Newshoggers.com

Independence Day and Occupation

By Steve Hynd

Happy Fourth of July to our American Readers. As I've said before, as a lifelong voter for Scottish independence I'm jealous as hell.

But on your Independence Day it might be worth giving a few minutes thought to those your nation and mine occupy in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've been reduced to the role of "collateral damage", told they should be greatful for being bombed into submission to our edicts, denied basic rights such as habeas corpus in our foreign prisons, tortured and abused, exposed to our dumb belief in The White Man's Burden. Iraqis have finally managed to gain enough independence to tell us to butt out of their internal struggles, as we always should have.

Days earlier, Iraqis had celebrated the withdrawal of American forces from their cities as a "day of national sovereignty." And while Biden's visit was welcomed as evidence that the U.S. doesn't plan to completely disengage from Iraq, al-Maliki made it clear that he does not want U.S. officials to involve themselves as closely in Iraqi politics as they did in the past.

Al-Maliki told Biden that "the reconciliation issue is a purely Iraqi issue and any non-Iraqi involvement might have a negative effect," al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said. "We don't want the Americans to come and get involved."

But Afghans, citizens of a state which has no power to constrain our colonialism, don't have that luxury. This Independence Day I recommend reading  an op-ed by Rory Stewart, an ex-soldier and diplomat who is Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard. From 2000 to 2002 he walked solo across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey of 6000 miles, staying in villagers houses, and he has been the UK's Coalition Deputy Governor for two Iraqi provinces.

Rory Stewart's op-ed, The Irresistable Illusion, is available at the London Review of Books website (h/t Newshoggers' regular Geoff). Read it all, but here's a lengthy snippet.

Every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. The Communist government tried to tear down the old structures of mullah and khan; the anti-Soviet jihad set up new ones, bolstered with US and Saudi cash and weapons supplied from Pakistan. There is almost no economic activity in the country, aside from international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. The Afghan army cannot, like Pakistan’s, reject America’s attempt to define national security priorities; Afghan diplomats cannot mock our pronouncements. Karzai is widely criticised, but more than seven years after the invasion there is still no plausible alternative candidate; there aren’t even recognisable political parties.

Obama’s new policy has a very narrow focus – counter-terrorism – and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state. He presents this in a formal syllogism. The final goal in the region is

to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban because

if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban . . . that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

Such efforts are hampered by the nature of the Afghan economy and government. We must implement a counter-insurgency strategy, which includes

the deployment of 17,000 troops [to] take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east

but also adopt a more ‘comprehensive approach’, aiming to

promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.

Finally, Afghanistan cannot be addressed without addressing Pakistan:

To defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognise the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Or, in the pithier statement made by Obama last October:

In order to catch Osama bin Laden we have to win in Afghanistan and stabilise Pakistan.

Obama, then, combines a negative account of Afghanistan’s past and present – he describes the border region as ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ – with an optimism that it can be transformed. He assumes that we have a moral justification and obligation to intervene, that the US and its allies have the capacity to address the threat and that our global humanitarian and security objectives are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

...It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Yet the current state-building project, at the heart of our policy, is justified in the most instrumental terms – not as an end in itself but as a means towards counter-terrorism. Obama is clear about this:

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.

In pursuit of this objective, Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans. What kind of anti-terrorist tactics would we expect from the Afghan military? What kind of surveillance, interference and control from the police? We should not assume that the only way to achieve security in a developing country is through the restriction of civil liberties, or that authoritarianism is a necessary phase in state-formation, or a precondition for rapid economic development, or a lesser evil in the fight against modern terrorism.

After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative. It is particularly difficult to argue not for a total withdrawal but for a more cautious approach. The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Read the whole article. Seriously.

When Did The Af/Pak Policy Change?

By Steve Hynd

One of these things is not like the other.

Back in March, President Obama set out the broad outlines of his Af/Pak policy. One of the bright lines was supposedly that US forces in Afghanistan were not there to engage in long-term nation building. The US most definitely wasn't in Afghanistan so that in a decade or more at a cost of over a trillion dollars that nation could be bootstrapped up to the level of, say, Chad. Instead, the mission was twofold: to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban's hardcore militants, disrupting safe havens and killing leaders, while giving Afghans the bare beginnings of providing for their own governance and security.

In his March speech, Obama was plain that a long-term COIN operation wasn't to be on the cards and that the US "surge" was to take the fight to the Taliban.

We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists.

So I want the American people to understand that 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.

...I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border. This push will also help provide security in advance of the important presidential election in August.

At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.

Sometime over the last few months, that mission has changed. Without informing the American people and wthout any real debate, the COINdinista interventionists have taken over and redirected Obama's policy. From the WaPo today:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan…

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

Counter-insurgency "clear, hold and build" has entirely taken over from counter-terrorism "hunt, kill and disupt". That might be the right thing to do - although I have my doubts - but the point is that it wasn't what Obama said would happen and government policy has radically shifted in favor of an interventionist, long-war, nation-building policy straight from the military and the folks at CNAS without any official announcement or very much public debate. In fact, it's almost as if Obama himself hasn't been told.

Update: In comments over at VetVoice, commenter Ben says that one data point does not a trend make. Ben's critique correctly notes that there was going to be some COIN even in Obama's mainly CT-aimed original plan and so he asks how do might tell the difference from meagre evidence. But of course there isn't just one data point. There's been a continual stream of officers, wonks and policy officials - from Gates and McChrystal on down - saying that it's about civilian protection and nation building, not killing bad guys and getting out. The genesis of the change is easy to see too. CNAS' David Kilcullen has estimated another 10-15 years. Back in March, Eric Martin noted a CNAS report written by four of the leading COIN scholars arguing why a 5-10 year military/diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan was necessary.

Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal sees the same mission creep as I do.

And a new piece at The American Conservative details the alliance between Petraeus' COIN team and CNAS that has quietly changed Obama's Af/Pak policy.

Competing Strategies, Blind Faith In Af/Pak

By Steve Hynd

Bob Woodward's piece for the WaPo, in which he recounts national security advisor Jim Jones telling military leaders that any further calls for more troops in Afghanistan would occasion a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment" from Obama, has both COINdinistas and contraCOINers discussing prioritization of the (still benchmarkless) strategy's confusing components in Afghanistan.

Marine general Lawrence Nicholson is quoted by Woodward as having a mission of “Protect the populace by, with and through the ANSF,” where “killing the enemy is secondary.” By contrast, Obama back in his March Af/Pak stratergy speech said that "These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border." Pretty much everyone agrees that there aren't enough troops on the ground - whether they be U.S., allied or local Afghan forces - to cover all the bases; to both secure population centers in a COIN "clear, hold and build" operation and to go after the insurgency in its own rural and border territory. Something has to give - and it looks like it will be the latter.

No matter what Obama may have said in March, the military and the CNAS-propelled Obama administration foreign policy team have set the strategy as a COIN-based one. That means a loooong war, at a cost of upwards of a trillion, as the US pursues a chimerical dream whereby Afghanistan one day (no one will guess when) emerges as a nation where economic development and reconstruction defeat the Taliban, albeit with a heavy occupation presence of foreign troops. But will that presence be heavy enough? At the CNAS blog, "Ibn Muqawama" writes in a post entitled "Repeating Mistakes?" that insufficient force was what hampered Iraq all those years and that:

if we are committed to our current strategy in Afghanistan, it seems pretty darn important that we're confident we have the force levels necessary to establish that minimum level of security.  Otherwise our "civilian surge" and reconstruction initiatives seem likely to be DOA.  That's not a call for the administration to reflexively throw in more troops without a rigorous analysis of strategic costs and benefits, but it does suggest that it needs to double-check to ensure that its ends, ways, and means in Afghanistan are are all aligned.

Hang on, the "mistake" wasn't to try to make an invasion based on lies and a years-long occupation turn out a "victory" for US interests in the first place? Apparently not - for CNAS is neoliberal interventionism at its very worst. "Can we invade it? Yes we can!"  All of which leaves contraCOIN writer Michael Cohen very frustrated:

If I had my druthers the President would conduct ... a cost benefit analysis and come to the right conclusion that the currently stated mission in Afghanistan is worth neither the blood nor treasure that are needed for it to be successfully achieved. Instead he has chosen a muddled course that pretty much guarantees the US won't achieve his goals for Afghanistan. Personally, I think fighting a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is the modern equivalent of fighting a land war in Asia, but if that's the mission you decide upon then you have to give the military the resources to actually do it.

The President can't have it both ways. Either you fight the war in Afghanistan to achieve the mission you've laid out, or you don't. There isn't really a middle ground here. History provides a pretty good road map for how that usually works out.

In the end, this whole situation reminds me of another old military expression: FUBAR

But the "civilian surge" is already in trouble too. As my friend and COINdinista-with-misgivings Spencer Ackerman notes:

The so-called “civilian surge” into Afghanistan isn’t happening. Proposals earlier this year for hundreds of new U.S. civilian officials to deploy to Afghanistan have given way to “triage” attempts at getting smaller amounts of key civilian personnel into advisory capacities to bolster Afghan governance.

Even if the "civilian surge" was sorted out, though, the whole "population-centric" strategy is based on the idea that economic improvement, reconstruction and reconcilliation would mean that the Taliban would lose their foothold in Afghanistan and be unable to regain it either by bullet or ballot box afteroccupying forces (eventually) leave. There's no particular reason why this should be so and indeed real world evidence suggests that it's simply bulls**t, but it's taken as an article of blind faith by the COIN crowd. Neither Afghanistan or Pakistan are Iraq and the Taliban movement is not foreign in the way Al Qaeda was in Iraq. In fact, this blind faith underpinning of the entire COIN strategy for Af/Pak is most akin to believing, just because, that economic reconstruction and democracy would prevent the Sunni Arabs of Iraq ever again holding any kind of power in that country after US troops leave - a pretty unlikely proposition.

Finally, A Sensible Af/Pak Opium Policy

By Steve Hynd

We've written a fair bit here about what we all believe to be Obama's disasterous non-plan for the Af/Pak region, a plan that is simply Bush-lite without a benchmark for progress in sight and without any kind of exit plan. But credit where it's due, the Obama administration has finally gotten something right.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication -- for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country -- was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

''Eradication is a waste of money,'' Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

''It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication,'' he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Instead, the US is to concentrate on assisting farmers who abandon poppy cultivation, boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops.

While Holbrooke did not provide the AP with a dollar figure for the new U.S. commitment, he told the G-8 ministers that Washington was increasing its funding for agricultural assistance from tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the current G-8 president.

''We're essentially phasing out our support for crop eradication and using the money to work on interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops,'' Holbrooke told the AP.

...The G-8 ministers along with Afghan counterpart Rangin Dadfar Spanta issued a statement at the end of their three-day summit Saturday saying it was urgent to find alternatives for farming communities where ''narco-trafficking and extremism are endemic.''

They said sustainable farming was key to Afghanistan's and Pakistan's future in that it would boost incomes, create jobs, improve rural development and lower regional tensions.

''Food insecurity and chronic poverty are root causes of civil instability and forced migration,'' the statement said.

As Fester noted back in December, US policies of eradication have been a disaster in Columbia too.

Newshoggers alumni Libby Spencer is happy with the policy change: "I could have written that statement. Come to think of it, I did -- too many times to count," but she, I'm sure, is aware that previous, lower key, promises of alternative crop development in Afghanistan have been plagued by a failure to follow through. Hopefully, now that these alternatives are official policy rather than piecemeal experiments, the funding and resourcing will come.

The Wrong Kind Of Clear

By Steve Hynd

The counter-insurgency paradigm for Af/Pak, as it was for Iraq, is "clear, hold and build". We've seen often enough that this paradigm has hit problems in Iraq, particularly with the "build" part - corruption and graft stopping construction or a total failure of the effort to build reconcilliation between feuding factions. But British troops have found, in Afghanistan, a new flaw - this time in the "clear" portion of the COIN mantra. The locals, getting wind of a major British operation and knowing full well that the "collateral damage" this would entail would be inflicted on them and their children, got the hell out of Dodge and left the field entirely to the Taliban.

The aim was to claim a lawless part of Afghanistan's troublesome south for the distant and disliked government far away in Kabul. They would seize the area, put up fortifications to limit movement and impose some order and authority.

But, despite the strict secrecy that cloaked the operation, the local people seemed to have got wind of it and – scared by the prospect of intense fighting – voted with their feet.

The day before the soldiers began their operation, drones monitoring the area showed people evacuating their homes, leaving Babaji in the hands of militants.

During the first three days of their two-week stay in the area, which will end when troops from the Welsh Guards relieve them, the men of the Black Watch battalion endured persistent attacks of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. With the enemy hiding at a distance, in bushes and abandoned compounds, most soldiers never saw their foes. Only the snipers and the men monitoring the live video feeds from circling drones got sight of their quarry.

"They are so well camouflaged you can't see anything," said Rob Colquoun, a section leader, in charge of a team of snipers who killed 18 Afghans in one afternoon.

... "Running around, getting into fights and killing a few enemy is all very well and good, but my main concern at the moment is that we haven't talked to any local nationals or really got out our main message to the community that this time we are here to stay," said Major Steele.

If there's no-one there to "build" for, COIN's "clear, hold and build" doctrine has a problem.

The Brits eventually found an old man who hadn't evacuated with the rest and three senior officers promptly and comically descended upon him to do their "population centric" bit. He wasn't having any of it.

"Last year a big British bomb in Nowzad killed 600 people," he said. "Another 170 were killed at a wedding party."

..."I'm 80 years old and I have seen many governments and none of them have been any help. Why should I believe that this one will help?"

So the officers split for their forward operating base (FOB) before they could be attacked and take casualties. Later that day, the UK troops called in an American B-1 bomber to clear one guy out of a deserted compound which had been someone's home. It isn't just among US officers that FOBbit-based, casualty averse "force protection" instincts get in the way of "hearts and minds".

The Farah Airstrike Coverup

By Steve Hynd

A report by the UK's Channel Four News, via the Real News Network, alleges a coverup over May 4th airstrikes in Farah province, Afghanistan, which the US military says killed scores of Taliban fighters and "only" 26 civilians and local villagers say killed around 140 innocents. The report includes previously unseen footage, taken by a cellphone, showing at least a score of children's bodies recovered from the rubble.

The US military had originally tried to blame Taliban grenades for civilian casualties, despite the utter devestation caused by dropping 2,000 lb bombs. Villagers who survived insist that by the time the bombs fell the Taliban had already fled the area.

Gareth Porter also accuses the US military of "covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident", and for much the same reasons as the Channel Four report.

The declassified "executive summary" of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the "Taliban" – the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces - for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes.

...the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the "second B1-B strike" and the "third B-1B strike" caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes.

It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a "second large group" – again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian – indicated that they were "enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces" and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved.

The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well.

In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the "destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties". Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike – thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians.

The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was "another Taliban element". A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby.

Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any "Taliban" killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike.

By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes which killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning – that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximised.

Despite admissions that the military's own rules of engagement were not followed in the airstrikes - particularly in not checking whether targets were civilian or not, no one has been held culpable in any way. Yet by not checking, then bombing civilians, a clear war crime was committed.

Bagram, the new Guantánamo

By Steve Hynd

Clive Stafford Smith at the Guardian responds to the BBC report of abuse and torture at Bagram prison in Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier.

President Obama told us that this sort of thing has stopped. Well, it hasn't.

Sadly, the Obama administration is up to the former administration's familiar tricks, attempting to block the world from the truth. In April, a federal judge in Washington DC ordered that prisoners in Bagram should be allowed counsel, and the right to be heard in court; the Obama administration refused to comply, and appealed the judgment. People being beaten up in Bagram should, apparently, grin and bear it.

The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people – to add to the 600 who are already there. Of these, many (including all those in the recent Washington case) were not originally captured in Afghanistan at all, but in other countries. The US then rendered them into Afghanistan.

The British government should have a sense of familiarity with this story: in February, Defence Minister John Hutton admitted that British personnel had taken two Pakistani men prisoner in Iraq in 2004, and had subsequently handed them to the Americans. The men were rendered to Afghanistan, where they have now been held – and, if the latest BBC report is anything to go by, presumably beaten – for five years. They have never been charged. The US argues that it is too dangerous to allow them lawyers – and yet, like so many others, the first time they went to Afghanistan was when the US took them there.

...Bagram is the evil twin of Guantánamo Bay, if rather more cut off from the world, and all things we consider civilised.

And, make no mistake, the Obama administration bears ultimate responsibility for what is happening there now. Back in March, Amnesty International issued a plea to Obama:

Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor's use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, "transparency promotes accountability".

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later.

Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA's transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

Obama has shown no sign of listening: even as he continues to hold his administrations actions on Gitmo up as a premier policy change, his administation continues following the same criminal course in another, more secret, location. 

Pentagon Thinks About Burying Afghan Airstrike Report

By Steve Hynd

As a friend noted when she sent this to me, "how stupid do they thing the Afghans are?"

Defense Department officials are debating whether to ignore an earlier promise and squelch the release of an investigation into a U.S. airstrike last month, out of fear that its findings would further enrage the Afghan public, Pentagon officials told McClatchy Monday.

The military promised to release the report shortly after the May 4 air attack, which killed dozens of Afghans, and the Pentagon reiterated that last week. U.S. officials also said they'd release a video that military officials said shows Taliban fighters attacking Afghan and U.S. forces and then running into a building. Shortly afterward, a U.S. aircraft dropped a bomb that destroyed the building.

However, a senior defense official told McClatchy Monday: "The decision (about what to release) is now in limbo."

Pentagon leaders are divided about whether releasing the report would reflect a renewed push for openness and transparency about civilian casualties or whether it would only fan Afghan outrage and become a Taliban recruiting tool just as Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has already deliberately leaked the report's finding that US forces broke their own rules of engagement and that "the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if" the rules had been followed. Now, McClatchy's Nancy Yousef reports that:

Two U.S. military officials told McClatchy that the video shows that no one checked to see whether any women or children were in the building before it was bombed. The report acknowledges that mistakes were made and that U.S. forces didn't always follow proper procedures, but it does little to reassure Afghans that the U.S. has done enough to avoid repeating those mistakes.

Again, one of those "officially unofficial" leaks.

This information is already 'out there' and it's bad enough to enrage Afghans (and those Westerners who object to their governments indiscriniately bombing civilians). So the question is - could there be something even worse in the report that's so bad it is worth squelching from the Pentagon's point of view or is this just more kneejerk secrecy?

Hypocrisy thy name is Republicans

Commentary By Ron Beasley

If the Republicans have one bit of policy consistency it's hypocrisy.

In reversal, GOP balks at war funding

 House Republicans are preparing to vote en bloc against the $106 billion war-spending bill, a position once unthinkable for the party that characterized the money as support for the troops.

For years, Republicans portrayed the bills funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as matters of national security and accused Democrats who voted against them of voting against the troops.

In 2005, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) went so far as to say sending troops into battle and not paying for it would be an “immoral thing to do.” And just last year, more House Republicans voted for the war supplemental bill than did Democrats, who opposed the legislation because it did little to wind down the military effort in Iraq.

But Republicans say this year is different. Democrats have included a $5 billion increase for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help aid nations affected by the global financial crisis. Republicans say that is reason enough to vote against the entire $106 billion spending bill and are certain voters will understand.

The Democrats had better not do what we did!

A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) noted the Republican support for the version that did not include the IMF funding and accused Democrats of politicizing the issue by including non-war-funding provisions.

“It is the Democratic leadership that is playing politics with our troops by insisting on using them as leverage to pass over $100 billion in global bailout money for the IMF,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman.

However, Republicans also have used the supplemental war bills to advance non-related priorities. In 2006, Republican senators included $4 billion for farm programs and $700 million for a railroad project on the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast.

Republicans also embraced the war supplemental in 2007 — advanced by the Democratic-controlled Congress — that included an increase in the minimum wage.

And the Democrats are ready:

“Anytime there was a Democrat [who] raised concern on some of these supplementals, he was tarred as being anti-troop,” said a House Democratic leadership aide.

The Democratic aide charged House Republicans with “hypocrisy” for opposing a bill because of the IMF funding, which amounts to less than 5 percent of the proposed spending in the legislation.

“It seems like they’re putting the interest of the Republican Party and the ability for them to develop a campaign narrative ahead of the interest of the troops,” he said.

All that said I applaud them.  We need to get out of Iran and Afghanistan and not giving money to the IMF is a really good idea too.
 

Contractor Failings Left U.S. Kabul Embassy Safety Gap

By Steve Hynd

There's a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight today, the subject of which is a $189 million contract to provide security services at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul awarded by the State Dept to ArmorGroup North America, Inc. (“AGNA”), a subsidiary of the British-owned ArmorGroup International in 2007. AGNA were supposed to provide a highly trained security force for the embassy.

But that's not how it turned out, according to the documents lodged with the hearing. The subcommittee staff summary says:

The Kabul embassy contract can be viewed as a case study of how mismanagement and lack of oversight can result in poor performance. The record before the Subcommittee shows that AGNA’s performance on the Kabul embassy contract has been deficient since the start of the contract in July 2007. The result is that, at times, the security of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul may have been placed at risk.

The State Department denies that the embassy was ever in actual danger, but does say security was poor enough to have "negatively impacted...performance of guard services in a high-threat environment" - a distinction that sounds like no distinction at all. State doesn't deny that there were serious security staff shortages, with up to 18 security guards absent from their posts at a time due to what AGNA admits was “supervisory personnel negligence.” Nor does it deny lack of profficiency in English or poor traing among the guards. But it says matters have improved after 2 years of the contract:

In recent months, AGNA has made significant improvements to its performance. With respect to some of the deficiencies, however, the contractor is now in compliance only because the State Department changed the contract’s requirements. According to the State Department, the contractor has only three remaining deficiencies: the lack of a secondary armorer; inadequate English language proficieny among the guard force; and the lack of one variet of traing weapon for the guard force.

But that's not all the story. The documents also reveal that in January, 2008, AGNI informed the State Dept that it was conducting an internal investigation into:

allegations that the company improperly procured counterfeit goods for the embassy guard force. Documents received by the Subcommittee indicate that boot, swinter jackets,and gloves purchased by AGNA at a cost of more than $130,000 were in fact counterfeit.

AGNA’s investigation also revealed that the AGNA logistics manager had acquired the counterfeit goods from a company owned and managed by his wife. In total, the logistics manager purchased a total of $380,000 worth of equipment from his wife’s company. According to the AGNA program manager in Kabul, the State Department was aware of this arrangement.

On January 24, 2008, the State Department requested that the logistics manager be removed from the contract. In early February 2008, AGNA informed the State Department that the logistics manager had resigned. On February 27, 2008, however, based on information received from State Department officials in Kabul, the State Department learned that the logistics manager was in fact still working on the contract in Kabul. One week later, AGNA told the State Department that the logistics manager was no longer working for AGNA.

The hearing began a short time ago and transcripts should be available soon. But it beggars belief that AGNA has kept its contract so long under such circumstances, the only penalty being a deduction of $2.4 million from the contract value. And of course no story of contractor incompetence in servicing America's occupations would be complete without a measure of sordid crime or corruption. I'm reminded forcibly of McClatchy's Jonathan Landy, who stated unequivocally back in January that he believes U.S. officials -- not U.S. contractors, but officials -- are complicit and involved in the corruption.

More on this later.