of WTC 7, the president would not only fulfill one of his most important promises. He would also prevent the war in Afghanistan from becoming known as “Obama’s Vietnam.”115

David Ray Griffin is the author of 36 books on various topics, including philosophy, theology, philosophy of science, and 9/11. His 2008 book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé, was named a “Pick of the Week” by Publishers Weekly. In September 2009, The New Statesman ranked him #41 among “The 50 People Who Matter Today.” His most recent book is The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (2009). His next book will be Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (September 2010). He wishes to thank Tod Fletcher, Jim Hoffman, and Elizabeth Woodworth for help with this essay.

Notes

1 For a few of the many times this issue has been raised, see Jeffrey T. Kuhner, “Obama's Vietnam?” Washington Times, January 25, 2009 (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/25/obamas-vietnam); Juan Cole, “Obama’s Vietnam?” Salon.com, January 26, 2009 (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/26/obama/print.html); John Barry and Evan Thomas, “Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam,” Newsweek, January 31, 2009 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/182650).

2 Marjorie Cohn, “Bombing of Afghanistan Is Illegal and Must Be Stopped,” Jurist, November 6, 2001 (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew36.htm).

3 Marjorie Cohn, “Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War,” AlterNet, August 1, 2008 (http://www.alternet.org/world/93473/afghanistan:_the_other_illegal_war).

4 President Barack Obama, “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ” Remarks at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, December 1, 2009 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34231058).

5 “Security Council Condemns, ‘In Strongest Terms,’ Terrorist Attacks on United States,” September 12, 2001 (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/SC7143.doc.htm).

6 Brian J. Foley "Legal Analysis: U.S. Campaign Against Afghanistan Not Self-Defense Under International Law," Lawyers Against the War (http://www.lawyersagainstthewar.org/legalarticles/foley3.html).

7 "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” US Constitution, Article VI, par. 2.

8 See Richard Falk and Howard Friel, The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (London: Verso, 2007).

9 Obama, “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan .”

10 For example, Robert H. Reid, writing for the Associated Press (“August Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, August 29, 2009 [http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/august-deadliest-month-for-us-in-afghanistan]), said the war “was launched by the Bush administration after the Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.”

11 “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You,’” CNN, September 21, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/21/ret.afghan.taliban).

12 David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens, “Diplomats Met with Taliban on Bin Laden,” Washington Post, October 29, 2001 (http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/US_met_taliban.htm).

13 “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand Bin Laden Over,” Guardian, October 14, 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5).

14 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Defends Strategy in Afghanistan,” New York Times, August 18, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/us/politics/18vets.html?_r=1&th&emc=th).

15 See the two chapters entitled “The New Great Game” in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004).

16 Rashid, Taliban, 75-79, 163, 175.

17 Quoted in Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002), 43.

18 George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC News, September 18, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm).

19 “Meet the Press,” NBC, September 23, 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext092301.html).

20 “Remarks by the President, Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill and Secretary of State Powell on Executive Order,” White House, September 24, 2001 (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/president_026.asp).

21 Seymour M. Hersh, “What Went Wrong: The C.I.A. and the Failure of American Intelligence,” New Yorker, October 1, 2001 (http://web.archive.org/web/20020603150854/http://www.cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Hersch_OCT_01.htm).

22 Office of the Prime Minister, “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” BBC News, October 4, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1579043.stm).

23 “The Investigation and the Evidence,” BBC News, October 5, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1581063.stm).

24 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Most Wanted Terrorists: Usama bin Laden”

(http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm).

25 Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’” Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006 (http://web.archive.org/web/20061107114035/http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html). For more on this episode, see David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink], 2008), Chap. 18.

26 See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), Chap. 5, notes 16, 41, and 92.

27 Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, with Benjamin Rhodes, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 118.

28 Ibid., 122-24.

29 Ibid., 119.

30 David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009), 27-29.

31 Professor Bruce Lawrence interviewed by Kevin Barrett, February 16, 2007 (http://www.radiodujour.com/people/lawrence_bruce).

32 Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? 16, 29-33.

33 Kevin Fagan, “Agents of Terror Leave Their Mark on Sin City,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2001 (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/04/MN102970.DTL).

34 The 9/11 Commission Report, 160.

35 “Professor Dittmar Machule,” Interviewed by Liz Jackson, A Mission to Die For, Four Corners, October 18, 2001 (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/interviews/machule.htm).

36 Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball, “Bush: ‘We’re at War,” Newsweek, September 24, 2001 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/76065).

37 Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida (Eugene, OR: MadCow Press, 2004). See also Hopsicker, “The Secret World of Mohamed Atta: An Interview With Atta’s American Girlfriend,” InformationLiberation, August 20, 2006 (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=14738). Many of the details are summarized in my 9/11 Contradictions, Chap. 15, “Were Mohamed Atta and the Other Hijackers Devout Muslims?” As I explain in that chapter, there were efforts to try to discredit Keller’s account by intimidating her into recanting and by claiming that she lived with a different man having the same first name, but these attempts failed.

38 “Professor Dittmar Machule.”

39 Kate Connolly, “Father Insists Alleged Leader Is Still Alive,” Guardian, September 2, 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa).

40 “Photographs Taken of Mohamed Atta during His University Years,” A Mission to Die For, Four Corners (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/resources/photos/university.htm). Also, the differences between the (bearded) Atta in his passport photo, which is in the FBI’s evidence for the Moussaoui trial, and the Atta of the standard FBI photo, seem greater than can be accounted for by the fact that only the former Atta is bearded. The two photos can be compared at 911Review (http://911review.org/JohnDoe2/Atta.html).

41 “Professor Dittmar Machule.”

42 Thomas Tobin, “Florida: Terror’s Launching Pad,” St. Petersburg Times, September 1, 2002 (http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/01/911/Florida__terror_s_lau.shtml); Elaine Allen-Emrich, “Hurt for Terrorists Reaches North Port,” Charlotte Sun-Herald, September 14, 2001 (available at http://www.madcowprod.com/keller.htm).

43 Connolly, “Father Insists Alleged Leader Is Still Alive.”

44 David Bamford, “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco,” BBC, September 22, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm). Although some news organizations, including the BBC itself, later tried to debunk this story, they failed, as I reported in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 151-53.

45 See Jay Kolar, “What We Now Know about the Alleged 9-11 Hijackers,” in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 3-44, at 22-26; and Paul Thompson, “The Two Ziad Jarrahs,” History Commons (http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essayjarrah).

46 For types of evidence not discussed here, see Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Chap. 8, “9/11 Commission Falsehoods about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Pakistanis, and Saudis.”

47 “Ashcroft Says More Attacks May Be Planned,” CNN, September 18, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/inv.investigation.terrorism/index.html); “Terrorist Hunt,” ABC News, September 12, 2001 (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/abc_hunt.html).

48 Anne Karpf, “Uncle Sam’s Lucky Finds,” Guardian, March 19, 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html). Like some others, this article mistakenly said the passport belonged to Mohamed Atta.

49 Statement by Susan Ginsburg, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, at the 9/11 Commission Hearing, January 26, 2004 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing7/9-11Commission_Hearing_2004-01-26.htm). The Commission’s account reflected a CBS report that the passport had been found “minutes after” the attack, which had been stated by the Associated Press, January 27, 2003.

50 A. K. Dewdney, “The Cellphone and Airfone Calls from Flight UA93,” Physics 911, June 9, 2003 (http://physics911.net/cellphoneflight93.htm); Michel Chossudovsky, “More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls,” Global Research, August 10, 2004 (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO408B.html). For discussion of this issue, see Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 112-14.

51 Greg Gordon, “Prosecutors Play Flight 93 Cockpit Recording,” McClatchy Newspapers, KnoxNews.com, April 12, 2006 (http://web.archive.org/web/20080129210016/http://www.knoxsingles.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MOUSSAOUI-04-12-06&cat=WW).

52 United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html). These documents can be viewed more easily in “Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights” (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

53 “Interview with Deena Lynne Burnett (re: phone call from hijacked flight),” 9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11, 2001, Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008 (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).

54 William M. Arkin, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing,” Washington Post, February 1, 1999 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm). For discussion, see Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 114-18.

55 FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” 9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11, 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008, (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).

56 “America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).

57 See David Ray Griffin and Rob Balsamo, “Could Barbara Olson Have Made Those Calls? An Analysis of New Evidence about Onboard Phones,” Pilots for 9/11 Truth, June 26, 2007 (http://pilotsfor911truth.org/amrarticle.html).

58 See the graphic in Jim Hoffman’s “Detailed Account of Telephone Calls from September 11th Flights,” Flight 77 (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

59 For claims about hijackers’ names on the flight manifests, see Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 13; George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 167-69; and my discussion in Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 174-75. On claims about hijacker names on the Pentagon autopsy report, see Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts: An In-Depth Investigation by Popular Mechanics, ed. David Dunbar and Brad Reagan (New York: Hearst Books, 2006), 63, and my discussion of its claim in David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2007], 267-69.

60 See Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 163, 174-75.

61 Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D. “Still No Arabs on Flight 77,” Rense.com, June 23, 2003 (http://www.rense.com/general38/77.htm).

62 See The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 275-79.

63 See David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11 (Louisville: Westminster

John Knox, 2006), Chap. 1, “9/11 and Prior False Flag Operations.”

64 General Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 120, 130; “Gen. Wesley Clark Weights Presidential Bid: ‘I Think about It Everyday,’” Democracy Now! March 2, 2007 (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/02/1440234); Joe Conason, “Seven Countries in Five Years,” Salon.com, October 12, 2007 (http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/10/12/wesley_clark); Gareth Porter, “Yes, the Pentagon Did Want to Hit Iran,” Asia Times, May 7, 2008 (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE07Ak01.html).

65 David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009).

66 James Glanz, “Engineers Have a Culprit in the Strange Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: Diesel Fuel,” New York Times, November 29, 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/29/nyregion/nation-challenged-site-engineers-have-culprit-strange-collapse-7-world-trade.html).

67 See FEMA, “High-Rise Office Building Fire, One Meridian Plaza, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” (http://www.interfire.org/res_file/pdf/Tr-049.pdf), and “Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela’s Tallest Building,” Venezuela News, Views, and Analysis, October 18, 2004 (http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/741).

68 See FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study (http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf), Chap. 5, Sect. 6.2, “Probable Collapse Sequence,” at p. 31.

69 Rather’s statement is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvx904dAw0o).

70 See “Danny Jowenko on WTC 7 Controlled Demolition,” YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=877gr6xtQIc), or, for more of the interview, “Jowenko WTC 7 Demolition Interviews,” in three parts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DRhwRN06I&feature=related).

71 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (http://www.ae911truth.org).

72 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7, November 2008, Vol. 1 (wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201-9%20Vol%201.pdf), 330.

73 “NIST Whistleblower,” October 1, 2007 (http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/10/former-nist-employee-blows-whistle.html).

74 Shyam Sunder, “Opening Statement,” NIST Press Briefing, August 21, 2008 (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/opening_remarks_082108.html).

75 Quoted in “Report: Fire, Not Bombs, Leveled WTC 7 Building,” USA Today, August 21, 2008 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-21-wtc-nist_N.htm).

76 New Research Misconduct Policies, section headed “What is Research Misconduct?” National Science Foundation, Office of Inspector General (http://www.nsf.gov/oig/session.pdf). This document is undated, but internal evidence suggests that it was published in 2001.

77 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 1: 324.

78 Quoted in Chris Bull and Sam Erman, eds., At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were

There Tell Their Stories (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 97.

79 Joan Killough-Miller, “The ‘Deep Mystery’ of Melted Steel,” WPI Transformations, Spring 2002 (http://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2002Spring/steel.html).

80 James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “A Search for Clues in Towers’ Collapse,” New York Times, February 2, 2002 (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/nyregion/search-for-clues-towers-collapse-engineers-volunteer-examine-steel-debris-taken.html).

81 Jonathan Barnett, Ronald R. Biederman, and Richard D. Sisson, Jr., “Limited Metallurgical Examination,” FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002, Appendix C (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/AppendixC-fema403_apc.pdf), C-13.

82 “Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation,” NIST, August 21, 2008, updated April 21, 2009). NIST has removed both versions of this document from its website, but Jim Hoffman’s website has preserved both the original (2008) version (http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/nist/wtc_qa_082108.html) and the updated (2009) version (http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/nist/wtc_qa_042109.html).

83 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature,” Expert Report, May 2004 (http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTCDustSignature_ExpertReport.051304.1646.mp.pdf), 11.

84 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature Study: Composition and Morphology,” December 2003 (http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTC%20Dust%20Signature.Composition%20and%20Morphology.Final.pdf), 17. This earlier (2003) version of the RJ Lee report contained much more information about melted iron than the 2004 version. For discussion, see Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse, 40-42.

85 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature Study” (2003), 21.

86 WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web (http://www.webelements.com/lead/physics.html).

87 Steven E. Jones et al., "Extremely High Temperatures during the World Trade Center Destruction," Journal of 9/11 Studies, January 2008 (http://journalof911studies.com/articles/WTCHighTemp2.pdf), 4-5.

88 WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web (http://www.webelements.com/molybdenum/physics.html).

89 Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2: 7-31 (http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm).

90 Jennifer Abel, “Theories of 9/11,” Hartford Advocate, January 29, 2008 (http://www.ae911truth.org/press/23).

91 See The Mysterious Collapse, 150-55.

92 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 1: 346.

93 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7, November 2008, Vol. 2 (http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201-9%20Vol%202.pdf), 462.

94 For documentation and discussion of NIST’s claim about the lack of girder shear studs, see Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse, 212-15.

95 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 2: 384, Figure 9-11.

96 Interim Report on WTC 7, NIST, June 2004 (http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june04/appendixl.pdf), L-26. This contradiction is pointed out in a video, “NIST Report on WTC7 Debunked and Exposed!” YouTube, December 28, 2008 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpbZ-aLDLY), at 0:45 to 1:57.

97 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Draft for Public Comment, Vol. 2 (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NIST_NCSTAR_1-9_vol2_for_public_comment.pdf), 595.

98 “WTC 7 Technical Briefing” (video), NIST, August 26, 2008, at 1:03. NIST has removed this video and the accompanying transcript from the Internet. However, Nate Flach has made the video available at Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/11941571), and the transcript, entitled “NIST Technical Briefing on Its Final Draft Report on WTC 7 for Public Comment,” is available at David Chandler’s website (http://911speakout.org/NIST_Tech_Briefing_Transcript.pdf).

99 Ibid., at 1:01:45.

100 David Chandler, “WTC7 in Freefall - No Longer Controversial,” September 4, 2008 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I), at 2:45.

101 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 2: 607.

102 Chandler, “WTC7 in Freefall – No Longer Controversial,” at 3:27.

103 “Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation.”

104 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Draft for Public Comment, Vol. 2: 595-96, 596, 610.

105 Symposium on State Crimes Against Democracy, American Behavioral Scientist 53 (February 2010): 783-939 (http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6).

106 Matthew T. Witt, “Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship,” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (February

2010): 921-39 (http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6), at 935.

107 “The Myth of Implosion” (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html).

108 See Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 30-31.

109 As to how domestic terrorists could have gotten access, an answer becomes possible if we are aware that Larry Silverstein, who owned Building 7 and had recently taken out a lease on the rest of the World Trade Center, stood to make several billion dollars if it was destroyed in a terrorist attack, and that a brother and cousin of George W. Bush were principals of a company that handled security for the World Trade Center (Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, 111).

110 Some have seen drug profits as central. Others have focused on access to oil, natural gas, and minerals. For example, economist Michel Chossudovsky, referring to the allegedly recent discovery of huge reserves of minerals and natural gas in Afghanistan, wrote: “The issue of ‘previously unknown deposits’ sustains a falsehood. It excludes Afghanistan's vast mineral wealth as a justifiable casus belli. It says that the Pentagon only recently became aware that Afghanistan was among the World's most wealthy mineral economies . . . [whereas in reality] all this information was known in minute detail” (Michel Chossudovsky, “’The War is Worth Waging’: Afghanistan's Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas: The War on Afghanistan is a Profit Driven ‘Resource War,’” Global Research, June 17, 2010 (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19769).

111 Dr. Gideon Polya, author of Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950, has estimated that there over four million Afghanis have died since the 2001 than would have died without the invasion; see “January 2010 – 4.5 Million Dead in Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide,” January 2, 2010, Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide (http://afghangenocide.blogspot.com).

112 On US-NATO war crimes in Afghanistan, see Marc W. Herold, “Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to ‘Save our Troops’: Eight Years of Horror Perpetrated against the People of Afghanistan,” Global Research, October 15, 2009 (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15665).

113 See The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, and, more recently, “Building What? How SCADs Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight,” 911Truth.org, May 27, 2010 (http://911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).

114 “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” New York Times, January 20, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html).

115 I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodworth for considerable help with this essay.

David Ray Griffin is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by David Ray Griffin

U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan

2010-06-16T21:42:00.048-01:00

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
A bleak Ghazni Province seems to offer little, but a Pentagon study says it may have among the world’s largest deposits of lithium.

By JAMES RISEN

Published: June 13, 2010

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

June 14, 2010

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”

With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program. “They’ve had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan.”

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

“There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”

McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure’

2009-09-21T17:04:00.001-01:00

Top U.S. Commander For Afghan War Calls Next 12 Months Decisive

By Bob Woodward

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 21, 2009

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, shown in Kandahar, makes a plea for more troops in a confidential assessment of the Afghan war. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)

A U.S. Army instructor is seen with new Afghan National Army recruits arriving at the Kabul Military Training Center. A broad effort is underway to train thousands of new troops to join the fight against the Taliban-led insurgency. (Photos By Emilio Morenatti -- Associated Press)

The army recruits pray at the training center's mosque. (Emilio Morenatti - AP)

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document's five-page Commander's Summary on a note of muted optimism: "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable."

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan's prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

McChrystal's assessment is one of several options the White House is considering. His plan could intensify a national debate in which leading Democratic lawmakers have expressed reluctance about committing more troops to an increasingly unpopular war. Obama said last week that he will not decide whether to send more troops until he has "absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be."

The commander has prepared a separate detailed request for additional troops and other resources, but defense officials have said he is awaiting instructions before sending it to the Pentagon.

Senior administration officials asked The Post over the weekend to withhold brief portions of the assessment that they said could compromise future operations. A declassified version of the document, with some deletions made at the government's request, appears at washingtonpost.com.

McChrystal makes clear that his call for more forces is predicated on the adoption of a strategy in which troops emphasize protecting Afghans rather than killing insurgents or controlling territory. Most starkly, he says: "[I]nadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced."

'Widespread Corruption'

The assessment offers an unsparing critique of the failings of the Afghan government, contending that official corruption is as much of a threat as the insurgency to the mission of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, as the U.S.-led NATO coalition is widely known.

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government," McChrystal says.

The result has been a "crisis of confidence among Afghans," he writes. "Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents."

McChrystal is equally critical of the command he has led since June 15. The key weakness of ISAF, he says, is that it is not aggressively defending the Afghan population. "Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us -- physically and psychologically -- from the people we seek to protect. . . . The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves."

McChrystal continues: "Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

Coalition intelligence-gathering has focused on how to attack insurgents, hindering "ISAF's comprehension of the critical aspects of Afghan society."

In a four-page annex on detainee operations, McChrystal warns that the Afghan prison system has become "a sanctuary and base to conduct lethal operations" against the government and coalition forces. He cites as examples an apparent prison connection to the 2008 bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul and other attacks. "Unchecked, Taliban/Al Qaeda leaders patiently coordinate and plan, unconcerned with interference from prison personnel or the military."

The assessment says that Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents "represent more than 2,500 of the 14,500 inmates in the increasingly overcrowded Afghan Corrections System," in which "[h]ardened, committed Islamists are indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders, and they are using the opportunity to radicalize and indoctrinate them."

Noting that the United States "came to Afghanistan vowing to deny these same enemies safe haven in 2001," he says they now operate with relative impunity in the prisons. "There are more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan," his assessment says.

McChrystal outlines a plan to build up the Afghan government's ability to manage its detention facilities and eventually put all such operations under Afghan control, including the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which the United States runs.

For now, because of a lack of capacity, "productive interrogations and detainee intelligence collection have been reduced" at Bagram. "As a result, hundreds are held without charge or without a defined way-ahead. This allows the enemy to radicalize them far beyond their pre-capture orientation. The problem can no longer be ignored."

McChrystal's Plan

The general says his command is "not adequately executing the basics" of counterinsurgency by putting the Afghan people first. "ISAF personnel must be seen as guests of the Afghan people and their government, not an occupying army," he writes. "Key personnel in ISAF must receive training in local languages."

He also says that coalition forces will change their operational culture, in part by spending "as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind the walls of forward operating bases." Strengthening Afghans' sense of security will require troops to take greater risks, but the coalition "cannot succeed if it is unwilling to share risk, at least equally, with the people."

McChrystal warns that in the short run, it "is realistic to expect that Afghan and coalition casualties will increase."

He proposes speeding the growth of Afghan security forces. The existing goal is to expand the army from 92,000 to 134,000 by December 2011. McChrystal seeks to move that deadline to October 2010.

Overall, McChrystal wants the Afghan army to grow to 240,000 and the police to 160,000 for a total security force of 400,000, but he does not specify when those numbers could be reached.

He also calls for "radically more integrated and partnered" work with Afghan units.

McChrystal says the military must play an active role in reconciliation, winning over less committed insurgent fighters. The coalition "requires a credible program to offer eligible insurgents reasonable incentives to stop fighting and return to normalcy, possibly including the provision of employment and protection," he writes.

Coalition forces will have to learn that "there are now three outcomes instead of two" for enemy fighters: not only capture or death, but also "reintegration."

Again and again, McChrystal makes the case that his command must be bolstered if failure is to be averted. "ISAF requires more forces," he states, citing "previously validated, yet un-sourced, requirements" -- an apparent reference to a request for 10,000 more troops originally made by McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan.

A Three-Headed Insurgency

McChrystal identifies three main insurgent groups "in order of their threat to the mission" and provides significant details about their command structures and objectives.

The first is the Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) headed by Mullah Omar, who fled Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and operates from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

"At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Omar announces his guidance and intent for the coming year," according to the assessment.

Mullah Omar's insurgency has established an elaborate alternative government known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, McChrystal writes, which is capitalizing on the Afghan government's weaknesses. "They appoint shadow governors for most provinces, review their performance, and replace them periodically. They established a body to receive complaints against their own 'officials' and to act on them. They install 'shari'a' [Islamic law] courts to deliver swift and enforced justice in contested and controlled areas. They levy taxes and conscript fighters and laborers. They claim to provide security against a corrupt government, ISAF forces, criminality, and local power brokers. They also claim to protect Afghan and Muslim identity against foreign encroachment."

"The QST has been working to control Kandahar and its approaches for several years and there are indications that their influence over the city and neighboring districts is significant and growing," McChrystal writes.

The second main insurgency group is the Haqqani network (HQN), which is active in southeastern Afghanistan and draws money and manpower "principally from Pakistan, Gulf Arab networks, and from its close association with al Qaeda and other Pakistan-based insurgent groups." At another point in the assessment, McChrystal says, "Al Qaeda's links with HQN have grown, suggesting that expanded HQN control could create a favorable environment" for associated extremist movements "to re-establish safe-havens in Afghanistan."

The third is the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin insurgency, which maintains bases in three Afghan provinces "as well as Pakistan," the assessment says. This network, led by the former mujaheddin commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, "aims to negotiate a major role in a future Taliban government. He does not currently have geographical objectives as is the case with the other groups," though he "seeks control of mineral wealth and smuggling routes in the east."

Overall, McChrystal provides this conclusion about the enemy: "The insurgents control or contest a significant portion of the country, although it is difficult to assess precisely how much due to a lack of ISAF presence. . . . "

The insurgents make money from the production and sale of opium and other narcotics, but the assessment says that "eliminating insurgent access to narco-profits -- even if possible, and while disruptive -- would not destroy their ability to operate so long as other funding sources remained intact."

While the insurgency is predominantly Afghan, McChrystal writes that it "is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI," which is its intelligence service. Al-Qaeda and other extremist movements "based in Pakistan channel foreign fighters, suicide bombers, and technical assistance into Afghanistan, and offer ideological motivation, training, and financial support."

Toward the end of his report, McChrystal revisits his central theme: "Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure."

Josh Boak and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.

Intimidation and Fraud Observed in Afghan Election

2009-08-24T17:52:00.000-01:00

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan Reports of fraud and intimidation in Afghanistan's presidential election continued to mount Saturday, with anecdotal but widespread accounts of ballot-box stuffing, a lack of impartiality among election workers and voters casting ballots for others.

A particular concern was the notably low turnout of women, who election observer organizations said were disproportionately affected by the violence and intimidation.

Election officials said that all the reports needed to be investigated, and that it was too early to draw broad conclusions about the overall validity of the vote.

The reports by election observers came as officials were still counting ballots from Afghanistan's second nationwide election in the nearly eight years since an American-led invasion ousted the Taliban.

More than 30 candidates ran for president, and while preliminary results were not expected until Tuesday, the prospect of a runoff election appeared likely, with the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai, facing a stiff challenge from his former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah.

The reported problems also included voter intimidation, by the Taliban and also by some powerful candidates, in particular local candidates running for provincial council seats. Voter turnout appeared to be low, especially in the volatile south where the Taliban is strongest.

But women voters seemed to have faced disproportionate obstacles, election observer groups said.

Hundreds of polling stations for women (stations throughout the country were segregated to keep men and women from publicly mingling) did not even open in some areas where Taliban influence is high, but women also suffered discrimination and intimidation in some places in central and northern Afghanistan. Female candidates received threats and were largely ignored in news coverage of the elections, the observers said.

"The disproportionate effects of poor security conditions, widespread cultural opposition to women in public life and a number of attacks clearly aimed at deterring women's activities all created significant obstacles," the European Union observer mission said in its preliminary statement on Saturday.

Women are already restricted by the conservative culture in many parts of rural Afghanistan, but the growing instability has further consolidated the opinions of many families and communities that it is not appropriate for women to be active outside the home, the statement said.

At least 650 women's polling centers planned did not open on the day, according to Free and Fair Elections in Afghanistan, known as FEFA, the largest Afghan observer organization. In the southern province of Oruzgan, of the 36 centers for women that were planned, only 6 opened, said Nader Nadery, director of FEFA. In certain polling centers in the south and southeast of the country almost no women voted, according to the National Democratic Institute, an American-financed group that promotes democracy abroad.

The insecurity also led to greater proxy voting, in which male family members vote for the women, further robbing women of their rights, observers said.

Afghan women have been granted equal rights under the new Constitution, and can run for office and there is a quota system that provides a minimum 25 percent representation of women in provincial councils. Two women entered the presidential race this year and 333 the provincial council elections, roughly 10 percent of the total field of council candidates. There was a slight increase nationwide of women's participation as candidates, but in nearly half the provinces, women's participation decreased, the European Union observation mission reported.

Female candidates complained that the insecurity made it impossible in some places to campaign. Assassinations of women working in government positions in provinces like Kandahar have undoubtedly deterred others from coming forward. Only three women entered the contest for four reserved female seats on Kandahar's provincial council, and none of the three candidates were living in Kandahar during most of the campaign.

Women received almost no coverage in news reporting, and topics concerning women's rights were virtually never featured in news coverage of the electoral campaign, the European Union mission said.

A lack of female staff members forced the election commission to use men, which deterred women from voting in areas, the National Democratic Institute said. A lack of women in the Election Complaints Commission, and the location and attitude of some of its staff members, also made it difficult for some people, particularly women, to make use of the complaints process.

The passage of a new family law for the Shiite minority before the election had also been criticized by human rights organizations and observers, since it had been suggested that Mr. Karzai signed it in return for political support from conservatives.

In addition to the problems listed by FEFA, which had roughly 7,000 observers out on election day, including 2,454 women, the European Union observer mission also criticized the appointment of election officials, unbalanced news media coverage during the campaign and irregularities in voter registration that increased the potential for fraud.

The National Democratic Institute also criticized the problem of multiple registration of voters and subsequent fraud, as well as the misuse of state resources in campaigning, and proxy voting.

A hundred complaints have been lodged with the election complaints commission, and all the observers called for the complaints commission and election commission to work seriously on the complaints to ensure the credibility of the election.

Mr. Naderi said that the general participation estimated at 40 to 50 percent of voters by some Western officials indicated that Afghans did support the development of democratic institutions in the country. But he warned, as did all the observers, that the credibility of the election would depend on the thorough investigation of the irregularities.

"Acceptability and credibility of the election is a good benchmark that needs to be observed," Mr. Naderi said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 23, 2009
An article on Aug. 23 about reports of intimidation and fraud in the Afghan elections gave an incorrect number of female election observers working in the country for the group Free and Fair Elections in Afghanistan. The correct number is 2,454. Also, the name of the group's director was misspelled: he is Nader Nadery.

The Future of Afghanistan: A Conversation with Ashraf Ghani

2009-05-09T15:20:00.001-01:00

April 22, 2009

Former Afghan Minister of Finance Dr. Ashraf Ghani spoke today at a conversation about the future of Afghanistan hosted the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center. The Atlantic Council also unveiled its Afghanistan Report by Dr. Ghani, A Ten-Year Framework for Afghanistan: Executing the Obama Plan and Beyond.

Just weeks after the Obama administration’s release of its new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dr. Ghani presented a medium-term framework for Afghanistan that outlined the steps which must be taken by Afghanistan and the international community to ensure that they make good on its second chance for success. The discussion session was moderated by Frederick Kempe, President and CEO of the Atlantic Council.

Read Transcript

Download Afghanistan Report

Podcast (MP3, 1:30:08):

Afghanistan Report: A Ten-Year Framework for the Future (Ashraf Ghani)

2009-05-09T14:41:00.001-01:00

April 22, 2009

Download Publication PDF

Describing the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as increasingly perilous, President Obama has committed his administration to enhancing the military, governance, and economic capacity of the two countries. Chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness and former Afghan Minister of Finance Dr. Ashraf Ghani outlines a medium-term framework for state-building in Afghanistan for the Atlantic Council in A Ten-Year Framework for Afghanistan: Executing the Obama Plan and Beyond.

Executive Summary

On March 27, 2009, President Obama announced plans to launch a new strategy in the region:

To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . . Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency. The people of Afghanistan seek the promise of a better future. Yet once again, they have seen the hope of a new day darkened by violence and uncertainty.

The Obama administration has thus both defined the problem and set clear goals for American engagement in the region. Translating these goals into achievements on the ground, however, is going to require understanding the context, the lessons from the past, and the priority actions for the future. Conditions on the ground are now much more difficult than in 2002 when the Afghan people overwhelmingly welcomed the international intervention. The goals set, however, are still achievable if the needs and aspirations of the Afghan people are the focus of renewed efforts. The administration has clearly recognized that the achievement of goals requires a medium-term approach. This report offers an implementation framework for translating the goals into feasible processes and actions in Afghanistan.

There are four major threats to securing Afghanistan’s future. First, Al Qaeda is a renewed force moving fluidly between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Second, an expanded, well resourced, and multifaceted insurgency presents a continual threat to Afghan and international actors. Third, a narcotics production, processing, and distribution network fuels corruption and violence and is becoming concentrated in the hands of a few nefarious individuals. And fourth, poor governance, underpinning all these problems, is now so entrenched that many organs of government are seen as the instruments of corruption, not of legitimacy and the rule of law.

These threats have been heightened and perpetuated by the inability of the international community to develop a unified strategy or coordination mechanism. Securing agreement on a joint strategy and on the means for coordination is a prerequisite for success in Afghanistan. The tendency of the Afghan elite to support instability rather than institutional reform is another key obstacle. The political field in Afghanistan must therefore be broadened to allow for the recognition and emergence of stakeholders in a stable and prosperous country.

While there are significant constraints to achieving the stated objectives, there are also significant Afghan and international assets to build on. On the Afghan side, the assets are in the natural, financial, and human capital and the institutional successes in areas ranging from the national army to rural development. The success of the political process from 2001 to 2004, when the first presidential elections in the country’s history were held, shows the willingness of the Afghan public to engage in democratic processes. The National Solidarity Program is one example of a novel approach that was deployed across a number of sectors. The success of its programs indicates that the key to institutional success is not context but the design of programs and the nature of partnerships between the Afghan stakeholders and the international community.

A coherent approach to state-building can produce a capable and accountable Afghan government. This report offers a prioritized approach to building state functions sequentially and in a way that creates self-sustaining linkages and reform processes. With a 10-year timeframe for achieving control of its territory and the allegiance of its people, the Afghan government can break down state functions into four institutional orders. This classification of functions will allow for a method of benchmarking and measurement and allow domestic and international actors to move from endless preparation of strategies on paper to the critical task of implementation on the ground.

First-order functions include the rule of law, to ensure that the Afghan state can control its territory through the use of effective security and police services that use force within a clear space defined by strict rules. They also include public finance, to ensure that resources, both internal and external, are channeled effectively and spent accountably at every level of government using robust national accountability systems. These functions involve administrative control, to turn Afghan territory into a hierarchically national space in which the functions and levels of governance are clearly defined and coordinated while supported by capable civil servants. These will include human capital development, to create stakeholders in positive reform that have the skills to support an effective public sector, a legitimate and productive private sector, and a vibrant civil society.

Second-order functions include market-building, creating sustainable jobs that can draw in unemployed youth who provide the basis for the insurgency and the narcotics industry. This will involve developing key initiatives in support of agriculture, through a bold initiative that works from market access backward through value chains, supply chains, knowledge, and infrastructure and uses trade concessions and innovative financial tools to ensure sustainable and profitable production. It involves mining, through transparent licensing frameworks and credible arbitration and judicial enforcement of contracts. And it includes construction, which, through a central construction code, a central procurement authority, and a construction corps, could build on the private capacity in Afghanistan to truly transform the efficiency and sustainability of infrastructure development across the country.

Third-order functions include a focus on infrastructure, to consolidate territory, harness space, and release market forces using domestic and regional capabilities to build key roads, develop alternative energies and capitalize on new technologies while focusing on social policy, through rural programs that allow for generating wealth and developing social and institutional capital from the bottom up.

Fourth-order functions include public borrowing, to ensure that external resources can be channeled effectively in support of the budget as the central instrument of policy. They demand effective management of public, cultural, environmental, and innovation assets through credible contracting and regulation and the formalization of property rights. These functions also include second-generation human capital development, through a focus on tertiary and vocational training as part of a long-term, 20- year human development plan.

These institution-building processes can be justified strategically because they build on the successful state-building efforts under way in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2005 and take advantage of the readiness of the Afghan people for good governance, the rule of law, and an end to violence and poverty.

The counter-insurgency (COIN) approach that is now beginning to guide American military actions in Afghanistan, as it has been in Iraq, also emphasizes a coherent and coordinated approach to good government to win public trust—to use force only when necessary in the short term and to avoid its use in the longer term. This is in line with the broader international thinking on state-building, which now emphasizes the centrality of governance and the cost of failure of disparate and piecemeal development approaches.

The coming months are central to Afghanistan’s future for a variety of reasons. The new U.S. strategy can reach the medium-term state-building priorities outlined above through short-term actions:

Ensuring a level playing field for the presidential elections in August 2009 and supporting a process through which Afghans can truly engage in constructive debate about the country’s future.

Developing a coherent international strategy, using the COIN manual as a basis for military operations and a Marshall Plan approach to simplify the actions of the broader international community.

Preparing new national programs with implementation plans in place for immediate roll-out by the new Afghan administration.

Using the National Solidarity Program, a community-level development program, as a platform for rural enterprise and wealth generation.

Focusing on eight model provinces across the country, which provide a demonstration and multiplier effect for the rest of Afghanistan to underpin a slowly broadening area of good governance.

The situation in Afghanistan is difficult, but by no means impossible, and renewed international focus combined with shifting internal dynamics provide a real opportunity to change the trajectory of the country and the lives of millions of Afghans. The first step has been taken—a coherent U.S. regional strategy now exists. This must be translated into measurable medium-term goals that support a functional and accountable state. These goals must be underpinned by short-term feasible actions that can generate positive change and a sense of hope, both within and outside Afghanistan, that the future will be more prosperous and secure than the past. This is essential for Afghan, regional, and global stability.

Key Numbers

The potential value of Afghanistan’s opium, morphine, and heroin exports was $3.4 billion, a third of the estimated GDP of $10.2 billion in 2008.

Initial U.S. support to Afghanistan was $300 million a year.

Afghanistan is at the center of 3 billion potential consumers in China, India, the Gulf, and Europe.

Current spending by NATO and Coalition forces is about $20 billion a month.

Rural incomes per capita have to increase from $1 a day to at least $4 a day, the tipping point for opium production to become unprofitable.

Afghan anger at deadly US strikes

2009-05-07T16:42:00.001-01:00

Afghan and US officials are investigating how many civilians died

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets in Farah in western Afghanistan in protest at the deaths of civilians in US air strikes earlier this week.

Shots were fired into the air and stones were thrown at government buildings. A number of people are reported to have been injured.

Witnesses said the crowd chanted "death to America, death to the invaders", and demanded US forces leave Afghanistan.

The protest comes as President Hamid Karzai continues his visit to the US.

The air strikes overshadowed a summit in Washington on Wednesday between President Barack Obama, Mr Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she "deeply, deeply" regretted the deaths, adding that the US would work hard to avoid such "loss of innocent life".

A Pentagon official said so far it was not clear who was to blame for the death of the civilians.

"Initial American investigation shows that some of the deaths do not seem to be in concert with how a civilian would die from an air strike," the official said.

The New York Times quotes Pentagon officials as saying investigators were looking into the possibility that Taliban militants were responsible for the casualties.

Afghan officials say more than 100 civilians died in the attacks.

Protests 'violent'

Deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli described the protests on Thursday as "violent".

"Police tried to disperse them but they started throwing stones at police, who fired into the air," he told AFP news agency.

One protester, Haji Nangyalai, 42, said he was demonstrating to "show our anger at the crimes committed by the American forces".

"We ask the Afghan government to force the American forces to leave Afghanistan. They kill more civilians than Taleban," he said.

Afghan police said more than 100 people had died, most of them civilians. One Afghan official said he had counted the bodies of 20 children.

The Red Cross has said that women and children were among dozens of dead.

President Karzai has long pleaded with Washington to minimise civilian deaths, saying such killings undermine the fight against the Taleban.

US President Barack Obama said after meeting his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts in Washington that the three leaders were united in the goal of defeating al-Qaeda.

He said he expected more setbacks and violence to come, but there was a lasting commitment to defeat the militants.

The BBC's Martin Patience in Kabul says President Karzai is now back in favour at the White House following months of fierce criticism from US officials.

But our correspondent says he will have to face growing anger over the civilian casualties when he returns home.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited a US Marines base in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, and said there were no plans to deploy US troops in Pakistan.

The Pakistani army is currently engaged in fierce fighting against Taleban insurgents in the north-west of the country.

Red Cross says dozens of Afghans killed in US raid

2009-05-06T20:26:00.001-01:00

AP – Afghan villagers mark new burial site of victims who were allegedly killed during the coalition airstrikes …

Play Video AP – Afghan civilian deaths cause friction with U.S.

Video:Obama tests Afghan, Pakistan strategy AP

Video:Karzai outlines vision for Afghanistan AP

By JASON STRAZIUSO and LARA JAKES, Associated Press Writers Jason Straziuso And Lara Jakes, Associated Press Writers – 8 mins ago

KABUL – Villagers dug dirt graves Wednesday to bury what the international Red Cross said were dozens of Afghans — including women and children — killed in American bombing runs. A former Afghan government official said up to 120 people may have died.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. "deeply, deeply" regretted the loss of innocent life, and the U.S. military dispatched a brigadier general to investigate the deaths in two villages in western Afghanistan's Farah province.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, voiced doubts about whether it was an American airstrike that caused the tragedy.

McKiernan said U.S. military personnel had come to the aid of Afghan forces who may have been ambushed by Taliban militants on Sunday. He said the Taliban beheaded three civilians, perhaps to lure police.

"We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties," McKiernan said. He would not elaborate but said the United States was working with the Afghan government to learn the truth.

A senior U.S. defense official said late Wednesday that Marine special operations forces believe the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, who then loaded some of the bodies into a vehicle and drove them around the village, claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike.

A second U.S. official said a senior Taliban commander is believed to have ordered the grenade attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the deaths "unacceptable," speaking only hours before his first face-to-face meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House. Karzai has long pleaded with the U.S. to minimize civilian deaths during its operations, contending that such killings undermine support for the fight against the Taliban.

The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan's worsening conflict jumped 40 percent to a new high last year, though more than half of the deaths were inflicted by Taliban insurgents and other militants, the U.N. has reported. A record 2,118 civilians died from violence last year, up from 1,523 the previous year.

Associated Press photos showed villagers burying the dead in about a dozen fresh graves early Wednesday, while others dug through the rubble of demolished mud-brick homes.

On Tuesday, an international Red Cross team in Farah's Bala Baluk district saw "dozens of bodies in each of the two locations that we went to," said spokeswoman Jessica Barry.

"There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there," she said. "We do confirm women and children."

Afghan police have said that 25 Taliban died in the fighting, which began Monday and lasted until early Tuesday.

It was unclear whether they were among the dozens of bodies witnessed by the Red Cross.

Tribal elders called the Red Cross during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help, said Reto Stocker, the agency's head in Afghanistan.

"We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an airstrike," Stocker said.

A Western official said Marine special operations forces called in the airstrikes. The U.S. troops responded to a call for help from Afghan security forces who had been attacked by Taliban militants Monday afternoon. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information.

"Because of the overwhelming firepower coming in by the enemy, they called in airstrikes," said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a U.S. military spokeswoman.

Villagers said they gathered children, women and elderly men in several compounds near the village of Gerani to keep them away from the fighting, but the compounds were later hit by airstrikes.

Taliban militants often take over civilian homes and launch attacks on Afghan and coalition forces. U.S. officials say the militants hope to attract U.S. airstrikes that kill civilians, thereby giving the Taliban a propaganda victory.

After a massive case of civilian casualties in the village of Azizabad last August, McKiernan ordered forces to consider backing off from a fight if commanders thought civilians were in danger. Afghan officials and the U.N. say 90 civilians died in Azizabad; the U.S. says 33 died.

Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, a former district chief of Bala Buluk who visited the site of this week's battle, said 100 to 120 people were killed. If 100 civilians died in the fight, it would be deadliest case of civilian casualties since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

"People are still looking through the rubble," Qadderdan said. "We need more people to help us. Many families left the villages, fearing other strikes."

Provincial authorities have told villagers not to bury the bodies, but instead to line them up for the officials conducting the investigation, Qadderdan said.

Karzai ordered an investigation, and the U.S. military sent a brigadier general to Farah to head a U.S. probe, said Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. spokesman. Afghan military and police officials were also part of the team. The team did not reach the site of the bombings Wednesday but hoped to on Thursday.

Opening a meeting with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department, Clinton said any loss of innocent life was "particularly painful."

Karzai thanked Clinton for "showing concern and regret" and said he hoped the countries "can work together to completely reduce civilian casualties in the struggle against terrorism."

State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said later that Clinton's remarks were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known, because "any time there is a loss of innocent life we are going to be concerned about it, and we wanted to make that very clear."

Kai Eide, the senior U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, said avoiding civilian casualties is a "particularly big challenge" given the increased number of U.S. forces arriving in the country this summer.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates landed in Kabul to meet with troops as the U.S. prepares to send 21,000 more forces to bolster the record 38,000 already in the country to battle an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency.

___________________________________________________________________

Associated Press reporters Fisnik Abrashi, Heidi Vogt and Rahim Faiez in Kabul, and Kevin Maurer in Wilmington, N.C., contributed to this report.

Obama’s Disastrous Afghan Plan

2009-04-14T16:09:00.001-01:00

By Ann Robertson

Global Research, April 1, 2009

Last month President Barack Obama announced the deployment of 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, raising the total there to 53,000, only to add an additional 4,000 training troops this past week. Questions of a possible quagmire have begun to sprout faster than opium poppies.

In an attempt to disarm his critics, Obama has defined his policy as pointed, specific, and winnable:

So let me be clear: Al Qaeda and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We have a clear and focused goal to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

Moreover, he has framed the Afghanistan war as entirely just:
The United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 of our people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives.

Tragically, however, like Bush’s war on Iraq, Obama’s war on Afghanistan, instead of protecting us from terrorist attacks, will only succeed in increasing the chances of our victimization.

Of course, one could point to the usual problems that wars spawn. Many people deeply resent the presence of foreign troops in their country, thereby intensifying feelings of bitterness. And desires for revenge are inflamed when attacks that are advertised as surgically targeting the enemy often produce more civilian deaths - and sometimes only civilian deaths - in the process. Moreover, thanks to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the production of opium poppies, which was virtually eliminated under the Taliban, now constitutes about 40 percent of the economy, which contributes to a profound destabilization of the country.

But in order to understand the deeper reason the Obama campaign is doomed to further endanger us, one must carefully consider the conclusions drawn by a 22-year veteran senior C.I.A. analyst who headed the agency’s task force on Osama bin Laden and anonymously wrote a book, Imperial Hubris, criticizing the so-called war on terror.

Here is what The New York Times reported about the book’s conclusions (June 9, 2004):

Anonymous contests the argument put out by members of the Bush administration that Mr. bin Laden wants to destroy America because he hates our values, freedoms and ideas. In Anonymous's view, the Qaeda leader hates us ''because of our policies and actions in the Muslim world'' and Al Qaeda's attacks are meant to advance a set of clear, focused and limited foreign policy goals: namely, an end to American aid to Israel: the removal of American forces from the Arabian Peninsula; an end to the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq; an end to American support for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia; an end to American support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; and an end to American pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.

In other words, terrorist attacks on the U.S. are triggered by U.S. policies of domination in the Middle East and beyond, especially the propping up of brutal and unpopular dictators, such as the “royal” family in Saudi Arabia, and the support of Israel in its virulent campaign to take more and more Palestinian land while depriving the Palestinian people of the most basic, fundamental human rights in the process. The review continues:

“U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990's,'' he writes. ''As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally.”

By escalating the war on Afghanistan, Obama has accepted George Bush’s Manichean outlook that defines those who hate us as evil while the U.S. represents only truth and goodness - a framework that conveniently eliminates any consideration of the role of U.S. policies in provoking terrorist attacks and automatically dismisses the credibility of any criticisms.

What goals might be pressing the Obama administration deeper into Afghanistan, despite the heightened danger to U.S. citizens? To answer this question we need only return to the analysis of the C.I.A. analyst.

He describes the invasion of Iraq as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages." He compared it to the 1846 U.S. war against Mexico.

Oil, the author contends, is at the core of U.S. interests in Muslim countries, leading the United States to support "the Muslim tyrannies bin Laden and other Islamists seek to destroy.” (The San Francisco Chronicle June 27, 2004)

This same theme appeared in a Frontline program aired in November 2003, where James Baker, former Secretary of State, declared to the interviewer: “As I told you, I worked for four administrations under three presidents. And in every one of those, our policy was that we would go to war to protect the energy reserves in the Persian Gulf.

That is a major and very significant national interest that we have.”

As long as the U.S. government pursues its imperial interests in the Middle East and Central Asia, turning civilian populations into “collateral damage” so that the U.S. can cling to oil, and as long as it props up Israel so that Israel can function as a surrogate attack dog, the U.S. population will be subjected to terrorist attacks.

In his book, Turning the Tide, Noam Chomsky quotes from a 1948 internal State Department document written by George Kennan, one of the chief architects of U.S. foreign policy, where an unusually candid glimpse into this imperial mindset appears:

… we have about 50 % of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security… We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

As long as corporate America is allowed to pursue this campaign of world domination for the purpose of monopolizing the world’s wealth - as opposed to reaching out to other countries in order to help them raise their standard of living - our safety will be jeopardized.

In order to win genuine security, working people here in the U.S. will have to come to the realization that the same impulse exhibited by corporations in their quest to raise profits by dominating other countries for their resources is expressed here at home when corporations attempt to raise profits by preventing workers from unionizing, reducing our wages, stripping us of traditional pensions, and so on.

In the final analysis, true security will only be achieved, not by deploying more troops, but by bringing all U.S. troops home from all over the world. But this will only happen when working people choose to redefine the fundamental principles of this society and insist, through a democratic process, that we begin to produce in order to raise everyone’s standard of living, not for corporate profits where the aim is to make the rich even richer.

Ann Robertson is a teacher at San Francisco State University and a writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). She can be reached at aroberts45@aol.com

Your war questions answered: Why is Obama getting a pass on Afghanistan troop increases?

2009-04-13T21:12:00.001-01:00

By Andisheh Nouraee

Global Research, April 3, 2009

Creative Loafing

A Don’t panic! special update: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan?

Dear reader(s),

In recent days, I’ve experienced a surprising emotion: nostalgia for the Bush era.

It’s not nostalgia for his administration’s catastrophic pairing of cronyism and incompetence.

It’s not nostalgia for his “kinda-drunk John Wayne with a speech impediment” public speaking style.

Nor is it nostalgia for the way Bush turned great words like “liberty” and “democracy” into jingoistic mantras, or the fact that he so sullied the word “freedom” that the people rebuilding the World Trade Center have rejected the name Freedom Tower because it sounds too obnoxious.

Nope.

I’m nostalgic for focused anger and healthy skepticism directed at the White House.

Not the millionaire faux-populist anger of people like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs or the “I want him to fail, because I care more about Republicans than I do my country” anger of Rush Limbaugh.

I’m concerned that some of Obama’s Bush-like policy initiatives are getting a free pass from the press and public simply because Obama isn’t Bush.

Most recently, I’m puzzled by Obama’s recently announced Afghanistan initiative, and the largely non-critical public response. Obama’s Afghanistan war aim, he says, is “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”

By fall, Obama says the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will increase from 38,000 to 68,000. That number may increase by an additional 10,000 next year. The bulk of the new troops will be dispatched to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Taliban forces use Pakistan as a safe haven from which to launch attacks into Afghanistan. The hope is to have many of the new troops in place in time for Afghanistan’s fighting season (i.e. anytime it isn’t brutally cold) and soon enough to thwart Taliban efforts to disrupt Afghan elections scheduled for August.

And apparently Afghanistan’s army and police forces still need a lot of training, even after three decades of non-stop war. (You’d think they’d have figured out this conflict thing by now.) To help, Obama has ordered 4,000 troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to tutor Afghanistan’s police and soldiers. Obama wants Afghanistan to have 134,000 soldiers and 82,000 cops. I wonder if Krispy Kreme is selling franchise rights in Kabul.

At the same time the U.S. is trying to muscle-up Afghanistan’s central government, it’s also doing kinda the opposite — funding and arming local militias. The Associated Press reports a U.S.-armed and paid militia is already operating in Wardak Province. Their goal: to protect the villages from Taliban fighters.

To summarize: the Obama plan in Afghanistan is to send in more troops, train the army and police, and give village boys guns and cash in exchange for fighting on our side for while.

If that sounds exactly like Bush’s so-called surge strategy in Iraq, that’s because it pretty much is.

That shouldn’t surprise. The Pentagon is still run by Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and the U.S. military’s top general in Afghanistan is former Iraqi Surgin’ General David Petraeus. If you’re one of the people who thinks the Bush surge in Iraq has been a huge success, then you’re probably pleased with Obama’s Afghanistan agenda.

If, however, you believe the Iraqi surge was a short-term patch to a long-term problem, you may have second thoughts. The news out of Iraq in recent weeks suggests sectarian violence is once again on the rise as Sunni and Shi’ite forces jockey in preparation for a U.S. troop drawdown.

Doubling-down on the Afghans with no obvious exit strategy is troublingly Bush-like to me.

Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda is in every sane person’s best interest. But it’s also an exceedingly vague war aim. It’s so vague, in fact, that it suggests the possibility of endless war. To paraphrase my friend John McCain, endless war is not change I can believe in.

It’s certainly not the change I voted for.

“We’re not against polio immunisation” - Taliban spokesman

2009-04-10T15:09:00.001-01:00

Photo: Ahmad/IRIN

Lack of access to all children has impeded efforts to wipe out polio in Afghanistan

KABUL, 25 March 2009 (IRIN) - A Taliban spokesman has said the Taliban are not against polio immunisation campaigns in areas under their influence or control.

Listen to this report in Pashto

A statement to this effect was made to IRIN in a telephone interview with the insurgents’ chief spokesman, Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, from an unidentified location.

“We are not against polio immunisation and we have not impeded vaccinators in areas under our control,” said Ahmadi, adding that government and foreign forces should not try to use immunisation exercises for military and political gain.

“Vaccinators must coordinate with us before they begin the process,” he said.
Such claims may seem hard to believe given persistent accusations over the years of systematic Taliban attacks on health centres, the aid community and other civilians.

However, Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the Health Ministry (MoPH), appeared to acknowledge the Taliban statement: “We have not received reports that the Taliban have blocked polio immunisation [drives].”

Insecurity, largely resulting from insurgency-related violence, has impeded aid delivery, health activities and immunisation efforts in large swathes of the country, according to the UN.

The UN and the MoPH have said about 200,000 children, mostly in the volatile southern provinces, have missed out on polio immunisation.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), much of Afghanistan has been polio-free for the past two to three years except for the conflict-affected southern region where four polio cases have been reported so far in 2009. Some 31 cases were reported in 2008 and 17 cases in 2007.

Seven million immunised
Backed by UN agencies, the MoPH implemented a nationwide anti-polio drive on 15-17 March, immunising about seven million children under five.

However, over 150,000 children in the four southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan missed doses of trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV3) because of access restrictions, Fahim said.

Security problems in areas along the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (where 118 polio cases were confirmed in 2008) and the large-scale movement of people between the two countries have also complicated efforts to wipe out the virus which is endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nigeria, according to WHO.

US will appoint Afghan 'prime minister' to bypass Hamid Karzai

2009-04-08T20:14:00.001-01:00

White House plans new executive role to challenge corrupt government in Kabul

by Julian Borger and Ewan MacAskill

Global Research, March 23, 2009

The Guardian - 2009-03-22

The US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the Guardian has learned.

The creation of a new chief executive or prime ministerial role is aimed at bypassing Karzai. In a further dilution of his power, it is proposed that money be diverted from the Kabul government to the provinces. Many US and European officials have become disillusioned with the extent of the corruption and incompetence in the Karzai government, but most now believe there are no credible alternatives, and predict the Afghan president will win re-election in August.

A revised role for Karzai has emerged from the White House review of Afghanistan and Pakistan ordered by Barack Obama when he became president. It isto be unveiled at a special conference on Afghanistan at The Hague on March 31.

As well as watering down Karzai's personal authority by installing a senior official at the president's side capable of playing a more efficient executive role, the US and Europeans are seeking to channel resources to the provinces rather than to central government in Kabul.

A diplomat with knowledge of the review said: "Karzai is not delivering. If we are going to support his government, it has to be run properly to ensure the levels of corruption decrease, not increase. The levels of corruption are frightening."

Another diplomat said alternatives to Karzai had been explored and discarded: "No one could be sure that someone else would not turn out to be 10 times worse. It is not a great position."

The idea of a more dependable figure working alongside Karzai is one of the proposals to emerge from the White House review, completed last week. Obama, locked away at the presidental retreat Camp David, was due to make a final decision this weekend.

Obama is expected to focus in public on overall strategy rather than the details, and, given its sensitivity, to skate over Karzai's new role. The main recommendation is for the Afghanistan objectives to be scaled back, and for Obama to sell the war to the US public as one to ensure the country cannot again be a base for al-Qaida and the Taliban, rather than the more ambitious aim of the Bush administration of trying to create a European-style democracy in Central Asia.

Other recommendations include: increasing the number of Afghan troops from 65,000 to 230,000 as well as expanding the 80,000-strong police force; sending more US and European civilians to build up Afghanistan's infrastructure; and increased aid to Pakistan as part of a policy of trying to persuade it to tackle al-Qaida and Taliban elements.

The proposal for an alternative chief executive, which originated with the US, is backed by Europeans. "There needs to be a deconcentration of power," said one senior European official. "We need someone next to Karzai, a sort of chief executive, who can get things done, who will be reliable for us and accountable to the Afghan people."

Money and power will flow less to the ministries in Kabul and far more to the officials who run Afghanistan outside the capital – the 34 provincial governors and 396 district governors. "The point on which we insist is that the time is now for a new division of responsibilities, between central power and local power," the senior European official said.

No names have emerged for the new role but the US holds in high regard the

reformist interior minister appointed in October, Mohammed Hanif Atmar.

The risk for the US is that the imposition of a technocrat alongside Karzai would be viewed as colonialism, even though that figure would be an Afghan. Karzai declared his intention last week to resist a dilution of his power. Last week he accused an unnamed foreign government of trying to weaken central government in Kabul.

"That is not their job," the Afghan president said. "Afghanistan will never be a puppet state."

The UK government has since 2007 advocated dropping plans to turn Afghanistan into a model, European-style state.

Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who will implement the new policy, said it would represent a "vastly restructured effort". At the weekend in Brussels, he was scathing about the Bush administration's conduct of the counter-insurgency. "The failures in the civilian side ... are so enormous we can at least hope that if we get our act together ... we can do a lot better," he said.

Surging towards a US-NATO Military Disaster: Obama's Escalating War in Central and South Asia

2009-03-14T11:02:00.001-01:00

by Tom Burghardt

February 23, 2009

On February 18, President Barack Obama ordered 17,000 additional U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. Obama's announcement will result in a major escalation of America's bloody occupation of that war-ravaged country.

Currently, some 36,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, including some 6,000 sent in early January under orders by the outgoing Bush regime. In addition to U.S. forces, 32,000 troops from other NATO countries and a mix of "private military contractors" (armed mercenaries) occupy the Central Asian nation.

When coupled with increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the Pentagon and military strikes inside Pakistan, the prospects for regional war--with incalculable risks for the people of Central- and South Asia--have put paid Obama's electoral hyperbole that his would be a "change" administration.

In a brief written statement issued Tuesday by the White House, Obama declared that "the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe-haven along the Pakistani border."

Responding to "a months old" request by "General McKiernan and supported by Secretary Gates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander of Central Command," Obama will soon dispatch a Marine Expeditionary Brigade (8,000 troops), an Army Stryker Brigade (4,000 soldiers) and 5,000 support troops.

Claiming that increased troop levels "will contribute to the security of the Afghan people," the White House studiously ignores reports from the United Nations, international human rights organizations--and from NATO itself--that the number of civilians killed by all armed actors increased dramatically over the previous year.

A confidential report titled "Metrics Brief, 2007-2008," was published by Wikileaks. Prepared by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, the 12 page dossier "reveals that civilian deaths from the war in Afghanistan have increased by 46% over the past year." According to the global whistleblowers,

The report shows a dramatic escalation of the war and civil disorder. Coalition deaths increased by 35%, assassinations and kidnappings by 50% and attacks on the Kabul based Government of Hamid Karzai also more than doubled, rising a massive 119%.

The report highlights huge increases on attacks aimed at Coalition forces, including a 27% increase in IED attacks, a 40% rise in rifle and rocket fire and an increase in surface to air fire of 67%.

According to the report, outside of the capital Kabul only one in two families had access to even the most basic health care, and only one in two children had access to a school. ("Wikileaks releases NATO report on civilian deaths," Wikileaks, Press Release, February 16, 2009)

While the majority of civilian deaths were attributed by the United Nations to the criminal actions of the Taliban and the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, some 828 of 2,118 civilians killed in 2008 were the result of indiscriminate attacks by the Afghan military, U.S. Air Force bombing and berserker American Special Forces units engaged in "counterterrorism" and "counternarcotics" operations. According to The New York Times,

The report singled out special forces and other military units operating outside the normal chains of command. That means their presence and movements are not always known by regular field commanders.

Special forces groups like Navy Seals and paramilitary units operated by the CIA often conduct raids in Afghanistan, and often at night.

The report also said that airstrikes that went awry were often those that were called in by troops under attack.

The United Nations report helps shed light on one of the most divisive issues between the American-led coalition and the Afghan government of Mr. Karzai. (Dexter Filkins, "Afghan Civilian Deaths Rose 40 Percent in 2008," The New York Times, February 18, 2009)

The growing carnage on the ground reflects the political crisis facing the new administration as capitalism's economic meltdown compel our corporatist masters to grab as much of the world's resources as possible to stanch the economic bleed out.

But as in Iraq and the Middle East generally however, the Obama administration's "surge" across Central Asian will prove quixotic--and deadly.

Kyrgyzstan Gives America the Boot

As the politico-military situation rapidly deteriorates, how the Pentagon will keep "surged" troops resupplied is fast becoming a looming nightmare.

With critical supply routes from Pakistan cut by Afghan Talibs and Pakistani Taliban fighters, who have launched coordinated attacks with Central Asian and Arab al-Qaeda guerrillas, the virtual closure of the Khyber Pass in the North-West Frontier Province has fueled a growing logistical crisis. Prior to last December's offensive by insurgents, some 75% of supplies for NATO forces flowed into Afghanistan along this route.

Adding to NATO's headaches, on February 18 Kyrgyzstan's rubber-stamp parliament voted to close the Manas Airbase near the capital Bishkek. According to The Guardian, Wednesday's vote followed "a backroom deal two weeks ago between the country's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev."

The Americans have six months to pack up and vacate the premises.
The kleptocratic Bakiyev regime has been promised a $2.15 billion loan and a debt write-off by Moscow in a move intended to wrest concessions from the United States to keep the military hardware flowing. Asia Times reported February 20,

In the end, transit salvation for the US and NATO is indeed coming from no one else but Russia--but on Moscow's terms: this means Russia possibly using its own military planes to airlift the supplies. A deceptively charming Medvedev has been on the record identifying "very positive signs" in the new US-Russia chess match. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been on the record saying transit of US and NATO non-military supplies through Russia begins in effect only a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Soviets leaving Kabul. (Pepe Escobar, "Obama, Osama and Medvedev," Asia Times Online, February 20, 2009)

As investigative journalist Pepe Escobar points out, "the price" that the United States and NATO will pay to have their supplies arrive from Russia is being made painfully clear to Washington: "no more encirclement, no more NATO extension, no more anti-missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland for protection against non-existent Iranian missiles. All this has to be negotiated in detail."

But in a potential move seen as a maneuver to bypass Moscow, The Independent reported that "the new US administration had indicated that it was prepared to talk to Iran about the Afghan situation."

No friend of the Sunni-based insurgency next door, nor of U.S.-backed jihadi groups such as Jundullah attacking from Pakistan, Tehran may be willing to cut a deal with Washington. Independent journalist Kim Sengupta writes that "Italy, which assumes the presidency of the G8 this year, said that Tehran would be invited to participate in a summit on Afghanistan. The Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said: 'We want to consider how to involve Iran, not whether to involve Iran'."

But how this will play out may be determined by America's stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East, Israel, and that country's "naval task force" in Washington, the powerful Israel lobby. And with Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right Likud party given the nod by Israeli President Shimon Peres "to take the lead" in forming the next government, it's an even bet that Bibi may cut a deal with Avigdor Lieberman's neofascist Yisrael Beiteinu party. Netanyahu and Lieberman have both threatened to bomb Iran's civilian nuclear facilities, and have called that nation Israel's number one "national security threat."

While Washington's chattering classes prattle on about the need to "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here," the sad reality for the Afghan people is that the Obama administration and their corporatist masters don't give a hoot about their suffering, the unprecedented "surge" in heroin production, the rise and rise of organized crime-linked "Islamic fundamentalists," or for that matter, bringing al-Qaeda to ground. It's all hot air designed to get the American people on-board as imperialism escalates the "right war" in Central- and South Asia.

With the 9/11 attacks as a backdrop--and pretext--for carrying out a long-planned military intervention to conqueror Afghanistan, either through proxies (remember the enthusiasm in petroleum board rooms when the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996!) or now, by installing a narco regime amenable to American demands, the unspoken project remains what it has always been: the "sole superpower's" hegemonic control over the vast oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.

Pakistan, Jihadis and America's Killer Drones

Meanwhile, on the "Pak" side of the "Afpak theatre" America's former "best friends forever," the Pakistani Taliban grouped under the banner of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-i-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, TNSM) have been doing some "surging" of their own.

Having successfully concluded a "truce" with the government of President Asif Ali Zardari in the North-West Frontier Province's Malakand District, the nominally secular Pakistan Peoples Party has ceded the political ground to Army and Inter Services Intelligence agency-linked militants with long-standing ties to international terrorist outfits and drug trafficking cartels. In other words, American allies.

But before the ink on the agreement had even dried, a television journalist with Pakistan's Geo network, Musa Khan Khel, covering TNSM head honcho Maulana Sufi Mohammed's triumphant entry into Mingora February 17, was brutally murdered. Riddled with bullets, his nearly decapitated body was found on the side of a road shortly after the TNSM leader announced that "peace" had come to the Swat Valley. Khel, according to reports, had been seeking an interview with TTP "emir" Maulana Fazlullah.

The News reported February 20 that TNSM leaders are meeting with their TTP counterparts to seal the deal to lay down their arms in lieu of the imposition of Sharia law in Malakand.

In 2001, the "peacemaker" and self-proclaimed "Sharia-lover" had led some 10,000 untrained volunteers across the border into Afghanistan to fight the American-led narcotrafficking Northern Alliance during the initial stages of the U.S. invasion. Drawn from madrassas across Pakistan as disposable cannon-fodder for the ISI, thousands were killed.

In the aftermath of the TTP and the Army's bloody operations Swat lay in ruins, its people terrorized and its infrastructure all but destroyed. Describing the region as a "hell-hole of bodies and ruin," The Sunday Times reports that

In the former mountain resort of Malam Jabba, where skiing thrived when the surrounding Swat Valley was an international attraction, one can still see the remnants of the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation's flagship hotel. The building was blown up by the Taliban because it was being used for "un-Islamic activities".
Hundreds of other hotels in the valley have been destroyed or forced to close after threats from the militants. (Daud Khattakis, "Into a Taliban wasteland of blood and fear," The Sunday Times, February 22, 2009)

But the destruction of critical infrastructure that fueled the region's economy is but the visible manifestation of a virtual reign of terror that grips Swat Valley. Khattakis writes:

What I found in Swat was a hell-hole. Suicide bombings, car bombs and artillery have scarred the valley's roads and buildings. The charred remains of hospitals and even a madrasah (seminary) litter the landscape.
Nearly 200 schools have been destroyed, all girls over the age of eight are banned from lessons and, in a symbol of the Taliban's hatred of learning, the public library in Mingora has been wrecked.
The Taliban have banned music and dancing, television and internet cafes. Women cannot leave home without wearing a burqa, the all-encompassing robe. Justice has been enforced with floggings and public executions. (The Sunday Times, ibid.)

In the heart of Mingora's bazaar, Green Square is now known as Khooni Chowk, or bloody square "because of the public executions carried out there by Taliban who leave the bullet-riddled bodies of police and soldiers for all to see."

One wonders what justification "Sharia-lover" Sufi Mohammed and his sociopathic son-in-law Fazlullah have for butchering whole families, including children, who simply wish to be left in peace?

According to multiple reports in the Pakistani media, since the TTP's violent take over of the region, organized crime gangs have flourished and car-jackings, armed robberies, kidnappings, rapes and murders as well as an explosive increase in the drug trade have turned Swat into an post-apocalyptic landscape. Like their American counterparts in crime, the message of TTP "emirs" seems to be: "Kill 'em all, and let God sort them out."

But here as elsewhere, the rise of reactionary fundamentalism has far more to do with failing state structures than with religious enthusiasm. Incapable of providing food, employment, housing and health care to its citizens, Pakistani elites, like corporate grifters everywhere, undermine their position by selling-off economic assets to well-connected cronies and ceding educational and social welfare services to "faith-based" groups, as in the U.S.

In this context, The Nation reported February 18 that the Cabinet Committee on Privatization approved the (fire) sale sell-off of some 21 state-owned enterprises, including "four power companies and other state-owned entities including SME Bank, National Power Construction Company, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Post."

Utterly bankrupt and bereft of imagination when its comes to ameliorating the horrendous economic and social hardships faced by Pakistani workers and farmers, the bourgeois PPP government following "advice" from their mentors in Washington, will instead line the pockets of their "constituents," the multinational corporations and the comprador elites who do their bidding.

The Swat truce follows revelations by The Times that the "CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan."

While the Pakistani government has demanded that the U.S. halt drone attacks in the area, The Times discovered "that the CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield--originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan--for at least a year."

The New York-based whistleblowing intelligence and security website Cryptome published a series of satellite images as part of their "Eyeball" series on February 18. One image, captured in 2006 before construction of a huge hangar meant to conceal America's robot killing machines was completed, show Predator drones on the Shamsi air strip.

According to Cryptome's anonymous correspondent, "This is a very capable base facility with a large hangar in addition to the two Predator support hangars. Nearby is a large secured compound (appears empty) which could support up to a battalion of special ops and associated command and control. The large parking area inside the compound is perfect to land choppers and leave with relative security. All security measures seem fresh."

As I reported February 16, "U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dropped a bombshell when she revealed that CIA Predator drones are flown from an airbase in Pakistan." Feinstein's disclosure came during hearings February 12 before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have refused to comment, unnamed "U.S. intelligence officials" described the senator's statement as "accurate."

Despite these revelations, Pakistan's Defense Minister Chaudry Ahmad Mukhtar continues to deny "that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is controlling drone attacks from the Shamsi base in Balochistan, and said Pakistan had no secret understanding with the US to use bases in Pakistan to carry out attacks in the Tribal Areas, according to a February 20 report in Daily Times.

Mukhtar said: "Certain news reports claiming that the CIA runs predator flights from the Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan are baseless ... Pakistan has no such understanding with the US to allow it to use its bases for predator attacks."

How the Defense Minister squares his denial with inescapable facts on the ground is another matter entirely. But revelations over the CIA's use of Shamsi Airbase may be the least of the Defense Ministry's problems.

"In a dramatic development," according to The News, "three prominent Pakistani militant commanders--Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazeer--on Friday set aside their differences and promised to jointly fight their enemy in future."

Two of the three Pakistani Taliban leaders were considered "pro-government" and had been recruited to fight Mehsud's TTP and their al-Qaeda allies but have since been alienated from the state due to persistent Predator attacks by the CIA from bases provided by Pakistan. The News reports,

If the three men, who now rule South and North Waziristan tribal region in true sense, got united, they could give a tough time to the government in future.
The militants from Wana said now they had understood Pakistan's divide and rule policy, and decided to get united and fight together against it in future. "Pakistan caused more losses to the Mujahideen than the US. It handed over 700 Arab Mujahideen to the US and jailed our people," the commander alleged. (Mushtaq Yusufzai, "Top militant commanders resolve rift," The News, February 21, 2009)

Islamabad's double-game with the imperialist Dracula on the one hand and the jihadi Frankenstein on the other demonstrates, if nothing else, the impervious nature of the existing political system to "change" on all sides of the "Afpak problem."

Barring a dramatic transformation of the political state of affairs, the bill for American and Pakistani duplicity is coming due, and it will be the people of South Asia who will pay a heavy price.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

A New Turn in the Afghanistan War and Occupation

2009-01-11T13:18:00.001-01:00

by Mark Vorpahl

Global Research, January 1, 2009

While the anti-war movement has primarily targeted the Iraq occupation in its protests and events, opposition to the Afghanistan occupation has always been understood as a shared point of agreement among the vast majority of participants. The Afghanistan occupation has been not as prominent in the minds of protesters because of fewer lives lost and less money wasted than in Iraq. Recent developments, however, indicate that this could be changing.

On December 20, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen announced the intention of sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan by next summer. This would be in addition to the 31,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan as well as 35,000 other Allied troops under NATO command. This represents a dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan not only in terms of numbers, but also in the speed-up of the timeline for sending in more troops. Previously, Pentagon spokesmen had said it would be 18 months before any new military personnel were sent over in full force. Now Admiral Mullen has stated there will be a far greater number of soldiers sent to Afghanistan than mentioned before, and in as little as six months.

The reason for this escalation is because the occupation has been failing when confronted by a growing opposition that is becoming more sophisticated in combating the foreign occupying troops. 2008 has been the most violent year since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, with a 25 percent increase in soldiers’ deaths who were under NATO or the U.S. command. Recently, Taliban attacks have succeeded in disrupting the route that carries up to 75 percent of supplies to the foreign forces. For all their greater military technology, the U.S. is proving to be outmatched by a homegrown insurgency that is determined to kick the occupiers out.

Consequently, the power brokers in Washington have decided to dedicate more resources to defeat them -- but at what cost to U.S. citizens? Currently, the Afghanistan occupation is costing U.S. tax payers $2 billion a month. The increase advocated by Admiral Mullen is expected, by some, to nearly double this amount, totaling $3.5 billion per month.

There can be little doubt that President-elect Obama was consulted about this escalation as he prepares to take over the Executive Office. Admiral Mullen has stated that the increase of soldiers in Afghanistan would be tied to a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In what way it is tied remains unclear since the newest military plan envisions a withdrawal of no more than 8,000 troops from Iraq within the first six months of 2009. However, even if many more troops are withdrawn from Iraq, millions of U.S. citizens did not vote for Obama to jump from one quagmire to another. They wanted to see an end to U.S. involvement in all unjust, unwinnable, and colossally wasteful wars. Though Obama never made it a secret that he favored greater involvement in Afghanistan and even stated that he would be willing to authorize military strikes in Pakistan in pursuit of Afghan rebels, he was voted in as a “peace candidate” because many wishfully believed he would reverse the war policies of Bush. The surge of troops in Afghanistan that Obama will preside over, will be the first significant challenge to this popular perception.

Bush, McCain, and Obama have all stated that the reason for the U.S. war and occupation of Afghanistan is to fight terrorism. Yet the effect of both the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations has been to embolden and strengthen the forces the U.S. has labeled as terrorists -- that is, anyone who would use military means to fight for their national sovereignty. The escalation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will likely see a corresponding strengthening of the Taliban and other militias as more Afghan civilians suffer under the occupation and are willing to support anyone that can fight against it. This will have destabilizing effects throughout the entire region.

In reality, the aim of "fighting terrorism" is only for public relations consumption. There are stronger economic and geo-political motivations at work behind the Afghanistan occupation that bear no relation to the sound bites fed to the American people. These motivations revolve around the need of U.S. big business to assert its economic and political control over Central Asia's energy resources against all potential competitors. The number of lives lost and the devastating horrors spread as a result of the war are an unpleasant but tolerable consequence to the players of this deadly chess game who are focused on the pursuit of their own narrow self interests, namely profits.

The central reason behind the Afghanistan war and occupation is to gain control over an oil and natural gas transit route that can provide Europe with much of its energy, and to contain the influence of Russia, China, and Iran in the region. While all these powers are attempting to take advantage of the occupation by appearing to co-operate with the US, there is no more honor behind this cooperation than there is in a den of thieves planning a heist while each, behind the backs of their cohorts, tries to figure out how to snatch the lion’s share of stolen goods.

This becomes obvious when examining the economically based politics behind the proposed U.S. supply routes to Afghanistan, as is discussed in the article "All Roads Lead Out of Afghanistan" by former India ambassador Mk Bhadrakumer. Aside from the current Karachi routes that the Taliban and others have been attacking with growing success, there are three other possibilities. One starts at the port of Shanghai, and goes across China, through Tajikistan, to reach Afghanistan. Another takes a land route through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan to reach the Afghan border. The third and shortest goes straight through Iran.

Instead of using these routes, which would strengthen the political hand of the nations they pass through, the U.S. is planning to build another from scratch. The plan is to use the Black Sea port of Poti in Georgia, and then take the cargo through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to the Afghan border. According to Mk Bhadrakumer:

"The project, if it materializes, will be a geopolitical coup -- the biggest ever that Washington would have swung in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. At one stroke, the U.S. will be tying up military cooperation at the bilateral level with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Furthermore, the U.S. will be effectively drawing these countries closer into NATO's partnership programs. Georgia, in particular, gets a privileged status as the key transit country, which will offset the current European opposition to its induction as a NATO member country. Besides, the U.S. will have virtually dealt a blow to the Russia-led Collective Security Treat Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Not only will the U.S. have succeeded in keeping the CSTO and the SCO from poking their noses into the Afghan cauldron, it will also have made these organizations largely irrelevant to regional security when Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two key players in Central Asia, simply step out of the ambit of these organizations and directly deal with the U.S. and NATO."

The creation of this route would also establish the U.S. as a long term military presence in the South Caucasus. This will be much to the distress of Russia which would correctly view this as a threat to their own interests and, potentially, their national security. This route is the prize because it could also be easily converted into an energy corridor, as was mentioned, for supplying the European market. This would greatly harm Russia's and Iran's business dealings with Europe, as well as make European policy more dependent on U.S. interests.

This policy, with its lucrative prospects, is in large part behind the escalation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Those business-directed government officials that are pursuing this policy are so far removed from the lives that will be destroyed by the lust for profits and so consumed with defending the interests of a tiny minority of big business owners that they are blind to the larger international social impact of their strategies and the consequences this impact unleashes.

A military victory in Afghanistan is even more unlikely than it is in Iraq -- which is not going so well and many believe is failing. This is partly because the Afghan population is not centered in large cities, but scattered across a mountainous landscape, ideal for guerrilla warfare. The British and the Russians learned this the hard way in their attempts to occupy this nation. The Taliban have been fighting in this terrain for decades and know it well. They also are emboldened by knowing that whenever a foreign power has tried to hold Afghanistan by force, they have always left in defeat.

The U.S. is attempting to bribe the warlords of local militias in order to win them over to fighting on the occupier’s side. While this may have some initial success, it will blow up in the U.S. government’s face. Each of these warlords are guided by their own interests, quite distinct and often opposed to each other's, not to mention U.S. long term goals. The only way that the U.S. can succeed in Afghanistan is to set up a state that will defend U.S. interests. But this will prove to be an impossible task since any state, by definition, requires a consolidated force of armed bodies. However, combining these scattered and feuding militias into a centralized, cohesive force on the basis of defending U.S. interests is simply not feasible. More likely, the building up of these militias will create a monster like Frankenstein's just as the U.S. training and funding of the Mujahadeen during the Russian occupation in Afghanistan helped to create Bin Laden.

The escalation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will produce a destructive fallout across the whole Central Asian region. The occupation has already greatly contributed to destabilizing the political situation in Pakistan. Though not directly related, the recent attacks in Mumbai, India can only be understood in the context of the militancy radiating from the Afghan war. Considering the explosive situation in the region, sending more troops into Afghanistan could have the effect of pouring gasoline on a fire.

On an even more menacing scale, the growing military presence could draw the U.S. into a war with more formidable powers such as Russia, China, or Iran. This is especially the case during a period of international economic crisis. Profits are shrinking for each nation's corporations and banks. Even with shrinking profits, each nation's government is nevertheless duty bound to make sure their ruling class' enterprises remain viable and positioned to get ahead of their competitors. They cannot do this by encouraging more production and flooding the international market with an excessive amount of goods. There are too few consumers who can afford to buy these commodities at a price that would leave the capitalists with a profit. Therefore, each government is compelled to employ policies that hurt the profit and productive capacity of their competitors in order to be on top of a declining ability to raise their domestic profits.

This is indicated by the U.S. government’s attempts to circumvent the established supply routes running through Russia, China, or Iran. While using one of these established routes would be more efficient, the U.S. is more concerned with not allowing its international competitors to take advantage of the construction that has already been done since this would give them an edge against the U.S. in the region. Such a state of affairs tends to take on a gathering momentum with unforeseen consequences for the policy makers. While no U.S. official would now be in favor of a war with Russia or China, and few would support one with Iran, the logic of the Afghanistan occupation combined with the international economic crisis could propel things in this direction.

The escalation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the continuing war in Iraq, and all the potential effects of spreading instability and more war is beginning to hit the American public hard. They voted for Obama in hopes for a change. However, as a capitalist Democratic Party politician, he has no more ability to fundamentally reverse course than a pig has the ability to fly. As unemployment soars, pensions collapse, health care rots, and the social safety net gets hacked away, the astronomical cost of the U.S. wars and occupations will leave more people questioning the viability of the system we live under. People will begin to pointedly ask, "Why do the politicians spend so much on destruction rather then production? Why are the rich bailed out, but not the workers?" And these thoughts will be expressed by many more people. When a system can no longer provide for its people, while vast amounts of resources are spent on wasteful destructive adventures,then that system is in all likelihood doomed.

It will take a mass, working class-led movement to make any real change. In order to do this, it is necessary that the anti-war movement hits the streets in a mass united way on March 21st. Especially in light of the escalation in Afghanistan, too much is at stake to passively wish Obama will change things. We must mobilize to shout in as large a collective voice as possible, "End the War and Occupation in Iraq & Afghanistan Now!"

Mark Vorpahl is an anti-war activist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org) He can be reached at vorps@yahoo.com

Corruption and Warlordism: A critical review of Corruption situation in Afghanistan

2008-11-29T20:24:00.003-01:00

Corruption has become part of a complex triad (corruption, opium economy and terrorism) where warlords, insurgents, factional leaders, corrupt officials and drug dealers are contributing to its sustenance.

By Abdul Basir Stanikzai
Similar to many South Asian and African Countries, Afghanistan is also a victim of corruption that is believed to be the most challenging and acute problem in addition to drugs and terrorism. It has posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of the state, trust of the public, process of development and democratization, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. The United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan Mr. Kai Eide has highlighted on 28th August 2008 that:
“Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic; it hurts the poorest people disproportionately, pushes people away from the state and undermines our joint efforts to build peace, stability and progress for Afghanistan’s peoples”
In addition, latest survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) in 2006-2007 revealed that more than 50 percent of the household in 13 provinces have paid bribe in the last six months to the government officials to obtain certain services. In addition, other findings by the same source show that majority of the public (41%) perceives the justice sector as the most corrupt followed by security (20%), customs (15%) and municipalities (13%). Similarly, Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International (2005) ranks Afghanistan near the bottom of 150 countries worldwide.

Corruption in Afghanistan was a taboo and untouchable dilemma right until the end of 2003 despite government’s commitment in series of international and national occasions to combat corruption. After the government became signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), it established an Independent Administration of Anti-Corruption (GIAAC) in Dec 2003. GIAAC was mandated to develop a foundation for fight against corruption by establishing regional offices in the country, drafting anti-corruption law and policies, investigating corruption cases in the government institutions and soliciting support from the Police and Attorney General Office to arrest and prosecute corrupt officials.
However, soon after it started its activities and filed cases of embezzlement of millions of US dollars from the national treasury and international aid, GIAAC’s leadership was forced to soften its approach and do not touch warlords and big fishes. The President himself, according to the former head of GIAAC, Mr. Zabihullah Esmati, has intervened and exempted several high level corrupt officials. The exemption of 6 key government officials, through a Presidential Decree, accused for corruption and fraud in the 2003 Haj ceremony is one example of government’s inability to implement law and dismantle safe heavens for corrupt perpetrators.
Similarly, days after the completion of his preliminarily findings of corruption and embezzlement by the prosecutors, the former Education Minister Mr. Qanooni (now speaker of the parliament) got a special exemption from the President to burn out his files in the General Administration against Corruption. Mr. Qanooni was accused for embezzling more than US$30 million in the procurement of furniture for the Ministry of Education and printing new books when he was the minister of education 2002-2003.
In addition, pardoning Marshal Qasim Fahim and Younus Qanooni for grabbing the land of innocent civilians in Sherpur of Kabul is another example that encouraged competition among other warlords such as Dostum and Karim Khalili to further surmount national and international funds and construct palaces in the same vicinity.

This deliberate fostering of culture of impunity was based on political compromises as the President did not want to offend warlords and criminals by punishing the members of their syndicates. This approach of the government offered the most conducive medium for corrupt officials and culprits to get protected in the criminal networks and safe havens.
Criminal warlords, human rights violators, kidnappers, and notorious commanders who are currently in the state institutions or have their members of their networks actively working in key government positions further deepened this problem.
International and national experts highlight some subsidiary elements that have caused failure to the fight against corruption such as poor legislations, limited capacities, uncoordinated institutional arrangement, corrupt judiciary and corrupt law enforcement agencies. However, they tend to forget the most fundamental elements which are lack of political will and the presence of notorious warlords in the government machinery. They are the real causes for failure of anti-corruption efforts in the country.
Its roots reaches back to the legacy of the previous so called administration or vacuum of legitimacy as Mr. Venderall, the former European Envoy to Afghanistan, termed it. When the Taliban regime collapsed due to US bombardment, there was a massive delay between the installation of an illegitimate government under Rabbani and the Bonn accord and by then more than half of the country got back to the hands of former warlord, criminals and Jehadi commanders. These Warriors came to power and they fostered a culture of lawlessness, looting, corruption, nepotism, racism and land grabbing.

It is true that corruption is a treatable cancer but it requires a firm stand (political determination), committed leadership, strong legislations, public support, and a clear institutional set up. Furthermore, it order to enlist citizens’ support, you need to showcase some examples by punishing the “untouchables” those who have stashed away millions of US dollars during their power and are still involved in organized crimes and criminal activities.
The former Attorney General Mr. Abdul Jabar Sabit was mandated by President Karzai to crack down corrupt officials in the government engine. However, when he would investigate some high level government officials, President Karzai himself would call the Attorney not to touch the mayor of Herat because Hazrat Mujadidi would get upset.
If Warlordism fuels corruption, terrorism, lawlessness, human rights violation and instability in the country then who is nurturing warlordism? The answer is: many of the international partners, coalition forces and donor community.
Empirical evidence shows that more 70 percent of the rented houses in the capital cities belong to former warlords, notorious commanders and factional leaders. The buildings in Sherpur, for instance, which were grabbed by forced from the innocent civilians, are mostly possessed by Marshal Fahim, Karim Khalili, Rashid Dostum, Younis Qanooni, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, Baba Jan and other criminals and leased by many private companies, donors, International NGOs and UN projects. These international partners have rented tens of expensive vehicles owned by these criminal gangs and pay thousands of US dollars to their owners.

BBC, Sep. 12, 2003: Miloon Kothari, appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to investigate abuses in Afghanistan, announced that various government ministers including Fahim and Education Minister Younis Qanooni were illegally occupying land and should be removed from their posts.

Sherpur Scandal Buildings of Afghan Ministers and Warlords

Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2008: Instead of calling the fancy neighborhood in Kabul "Shirpur," which means "child of a lion," Afghans now call it "Shirchoor," which means "looted by lions." English speakers describe the architecture style as "narco-tecture."

Sherpur narco-mansion: Gap between rich and poor in Kabul
Similarly, the United States military base in Bagram Airbase have contracted out the supply of their food commodities and equipments to a notorious and ill-famous commander and head of northern militia General Baba Jan and so many other examples.
Corruption has become part of a complex triad (corruption, opium economy and terrorism) where warlords, insurgents, factional leaders, corrupt officials and drug dealers are contributing to its sustenance. This has resulted into unstable and unpredictable situation and ultimately to poverty and unemployment. Evidence shows that Chiefs of Police and key officials in the Ministry of Interior including the former Minister Mr. Zarar Muqbil and the Deputy Minister Mr. Daoud are deeply involved in the drug trafficking in return for huge bulk of money from the drug mafia.
Police receives 100 times more bribe to facilitate the trafficking than his/her government salary; hence, diverting his moral responsibilities of providing security and safety to the people.
The Afghanistan National Development Strategy (2008) analyzes that such a culture of lawlessness and immunity before rule of law and justice have resulted into a situation where foreign and domestic investors hardly put their money into this ravaged country which ultimately fosters poverty, unemployment and reduced economic growth.
With such a widespread presence in the government including parliament, cabinet, judiciary and other key official positions, warlords stand united against the interest of the Afghan people by sabotaging peace and security and fostering a culture of lawlessness. They have ensured their safety through protected networks, and safe heavens in the capital as well as in the provinces. Hence in order to dismantle these syndicates and protected network, the following measures are commendable to be taken into account.
1. To be more realistic, it is only a phobia that warlords might have power to destabilize the normal situation if they were to be punished. But the truth that public is not behind them, they rule by gun and money so if the international community truly and courageously joins hands with the Afghan government and seize both of them, they can simply get rid of these notorious elements.
2. In addition, a simple remedy to such anarchy would be to block the routes of supply of these criminal gangs by cancelling contracts, pulling out of their homes, and terminating the rental of their vehicles.
3. It is crucial to revitalize efforts for the implementation of Transitional Justice that ban and delegitimize the participation of warlords in the political process.
4. No more compromises as it is the only poisonous measure contributing to the increase of culture of impunity and increase violence.
5. Speed up the implementation of Disarming Programme (DIAG) while soliciting strong support from the coalition forces against every single warlord even those who are currently on the government posts.
6. The international community could contribute in the seizure of their money and property outside and inside the country.
Unless the international community and the Afghan government truthfully take the issue of warlordism seriously, they would have little chance of bringing peace and security or winning the war against terror and insurgency as warlordism and terrorism are indivisible concepts which are feeding each other.

Why it's so hard to negotiate with the Taliban

2008-10-10T15:07:00.002-01:00

GRAEME SMITH

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

October 8, 2008 at 1:26 AM EDT

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — In the spring of 2007, a Taliban commander brought a small delegation of insurgents to Kabul for a secret meeting with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the former Afghan president who leads a reconciliation program for insurgents who want to stop fighting.

But the talks quickly turned sour. Mr. Mojaddedi gave the Taliban delegation $10 to cover the expenses of the dangerous journey and waved them away, telling them to come back later.

“It was an insult,” said the Taliban leader, his skin darkened by years on sun-baked battlefields. “They're not serious.”

Nothing in the recent months of war has changed that impression. The government and its backers have failed to persuade insurgents that they're taking the idea of negotiations seriously, and the Taliban themselves haven't shown any real enthusiasm for talks.

Pakistani Taliban militants visit
the mosque where a suicide attack
wounded 30, in Bara, a troubled
town in the Khyber tribal region
about 15 kilometers from Peshawar,
Pakistan on May 1, 2008.
(Mohammad Zubair/Associated Press)

Despite a much-publicized meeting in Saudi Arabia last month that included representatives from all sides, negotiators have hardly started to bridge the chasm between the players in the conflict.

The subject of negotiations has come up more than once recently in comments from high-ranking officials – from Britain's top commander in Afghanistan to the senior United Nations official in the country – who have argued that a military solution is not feasible and that a negotiated settlement will be necessary.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai has previously admitted that his government's calls for negotiations in recent years have been in part an effort to split the already fractious insurgency into camps that support or oppose a mediated settlement.

Sections of the Taliban movement and their allied groups hold different views about their political aims in the war: While agreeing on expelling foreign troops, they have contrasting visions about what might happen next.

Insurgents in southern Afghanistan have burned schools and executed teachers in front of their students, for example, while a researcher for The Globe and Mail recently recorded video of armed Taliban touring a school in the central province of Wardak, where insurgents claimed to be protecting, funding, and even supplying books for schools. Those disagreements between insurgent factions have occasionally turned bloody, with three sources reporting a gunfight last month between Taliban and their local allies from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami network.

In that context, observers say, it's not surprising that hints of progress on negotiations frequently emerge from authorities in Kabul. As the war grows, and the government's position looks increasingly weak, raising the idea of negotiations brings a rare piece of hopeful news to the capital.

For similar reasons, the Taliban have vehemently denied they're engaged in any kind of discussions, as the insurgents try to keep their fighters united and motivated. Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi announced yesterday that peace talks have not happened.

The Taliban's website, Voice of Jehad, also carried a statement this week from Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, clarifying his previously reported comments that the Taliban had made contact with their opponents. A meeting did occur during a meal to celebrate the Eid holiday, Mr. Zaeef said, but the participants were visiting Saudi Arabia only for the sake of a pilgrimage, or umrah, to the holy land and did not discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

It does not appear that the insurgents completely reject the idea of talks, but their framework for negotiations is unacceptable to the government and its foreign supporters.

In his comments on the Taliban site, Mr. Zaeef said: “I believe talks should be held without putting any condition by either side. … The government's condition means to recognize the government, which Taliban will not accept.”

He continued: “The talks should be unconditional and the U.S. should also present its stance, while the withdrawal of foreign troops, the future of Afghanistan and several other issues should be discussed.”

Mr. Ahmadi, the Taliban spokesman, made similar comments, repeating the insurgents' long-standing refusal to talk while foreign troops remain in Afghanistan.

For his part, Mr. Karzai has always said that any talks must respect the new constitution of Afghanistan. The Afghan President also cannot satisfy the Taliban's demands for a troop withdrawal before talks happen, observers say.

Even Waheed Muzhta, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who lives in Kabul and wrote a nostalgic book about the previous Taliban government, says he does not favour an immediate pullout of foreign troops. Although he would like to see them leave eventually, and perhaps take a less aggressive role as they try to find a political solution to the conflict, Mr. Muzhta conceded in a recent interview that a quick withdrawal of international forces would spark a vastly bloodier civil war.

But the former Taliban official emphasized that the burden now falls on Mr. Karzai and his foreign supporters to show greater flexibility about their terms for peace. Like his U.S. counterparts, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has often said negotiations must be handled by the Afghan government, despite calls from some Taliban or ex-Taliban figures, such as Mullah Zaeef, for direct involvement by the international military forces. Speaking with reporters this week, Mr. Harper also repeated a caveat he has used in the past, saying talks can happen “provided these people are willing to participate in the democratic and constitutional process.”

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates used a similar phrase this week, endorsing a reconciliation process with “people who are willing to work with the Afghan government.”

Such people are difficult to find in Afghanistan these days, and the short-term prospects for peace are slim.

U.S. Study Is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan

2008-10-09T21:37:00.005-01:00

By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: October 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.

Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
A boy looked toward a construction
site near a refugee camp this week
in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive American assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems are of the country’s own making, the officials said.

The report cites gains in the building of Afghanistan’s national army, the officials said. But they said it also laid out in stark terms what it described as the destabilizing impact of the booming heroin trade, which by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s economy.

The Bush administration has initiated a major review of its Afghanistan policy and has decided to send additional troops to the country. The downward slide in the security situation in Afghanistan has also become an issue in the presidential campaign, along with questions about whether the White House emphasis in recent years on the war in Iraq has been misplaced.

Inside the government, reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.

Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer who last year stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, attributed some of Afghanistan’s problems to a “lack of leadership” both at the White House and in European capitals where commitments to rebuild Afghanistan after 2001 have never been met.

Mr. Crumpton, who was in charge of the C.I.A. teams that entered Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks but who said he had not seen the draft report, said that Afghanistan was “bad and getting worse” and that officials in Washington were just beginning to wake up to the problem.

“It’s taken them a long time to realize it, but now they know it’s pretty grim,” he said.

A National Intelligence Estimate is a formal document that reflects the consensus judgments of all 16 American intelligence agencies. Although the Bush administration has made public the crucial findings from some recent N.I.E.’s on Iraq and terrorism, most remain classified. The assessment on Afghanistan is the first since the Taliban regained strength there beginning in 2006 and launched an offensive that has allowed them to seize large swaths of territory.

The draft intelligence report was described by more than a half dozen current government officials who had read its conclusions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report remains classified and has not been completed.

Richard Willing, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which produces the national intelligence assessments, declined to comment for this article. A White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, also declined to comment on the report’s conclusions but said: “Everyone understands that the current situation in Afghanistan is a tough one. That’s why the president ordered additional troops there. That’s why we’re increasing the size of the Afghanistan Army.”

Both major presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, have called for American troop increases in Afghanistan even beyond those the White House has ordered. Mr. Obama has accused the White House of paying too little attention to Afghanistan as it poured the vast bulk of American military resources into the war in Iraq, while Mr. McCain has defended the administration’s decision, saying that Iraq remains the more important front in the battle against terrorism.

In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Mr. Obama said he told Mr. Karzai during a visit to Afghanistan in July that the Afghan leader had “to do better by your people in order for us to gain the popular support that’s necessary.”

“We have to have a government that is responsive to the Afghan people, and frankly it’s just not responsive right now,” Mr. Obama said.

American officials said that intelligence agencies were also working to produce an assessment on Pakistan, and that both were to be completed after next month’s elections. They said the draft findings had already begun to influence the recommendations of the White House-led review of Afghanistan policy, which was scheduled to be completed this month but has now been postponed several weeks.

The administration is considering whether the United States should devote more effort to working directly with tribal leaders in far-flung provinces, and possibly arming tribal militias, to fight the Taliban in places where Afghanistan’s army and police forces have been ineffective.

The Bush administration had long resisted making tribal elders a centerpiece of American strategy in Afghanistan. American officials had hoped instead that strong national institutions like the Afghan Army could protect the Afghan population, but the escalating violence this year has forced a reassessment of the value of the tribal system for counterinsurgency operations.

“In order to have an effective counterinsurgency strategy, you need to have strong local governance in the districts and the provinces,” said a senior State Department official who has been briefed on the report’s broad conclusions, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a sign of the seriousness of the administration’s policy review, the White House’s top coordinator for Afghanistan policy, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute of the Army, will lead a team of specialists who will go there to assess the situation, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Administration officials say the review is examining how and where the nearly $6 billion in annual American assistance to Afghanistan is being spent; how to improve the effectiveness of small teams of American and European civilians and troops seeded throughout the Afghan provinces to spur economic growth; and how to strike the right balance between taking military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan and providing more development aid to that country.

Senior American commanders have recently been blunt in their assessment of the security trends in the country. “In large parts of Afghanistan, we don’t see progress,” Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American officer in Afghanistan, told reporters last week. “We’re into a very tough counterinsurgency fight and will be for some time.”

It is not just American officials who offer a grim prognosis. A French diplomatic cable leaked to a French newspaper last week quoted the British ambassador to Afghanistan as forecasting that the NATO-led mission there would fail.

“The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust,” the British envoy, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted as telling the French deputy ambassador to Kabul, who wrote the cable.

British officials have said the comments attributed to Sir Sherard were distorted and do not reflect official British policy.