Obama administration officals claim they have no legal right to investigate Taliban deaths or Bush refusal to do so.

A video called the Convoy of Death is available.

The video shows that U.S. officials were involved at some stages. They were probably CIA operatives or some special forces operatives. So Americans were involved. The video provides evidence of that.
Obama simply does not want to investigate. Dostum is still an important figure in Afghan politics. This is just avoidance justification on the part of the Obama administration.


No legal rights to investigate Taliban deaths - or Bush admin. refusal to do so, officials say
LARA JAKESAP News
Jul 11, 2009 06:48 EST
Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces.


The mass deaths were brought up anew Friday in a report by The New York Times on its Web site. It quoted government and human rights officials accusing the Bush administration of failing to investigate the executions of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of prisoners.
U.S. officials said Friday they did not have legal grounds to investigate the deaths because only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.
The Times cited U.S. military and CIA ties to Afghan Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom human rights groups accuse of ordering the killings. The newspaper said the Defense Department and FBI never fully investigated the incident.
Asked about the report, Marine Corps Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said that since U.S. military forces were not involved in the killings, there is nothing the Defense Department could investigate.
"There is no indication that U.S. military forces were there, or involved, or had any knowledge of this," Lapan said. "So there was not a full investigation conducted because there was no evidence that there was anything from a DoD (Department of Defense) perspective to investigate."
A Justice Department official said the FBI had no jurisdiction to investigate. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Separately, Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller declined to comment.
A spokesman for former President George W. Bush did not have an immediate comment Friday night.
Reacting to the Times' report, human rights group Physicians for Human Rights called for the Justice Department to begin a criminal investigation into whether the Bush administration blocked inquiries into the Taliban deaths.
"For U.S. government officials to claim that there is no legal basis to investigate this well-documented mass atrocity is absurd," said the groups deputy director, Susannah Sirkin.
The allegations date back to November 2001, when as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners died in transit after surrendering during one of the regime's last stands, according to a State Department report from 2002.
Witnesses have claimed that forces with the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance placed the prisoners in sealed cargo containers over the two-day voyage to Sheberghan Prison, suffocating them and then burying them en masse using bulldozers to move the bodies, according to the State Department report. Some Northern Alliance soldiers have said that some of their troops opened fire on the containers, killing those within.
Dostum, the Northern Alliance general who is accused of overseeing the atrocities, has previously denied the allegations.
A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.
Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him, the Times reported.
Source: AP News

Armed Northern Militias complicate Afghan security

Dostum was one of the worst of the warlords and now he is chief of staff of the Afghan army. No doubt Karzai put him there to neutralise him so to speak. Dostum is infamous for his human rights record. The warlords just moved from the battlefield into parliament but now are reforming their militias. This article also reveals that the occupying forces are using the same technique in the south as in Anbar in Iraq. They are using local militias to fight the Taliban.

Armed northern militias complicate Afghan security

Warlords, druglords in Parliament seek to carve out their own fiefdoms.

Dateline: Monday, November 05, 2007

by Ron Synovitz

Much of the world's attention on Afghanistan is now focused on the country's Pashtun-dominated south and east, where Taliban fighters are battling NATO troops and US-led coalition forces. But there is a different kind of tension in northern Afghanistan.

Illegal ethnic-Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara militias in the north appear to be using the threat of a resurgent Taliban as an excuse to hoard weapons and more forcefully protect their interests, such as ruling over land they have controlled since the Taliban's collapse or defending drug export routes that are a major source of income.

"What is happening in the north is the growing Balkanization of the country."



Experts say the entrenchment of the militias, who once fought together against the Taliban, reflects divisions and mistrust among regional commanders of different ethnicities which — if left unchecked — could exacerbate tensions in the country at a time when its security situation is already on a razor's edge.

"Obviously, what is happening in the north is really the growing Balkanization of the country," said Sam Zia-Zarifi, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch and field researcher in Afghanistan who has monitored programs by the United Nations and Afghan government to disarm the militias.

"It's been an ongoing trend in Afghanistan for warlords who are ostensibly allied with the government to entrench themselves even more fully," Zia-Zarifi told this reporter. "A lot of them are now swollen with the narcotics trade — profits from the sale of poppy and heroin. They have a lot of political clout because many of them have allies in the parliament, if they are not directly members of the parliament. And the next step is to openly flex their military muscle."

Attempts to demobilize the patchwork of rival militias across Afghanistan were once trumpeted as a necessary step toward peace and the creation of a functioning democracy. But UN officials have acknowledged that their initial voluntary disarmament program failed to reach its targets.

Militia leaders in the north still command the loyalty of thousands of fighters who can be mobilized quickly in the event of a local dispute or crisis.

Brigadier General Abdulmanan Abed, an Afghan Defense Ministry official involved the country's ongoing disarmament program, says there is an "environment of mistrust" in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif about the Kabul government's ability to prevent Taliban infiltrations.

The commander who holds sway in Mazar-e Sharif is Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful general whom Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed as chief of staff for the Afghan National Army.

Dostum is enormously popular among his fellow ethnic Uzbeks in the north. According to the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), Dostum also is one of several regional commanders who appear to be exploiting Kabul's preoccupation with the violence-ridden south and east in order to stake claims on their old fiefdoms.

In May, when Dostum's supporters staged protests against a controversial governor of the northern province of Jowzjan, the demonstrations turned violent — leaving at least 10 people dead and more than 40 injured.

Armed supporters of Dostum also clashed with authorities in Faryab Province in May, forcing Kabul to send in troops to quell the violence.

Provincial authorities in Jowzjan accuse Dostum's political faction, Junbish-e Melli, of rearming its supporters in the north. But Junbish representatives have repeatedly denied those accusations, telling Radio Free Europe's Radio Free Afghanistan that they are only a political group and have no weapons.

Another powerful commander accused not fully disarming and demobilizing his factional militia fighters is Mohammad Qasim Fahim.

Fahim commanded ethnic Tajik fighters from the Panjshir Valley in the former United Front — also known as the former Northern Alliance. The US-backed alliance also had included Dostum's fighters. But the former United Front disintegrated as the rival militias raced to stake out territory after the collapse of the Taliban regime.

It was Fahim's fighters who, against the pleas of the international community, seized control of Kabul when the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001. And Fahim's Islamist political faction — Jam'iat-e Islami-yi — used its de facto control of Kabul as a negotiating position at the Bonn Conference in December of 2001.

That initially gave Jam'iat-e Islami-yi commanders control of some of the most powerful posts in Karzai's post-Taliban transitional administration — heading the ministries of Defense, the Interior, and Foreign Affairs as well as the Afghan intelligence services.

Fahim himself was Defense Minister from late 2001 thru most of 2004. But he was removed from the post in December 2004 after being accused of illegally occupying land in Kabul.

Commanders of other factional militia also have accused Fahim of hoarding weapons for his own militia fighters at a time when, as Defense Minister, he was in charge of the government demobilization efforts.

Christopher Langton, an expert on conflict and defense diplomacy at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, says that amid a perceived spread of the Taliban-led insurgency during the last two years, as well as disturbances further north and heavy fighting in the south, some former United Front commanders have decided unilaterally that they may need weapons in the future.

"Some are quite senior, some close to the government and in politics," Langton said. "And they don't see why they should have to disarm whereas groups in the south remain armed — and some of the groups in the south have actually been armed by international forces in order to fight on the side of the [Afghan] government."

Other independent experts say the lack of detailed information about local militia command structures has compromised the effectiveness of disarmament efforts.

The International Crisis Group says it is not formal militia structures, but rather, the informal structures that must be understood in order to identify commanders at the village level responsible for calling into action the militia fighters who have stashed away their weapons.

After decades of war, Langton describes the nature of Afghanistan as "a country based around armed groups." He says it is naive for anybody to think such a situation could be changed by a voluntary program to disarm and disband militia.

"If, at the beginning, there wasn't the threat of Taliban coming back [to the north], there were other reasons for retaining weapons," Langton told RFE/RL. "Self-protection in a place like Afghanistan is one reason.

"The possibility of having to guard opium convoys or heroin consignments going abroad is another reason," he said. "And the other reason is commercial — selling armed guards to local authorities to guard their properties. What I think the so-called resurgent Taliban does is to give some perceived legitimacy to [the hoarding of weapons]."

Langton says fears among non-Pashtun commanders in the north have been heightened by recent overtures in Kabul about bringing moderate Taliban into the government — an issue he says is closer to reality now than ever before.

"It does strengthen the belief amongst the former Northern [Alliance] groups that they may have to be prepared to stand up to some kind of Pashtun-dominated government," Langton said. "The United Afghan National Front opposition group, which was given birth last year, came together as a political opposition to the government largely because the people in the party feared that there might be a need to be united once again. And, of course, these are the former Northern Alliance commanders.

"The formation of this political group is an indication that there is a retention of weapons because there is a fear of increasing Taliban involvement both, possibly, in legitimate government and as a force which is encroaching further north illegally," Langton said.

Still, Langton and other experts conclude that the Afghan government is not about to face an armed insurrection by commanders from the former United Front.

They say such a development would require a degree of unity among northern militia that doesn't appear to exist. And they say the political coalition formed last year by northern commanders does not translate into an armed alliance — except at local levels where militia commanders are trying to protect their personal and vested interests.

Ron Synovitz covers Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq as well as economic transition and human rights issues. He reported on the US Army's advance from Kuwait to Baghdad as an embedded journalist (March-April 2003). Since joining RFE/RL in 1995, he also has covered the Balkans extensively — including Kosovo (1999), Macedonia's ethnic Albanian insurgency (2001), Bulgaria, and Romania. He has a master's degree in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Copyright (c) 2007. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N. W. Washington DC 20036.


Related addresses:

URL 1: www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/11/ffca5de1-b96c-4cdf-810b-831bec1b...


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Taliban using Soviet era weapons

Surely the Taliban buy from wherever they can. It is ironic that the Taliban would be using Soviet era weapons. They were abandoned due to the success of the Taliban and other jihadists funded by the west to drive the Evil Empire out of Afghanistan. This is a type of blowback.
Imagine one of the worst warlords Dostum is still quite active in the new democratic Afghanistan. He is even military adviser to Karzai.

Officials: Soviet-Era Caches, Not Iran, Arming Taliban

by Tahir Qadiry
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan - While United States officials accuse Iran of arming a resurgent Taliban, officials here say the weapons are actually part of vast caches left behind by the Soviet army that fought a nine-year war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in 1988.

Ustad Basir Arifi, secretary for the Disarmament of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG) program in northern Afghanistan, told IPS that weapons abandoned by the Soviet Union there are now being moved by professional smugglers to the southern provinces where the Taliban Islamist movement has its stronghold.

"Huge caches of weapons remained with the people from the Soviet Union period. These are now being smuggled to the south of Afghanistan. These weapons are bought in the north of Afghanistan and smuggled to the south to be used against government and foreign forces," Arifi said.

According to Arifi, security officials have on several occasions intercepted weapons being smuggled to the south. He said the DIAG has urged the government to take firm measures to avoid all this.

Abdul Aziz Ahmad Zai, the chief of DIAG, said his group was "very concerned over the issue. It shows that the Taliban are being fortified."

Zai did not rule out the possibility of weapons originating from outside Afghanistan. "Smugglers could be bringing weapons from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north. A good transit point could be Badakhshan province," he said without mentioning Iran.

Zai said powerful syndicates were carrying out the smuggling. "However, our security officials and the Interior Ministry are working very actively in this regard," he added.

According to Zai, the recent riots in northern Jowzjan province were an indicator of the fact that weapons were freely available to people. He also said that there still were armed groups in the north of Afghanistan. "It is a very great concern for us that there are lots of illegal armed groups in the north," he said.

Gen. Abdul Manan, representative of the defense ministry in the DIAG program, said the government has been able to collect 70,000 heavy and light weapons from the whole country under the DDR and DIAG programs. But he believes that at least a million more pieces were in the hands of armed groups in the north.

A gun smuggler operating from the Balkh province district told IPS that he has been in the business for the last two years. The Pashto-speaking, bearded man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he regularly comes to the north to buy different kinds of weapons. "I have employed people to collect weapons from people who have them and these are ferried to the south."

"I have my customers in Kandahar. When the weapons reach there, they come and receive it. I make a good profit. I can buy an AK-47 for $200 in the north and sell it for $400 in the south," he added. Occasionally he smuggles explosives as well.

Ahmad Shah, 45, a resident of Chemtal district in the Balkh province, freely admitted to supplying the smugglers with guns. "I earn my living through running this business," he told IPS.

Atta Mohammad Nur, the governor of Balkh province, neither accepts nor rejects the fact that the weapons are being smuggled to the south. "It could be right. Insurgents are doing their utmost to disrupt life in the country. They could be smuggling weapons from north to the south," he said.

Rohullah Samun, spokesman for the Jowzjan governor, accepts that vast amount of weapons still exist in the province. "People do have weapons. There are lots of illegal armed militias in Jowzjan and its neighboring provinces. Some of the warlords are regrouping," he said.

The reference was to Abdorrashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan's most formidable warlords. Dostum, who once supported the Soviets, has had a hand in the many regime changes that this war-torn country has seen over the last three decades and retains enormous influence in Jowzjan.

Dostum was among leaders who helped the U.S.-led forces to overthrow the Taliban government in 2001. Until recently he was regarded as the strongman of the north, but his role has been reduced to that of a military adviser to Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai.

On June 13, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told CNN television in Paris that there was "irrefutable evidence" that Iran was supplying weapons to the Taliban.

Ironically, the Taliban owes its origins largely to mujahedeen that were once armed and backed by the U.S. against communist rule in Afghanistan and the Soviet occupation.

(Inter Press Service