Hollande repeats pledge to withdaw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by end of this year.

After a meeting at the White House with president Obama newly elected French president Francois Hollande repeated his campaign promise that he would withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

Hollande said:“I reminded President Obama of the commitment that I made to the French people – the withdrawal of combat troops between now and the end of 2012,” However Obama said that both agreed to a long term commitment to Afghanistan. This may mean only that France will simply help financially in the period from 2014 to 20024 when the U.S. Afghanistan Strategic Partnership agreement will be in force. However perhaps some French troops might remain in a non-combat role.

There is majority opposition to the Afghan missions in both the U.S. and France but France is obviously going to withdraw troops early. However the U.S. is planning to keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014 who will not only be there in a training role but special forces will still conduct night raids and other anti-terror missions. The number of troops to remain has not as yet been determined nor the terms of their presence. As well the U.S taxpayer will be funding the Afghan military by at least a billion plus for year. The U.S. naturally would like to have more NATO countries share the burden but that is a political hard sell in many NATO countries. For more see this article.

Pakistani Taliban face deep divisions in leadership

 Some analysts think that open warfare may break out within the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) the umbrella group of militants formed in 2007 to unite radicals. One main split is said to be between Hakimullah Mehsud head of the group and his deputy Wali-ur-Rehman.
   Rehman is concerned that Mehsud is taking the group closer to Al Qaeda and its Arab fighters. Other commanders are trying to end the dispute between the two leaders. There are also disagreements between Mehsud and other leaders about the groups relation to the Pakistani armed forces. Some commanders have avoided conflict with the Pakistani military in order to concentrate on the war in Afghanistan while Mehsud regards the group as at war with the Pakistan armed forces as well.
   Although militant attacks were down considerably last year there is still constant conflict between the military and some factions. Recently the Pakistani Taliban killed 15 Pakistani soldiers they had captured and vowed further revenge. See this article.  A former TTP commander in one tribal region Fazad Haggani left the TTP last year. He is close to the militant Afghan Haqqani network. The militants have formed a five member commission to try to work out differences between the groups and unify them once again. Given the differences among the groups this may be a difficult if not impossible task. No doubt foreign operatives will be attempting to ensure that the divisions remain, For more see this article.

Jeff Huber: Marjah Madness

Huber is very critical of McChrystal's strategy and doubts that it will work. Certainly the Afghan forces did not really lead the Marjah assault but the US marines. Huber could have mentioned that the Afghan police are to take over security in time and they are even less battle ready or trustworthy than the Afghan armed forces. While there is no doubt that NATO forces will eventually gain control of Marjah they may face endless harassment. Marjah is just a prelude to trying to clear out Kandahar a far larger city and a much bigger job. There are quite a few US casualties already. The American people who are providing this cannon fodder may put political pressure on Obama to withdraw.

Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -

Marjah Madness

Posted By Jeff Huber

As journalist Gareth Porter said in a recent interview with Real News, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s offensive in Marjah, Afghanistan, is "more of an effort to shape public opinion in the United States than to shape the politics of the future of Afghanistan." Like so much of what we’ve seen in our woeful war on terrorism, the Marjah effort is short on substance and long on Newspeak, Doublethink, and other Orwellian deceptions.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and an unhealthy chunk of the rest of the news outlets are calling the Marjah madness a "test" of "Obama’s strategy" in Afghanistan. Amazingly, nobody is calling it a test of McChrystal’s strategy. Stan the Man is, after all, the maestro who orchestrated the big honking counterinsurgency (COIN) plan with its attendant troop escalation and who then, along with Gen. David Petraeus and the rest of the warmongery, boxed Obama into going along with the scheme through an expansive media campaign that included McChrystal’s September 2009 infomercial on 60 Minutes.

We don’t need to feel sorry for Obama, though. He asked for this during the 2008 presidential race when he decided to show the hawks his baby-makers by saying he’d pull us out of Iraq but he’d "get the job" done in Afghanistan. Pavlov’s dogs of war started frothing when he stepped on that land mine. Obama had a chance to get rid of the war dons – Petraeus, McChrystal, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and the Pentagon’s bureaucratic survival savant, Robert Gates – when he took office. But no, President Obama kept them around, despite the fact that they all had publicly criticized Candidate Obama’s plan to establish an Iraq withdrawal timeline. Obama exacerbated things when he named retired Army Gen. James Jones as national security adviser; Jones had stated for the record in 2007 that an Iraq withdrawal deadline would be "against our national interest."

So, yes, Marjah is a referendum on Obama’s fitness as commander in chief, and it’s becoming clear that the guy is in over his pay grade.

A key component of McChrystal’s hallucinatory COIN plan is an initiative to build up Afghanistan’s security forces to an end-strength of 400,000. He’d be better off paying them all off to go home and keep out of the way.

When 60 Minutes reported on the status of Afghan security forces training in late January, the native troops were literally shooting themselves in the foot and their instructors in the leg. According to 60 Minutes – which means according to what Af-Pak propaganda czar Rear Adm. Gregory Smith told 60 minutes – the Afghan troops were commandos, Afghanistan’s best soldiers, and they were being trained by Green Berets, America’s "best soldiers."

The "specialized" Afghan troops had received three months of "advanced training" before coming under the tutelage of the Green Berets. When they displayed their tendency to shoot everybody but the bad guys, the Green Berets drilled them in the fundamentals of how to load their weapons and hold them safely. When the Afghan commandos couldn’t even perform those tasks correctly, the Green Berets started treating them like raw recruits and tried to instruct them by yelling at them.

Yet somehow Smith and his spin merchants and their dupes in the mainstream media expected us to believe that by late February, Afghan forces were ready to take charge of their country’s destiny. "In Marjah offensive, Afghan forces take the lead," claimed a Feb. 15 headline in the Christian Science Monitor. But by Feb. 20 even the New York Times, the journalistic home of McChrystal idolater Dexter Filkins, had to confess that "Marines Do Heavy Lifting as Afghan Army Lags in Battle."

Bravo to journalist C.J. Chivers, a former Marine, for reporting that the assertion by American and Afghan officials that portrays "the Afghan Army as the force out front in this important offensive against the Taliban" conflicts with "what is visible in the field." By all important measures, "from transporting troops, directing them in battle and coordinating fire support to arranging modern communications, logistics, aviation, and medical support – the mission in Marjah has been a Marine operation conducted in the presence of fledgling Afghan Army units, whose officers and soldiers follow behind the Americans and do what they are told."

I hope the owners of the Times don’t fire Chivers. It would be nice to think that the rag of record has at least one reporter capable of telling the truth.


Another Times contributor, Timothy Hsia, a West Point graduate who has served in Iraq, says in a Feb. 18 piece that success in Marjah will hinge on a "civilian surge." Hsia has, lamentably, bitten off on the jagged piece of crack-pottery that says in order to succeed in Afghanistan we need lots and lots of American civilians to go over there and be policemen and fire dudes and construction workers and so on as part of a Civilian Response Corps. The idea is so ludicrous that its proponents picked Dick Cheney protégé Doug Feith, the dumbest freaking guy on the planet, to shill it in a May 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We already have a Civilian Response Corps; it’s called the Peace Corps, and it’s been around since before people joined it to get out of fighting in Vietnam. As you might have already inferred, the reason we call it a "Peace" Corps is that it only works in a peacetime scenario. Sending U.S. civilians into a hot war zone, especially one like we have in Afghanistan where there are no front lines, doesn’t accomplish a whole lot except get a whole lot of U.S. civilians killed. The only way to try to protect the civilians is to send more soldiers to the war zone or (aha!) hire mercenary outfits like Blackwater to do the job. Even then, the civilians have to stay holed up in areas where the soldiers or the hired thugs can protect them, so they can’t do what we supposedly sent them for.

But civilians provide a vital layer in the Pentagon’s lame-excuse stratagem. If our military can’t win a war, it’s because we don’t have enough military in the theater of operations. If we have enough military, we don’t have enough military from the country we’re fighting in to fight with us. If we have enough military from the country we’re fighting in but they turn out to be a pack of Gomer Pyles, then we don’t have enough civilians involved. Next, I suppose, come household pets.

Of course, civilians might be able to do one thing that our Green Berets can’t: teach Afghan soldiers how to load and carry their rifles.

Read more by Jeff Huber
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2010/02/22/marjah-madness/

Click here to print.
Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original. All rights reserved.

45 killed in fresh Afghan violence.

Notice that these attacks are in Western Afghanistan not the south or east where most of the violence usually occurs. Official pronouncements about numbers of Taliban killed are always suspect. Note that the kills are after U.S. air bombardment. This practice is bound to produce collateral damage that is a great recruitment boon for the Taliban. The Taliban seem to be learning to spin the news from the occupiers According to the Taliban those killed were all innocent civilians! This is from AFP.



45 killed in fresh Afghan violence
Mon Jun 30, 9:02 AM ET
US-led air strikes and Afghan ground troops killed 33 Taliban rebels in western Afghanistan, while four civilians were killed in bomb blasts elsewhere, officials said Monday.
The coalition said "numerous" militants were killed on Sunday during an operation in Nimroz province targeting a Taliban leader involved in bomb attacks but did not give further details.
Insurgents attacked a police post in Khash Rod district of Nimroz late Sunday, leaving five Taliban dead in the clash that broke out immediately afterwards, provincial police chief Mohammad Ayob Badakhshi told AFP.
After the incident the militants massed with other insurgents in the same district, where they were bombed by US-led coalition aircraft, provincial governor Ghulam Dastageer Azad told AFP.
"In the aerial bombing by the US troops 28 Taliban were killed and many others were wounded. The dead include three Taliban commanders," Azad said.
The Afghan interior ministry however put the death toll at 15.
The governor said locals had told him that eight civilians were also killed near the bombing area but he could not confirm the information.
A coalition statement said it killed "numerous" armed militants using small-arms fire and air strikes in an operation on Sunday targeting a Taliban leader known to facilitate bomb attacks, but did not give figures.
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said that none of its fighters were killed in the bombing and that all those who died were civilians. Many of his previous claims have proved to be exaggerated.
"They killed 22 people and they were all civilians who had gathered in open due to hot weather for a ceremony. None of them were Taliban," Ahmadi said in a telephone call.
Meanwhile a mother and three of her sons died when a bomb the men were allegedly constructing exploded in their home in Wardak province, just south of the capital Kabul, district chief Enaytullah Mangal told AFP.
A teenage girl, apparently the sister of the suspected insurgents, was wounded.
"Our investigation showed that they were constructing a bomb to be later used in terrorist attacks. The bomb exploded and killed three brothers and their mother," Mangal said.
The district chief said that one of the brothers, an engineer, was recently freed from a jail where he was held for several months over suspected links with Taliban militants.
Hundreds of Afghan security forces backed by NATO-led troops launched an operation in several districts in Wardak at the weekend to root out Taliban insurgents who have increased attacks in recent weeks.
Three US-led soldiers were killed in a bomb explosion there on Friday.
Separately four civilians were killed and two police were wounded in three roadside bomb blasts Monday in Zurmat district of eastern Paktia province, spokesman for provincial governor Rohullah Samoon said.
In a similar incident an army vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb on Sunday in the same district killing two Afghan soldiers, the defense ministry said.
Another two militants were killed Sunday in a firefight in the Marja district of troubled Helmand province, the ministry said.
The Taliban was ousted from power in late 2001 by a US-led invasion and has since launched a bloody insurgency which has claimed thousands of lives.
Copyright © 2008 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.

Karzai decries civilian deaths from international operations

As I have noted in previous posts these actions are likely causing NATO forces to lose the support of the citizens and increase recruits and support for the Taliban. The US and NATO reports often ignore or deny that there are civilian casualties as is the case here. Of course Karzai is more or less impotent as far as stopping the attacks are concerned. I am sure he does not get to authorise them. It is the military that decides when and how to attack. In fact Karzai depends upon a US contractor to provide him with personal security.

Afghan president decries civilian deaths By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer
Wed May 2, 1:45 PM ET



KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghans can no longer accept or understand civilian deaths from international military operations, President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday after officials said 51 villagers were killed during a U.S.-led offensive against the Taliban in western Afghanistan.



Despite claims that women and children were among the dead, the U.S. military maintained it had no reports of civilian casualties. But rising public anger was evident as students staged a fourth day of anti-American protests in an eastern city over civilian deaths.

Karzai met with NATO, U.S. and European Union officials, telling them that "civilian deaths and arbitrary decisions to search people's houses have reached an unacceptable level, and Afghans cannot put up with it any longer," according to a statement from his office.

During an earlier news conference, Karzai said Afghans had reached their limit after the years of conflict since the Taliban's ouster in late 2001.

"The intention is very good in these operations to fight terrorism. Sometimes mistakes have been made as well, but five years on, it is very difficult for us to continue to accept civilian casualties," Karzai told reporters.

"We can no longer accept civilian casualties the way they occur," he added. "It is not understandable anymore."

The U.S.-led coalition said the military operation in western Herat province was conducted between Friday and Sunday by U.S. and Afghan troops in the Zerkoh Valley and killed 136 suspected Taliban militants — the deadliest fighting in Afghanistan since January.

The bloodshed sparked angry anti-U.S. protests earlier this week by villagers. Mohammad Homayoun Azizi, chief of Herat's provincial council, said two council members who visited the area along with Afghan police and intelligence officers reported that 51 civilians were killed.

Azizi said the bodies were buried in three locations and included women and children. The dead included 12 relatives of a man named Jamal Mirzai, he said.

A man being treated in a hospital Wednesday said he was wounded by an airstrike that did not hit any insurgents. "There were no Taliban. Ten of my relatives have been killed, including two of my cousins," said the man, who gave only his first name, Mohammed.

Osman Kalali, a lawmaker who was part of the investigative delegation, said they did not see any Taliban or other militants among the dead. "The casualties were women, children, this kind of people," he said.

Civilian deaths have deepened Afghans' distrust of international forces and of the U.S.-backed government as they try to combat a resurgent Taliban — itself accused by human rights groups of indiscriminate attacks that often kill noncombatants.

"We do everything we can to prevent civilian casualties in our operations, and we have no reports of civilian casualties in that operation" in Herat, said a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, Maj. Chris Belcher.

Think tank claims NATO mission failing in Afghanistan

Perhaps one of the main reasons that the mission is failing is that the Afghans really do not take kindly to occupation or occupation promoted governments. Ask the Russians or earlier occupiers.


Thursday » February 15 » 2007

Think-tank claims lack of trust behind Afghan mission's failure

Richard Foot
CanWest News Service


Thursday, February 15, 2007



CREDIT: AFP/Canada and its allies in Afghanistan are waging a losing war against the Taliban that's killed thousands of innocent civilians, harmed the reputation of coalition forces and fuelled support for the insurgency in the past year, says a new report on the conflict by the Senlis Council.

The council is an independent, London-based think-tank specializing in security and development issues. A team of researchers led by the council's president - Canadian Norine MacDonald, who lives in Afghanistan - interviewed more than 500 ordinary citizens in the war-torn south over the past two months.

The results of that research were released on Wednesday in a 186-page report titled, "Countering the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies."

The report is a withering indictment of the war's conduct by NATO governments, especially through 2006, the first year of Canada's mission in the volatile province of Kandahar.

In particular, it says coalition governments have failed to heed the fundamental rule that a counter-insurgency can't be won at the point of a gun, but rather with policies to win the trust and confidence of local people.

Instead, the council says failed coalition policies - such as the bombing of villages, the poppy eradication program and the lack of school or hospital construction - are directly responsible "for the rise of the insurgency."

MacDonald says coalition governments have shown a "blatant disregard for established counter-insurgency theories," and their ongoing mistakes have generated an army of "resentful and poor young men who cannot feed their families.

"Through these misguided policies, the international community has turned southern Afghanistan into a recruitment camp for the Taliban."

Officials at both the Defence Department and Foreign Affairs declined comment on the report Wednesday.

The council is particularly critical of the use of aerial attacks in southern Afghanistan, where it says NATO carried out more than 2,000 bomb attacks in 2006, leading to the deaths of an estimated 4,000 civilians.

Senlis officials, however, support NATO's military presence in the area and are in favour of calls for increased troop numbers.

Last fall, MacDonald appeared in Ottawa before the House defence committee, where she praised the courage of Canadian soldiers in the battles around Kandahar.

Canadian troops frequently called in air strikes during those battles last year. Air strikes are used not only to intimidate and destroy the enemy, but also to shield and protect troops who have come under Taliban fire.

MacDonald says the bombing is the result of having too few troops on the ground. When coalition forces become overwhelmed in a firefight, they call in an air strike to clinch the battle.

But because the Taliban live and hide among local populations, bombing also destroys villages and kills and maims civilians.

The Senlis report says while coalition forces whisk wounded soldiers off to sophisticated army field hospitals, NATO makes no effort to provide medical care to wounded civilians - a violation of the Geneva Conventions on minimizing the suffering of civilian war victims.

"Why did the Canadian government and CIDA not say, 'let's get some assistance to people who are being injured by air strikes,'" said MacDonald in an interview Wednesday. "It's a complete lack of either concern for local people, or a complete lack of understanding of how to fight a counter-insurgency."

The report includes a photograph of the mobile Burger King trailer at Kandahar Airfield, where NATO troops can buy fries and burgers. It says such a trailer "would make an excellent mobile surgical clinic for civilian victims of war."

Worse, the report says coalition governments have done almost nothing during five years in southern Afghanistan to build basic health facilities for the local population.

In an accompanying case study, the council says hospitals in the capitals of Kandahar and Helmand provinces remain "dilapidated, barren and filthy," and lack "basic war zone trauma treatment, medical diagnostic equipment, medicines, oxygen, and trained staff."

The council says such oversights are typical of the coalition's failure to mount an effective campaign for the hearts and minds of Afghans.

While a hard core of the Taliban are religious jihadists that can only be defeated by force, the report says many insurgents are recruited because of grinding poverty, or because of resentment bred by coalition actions on the ground.

These people represent a "grassroots insurgency," the report says, which can best be solved by serious efforts to develop the economy, build local infrastructure, schools and hospitals, and rid the Karzai government of corruption.

"The Taliban are a very competitive employer, offering wages with which no other employer can compete," says MacDonald.

An average Taliban fighter is paid the equivalent of $400 US a month, compared to $60 for an Afghan army soldier and only $50 for a doctor in an Afghan hospital.

To succeed in Afghanistan the international community must "urgently reassess" its strategy before an anticipated Taliban offensive this spring, the report says. Its recommendations include:

- Ending the U.S.-sponsored poppy eradication program, which hurts farmers and breeds resentment in rural areas. Instead, a pilot project should be started to license the production of opium, thereby legalizing the poppy crop, taking its profits out of the hands of the Taliban, and producing essential medicines such as morphine for local hospitals;

- Instituting a program of widespread food aid in the south;

- Compensating civilian victims of air strikes and sending mobile field hospitals to help civilian casualties;

- Increasing the coalition aid and development effort at least to the level of the military effort.

© CanWest News Service 2007








Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.