AUGUST 2008

AFGHANISTAN: PROTECTING A NARCO STATE AGAINST TERRORISM

JUNE 2008

AFGHANISTAN: THE OTHER WAR WE'RE LOSING

ULLRICH FICHTNER, SPIEGEL, GERMANY Forty nations are embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Anyone who travels through the country with Western troops soon realizes that NATO forces would have to be increased tenfold for peace to be even a remote possibility. . .

Good days are in short supply in Afghanistan, a country at war -- or involved in several wars, to be exact. There is constant fighting on many fronts, hard and soft. The newspapers, and there are many of them in Kabul now, serve up pages of chaotic images every day. Their reports are about bombs and drinking water, holy warriors and wheat prices, NATO air attacks and schoolbooks, kidnapped children, refugees and bandits.

Almost seven years have passed since the overthrow of the Taliban regime, and in those seven years half of the world has tried to bring a better future and, most of all, peace to this new country, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. As part of the NATO military operation known as the International Security Assistance Force, 40 nations have 60,000 soldiers deployed in the country. There are 26 United Nations organizations in Afghanistan, and hundreds of private and government agencies are pumping money, materials and know-how into the country's 34 provinces. But anyone seeking success stories or asking about failures will encounter reports that do not seem to be coming from the same country.

According to the speeches and statements Western military officials, diplomats and politicians are constantly churning out, the security situation has improved substantially, the military successes are obvious and the Taliban are as good as defeated. But peace and Afghanistan, say the Afghanis when speaking to a domestic audience, are still two incompatible words.

Last year, 1,469 bombs exploded along Afghan roads, a number almost five times as high as in 2004. There were 8,950 armed attacks on troops and civilian support personnel, 10 times more than only three years earlier. One hundred and thirty suicide bombers blew themselves up in 2007. There were three suicide bombings in 2004. .

There is no peace anywhere in Afghanistan, not even in the north . . . which officials repeatedly insist has been pacified. Anyone who travels the country -- making the obligatory rounds to its ministries, speaking with Western ambassadors, UN directors, ISAF commanders and provincial governors, and meeting with women's rights activists, narcotics officers and police chiefs -- is bound to return with many dark questions and an ominous feeling that this mission is not a task to be measured in years, but in decades, many decades.

MAY 2008

NEWS FROM THE COLONIES: A NEW SUPERMAX FOR AFGHANISTAN

AFGHANISTAN: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

PROGRESS REPORT In a press conference, President Bush said, "I think we're making progress in Afghanistan" -- days after President Hamid Karzai was the subject of an attempted assassination plot. The Interior Ministry said the Taliban, nearly vanquished from the country in 2001, admitted to launching the attack. These rounds of violence are the latest in what has been an eroding situation over recent years. . .

2007 was the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since 2001, with 6,000 killed in the country. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said violence in 2008 "may well reach a higher level than it did in 2007," as insurgents pour in from Pakistan. "This year won't be different," he said. The attempted assassination of Karzai "came as the latest sign of a trend" that the insurgency in Afghanistan "is spreading from the Taliban stronghold of the south to the central and northern regions of the country," Christian Science Monitor reported this week. Furthermore, "there is no security force in Afghanistan that people trust," according to member of parliament Ramazan Bashardost. He added that, after a recent attack, "the security forces fled the area before the ordinary people did." Afghanistan also has rates of illiteracy "among the highest in the world," a "weak and corruption-ridden government," and still retains the world's largest opium poppy crop.

According the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, "Western countries have failed to deliver $10 billion of nonmilitary assistance pledged to Afghanistan over the last six years and the United States, by far the biggest donor, is responsible for half of the shortfall." Funding for Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which Bush "has called the leading edge of stabilization efforts," is "ad hoc and comes from so many sources that congressional investigators were unable to determine how much has been spent," a House Armed Service Committee report said last week. Overall, 42 percent of Afghans rate U.S. efforts in Afghanistan positively," down from 68 percent in 2005 and 57 percent last year, according to a December ABC News poll.

JANUARY 2008

GERMAN OFFICER CLAIMS NATO TROOPS USED UNSUSPECTING KIDS TO DETECT LAND MINES

DECEMBER 2007

GORDON BROWN WANTS TO TALK WITH TALIBAN

INDEPENDENT, UK - Six years after British troops were first deployed to oust the Taliban regime, the Prime Minister believes the time has come to open a dialogue in the hope of moving from military action to consensus-building among the tribal leaders. Since 1 January, more than 6,200 people have been killed in violence related to the insurgency, including 40 British soldiers. In total, 86 British troops have died. The latest casualty was Sergeant Lee Johnson, whose vehicle hit a mine before the fall of Taliban-held town of Musa Qala.

The Cabinet approved a three-pronged plan that Mr Brown will outline for security to be provided by Nato's International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan national army, followed by economic and political development in Afghanistan.

But the intention to engage Taliban leaders in a constructive dialogue will be by far the most controversial element of the plan. A senior Downing Street source confirmed the move last night and one Brown aide who accompanied the Prime Minister on his recent visit to Kabul, said: "We need to ask who are we fighting? Do we need to fight them? Can we be talking to them?"

Senior government officials said it was an error to see the Taliban as a unified organisation rather than as a disparate group of Afghan tribesmen, often farmers recruited at the end of the gun, infiltrated by foreign fighters. The aim is to divide the Taliban's local support from al-Qa'ida and militants from Pakistan.

The shift of strategy will place the onus to deliver on Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, who will take the lead in opening discussions with Taliban leaders through provincial governors.

MARCH 2007

AFGHAN ANTI-CORRUPTION CHIEF IS DRUG DEALER

JUSTIN HUGGLER, INDEPENDENT, UK - Afghanistan's new anti-corruption chief has a shady past. Izzatullah Wasifi served nearly four years in a US prison for trying to sell heroin to an undercover agent in Las Vegas for $65,000. It is not the ideal CV for a man appointed to root out corruption in the country that is overwhelmingly the world's biggest supplier of opium, from which heroin in refined.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2344759.ece

DECEMBER 2006

THANKS TO WAR, AFGHANISTAN IS AMERICA'S MAJOR SOURCE OF HEROIN

GARRETT THEROLF, LA TIMES - Supplies of highly potent Afghan heroin in the United States are growing so fast that the pure white powder is rapidly overtaking lower-quality Mexican heroin, prompting fears of increased addiction and overdoses. Heroin-related deaths in Los Angeles County soared from 137 in 2002 to 239 in 2005, a jump of nearly 75% in three years, a period when other factors contributing to overdose deaths remained unchanged, experts said. . .

According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report obtained by The Times, Afghanistan's poppy fields have become the fastest-growing source of heroin in the United States. Its share of the U.S. market doubled from 7% in 2001, the year U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban, to 14% in 2004, the latest year studied. Another DEA report, released in October, said the 14% actually could be significantly higher.

Poppy production in Afghanistan jumped significantly after the 2001 U.S. invasion destabilized an already shaky economy, leading farmers to turn to the opium market to survive.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/25/ap/health/mainD8M85H6G1.shtml

NOVEMBER 2006

PAKISTANI OFFICIALS TO NATO: GIVE UP AND WORK A DEAL WITH THE TALIBAN

AHMED RASHID, LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH - Senior Pakistani officials are urging NATO countries to accept the Taliban and negotiate a series of regional peace agreements similar to those that Pakistan has reached in tribal areas along its border with Afghanistan. Prior to last week's NATO summit in Latvia, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri told foreign ministers from some NATO member nations that the Taliban was winning the war in Afghanistan and that NATO was bound to fail. "Kasuri is basically asking NATO to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently. . . Lt. Gen. Ali Mohammed Jan Orakzai, governor of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, said in an interview with Reuters news agency late last month that U.S. and British military actions in Afghanistan were merely feeding a "snowballing" insurgency. "Either it is a lack of understanding or it is a lack of courage to admit their failures," he said of the two countries. Gen. Orakzai also said the Taliban now lead a Pashtun-based "national resistance" movement whose aim is to throw out Western occupation forces. . .

http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20061204-122533-7493r.htm

U.S. ENGAGED IN MASSIVE BOMBING OF AFGHANISTAN

[The "growing demand for American air cover' presumably doesn't from those being killed or injured by it]

DAVID S. CLOUD, NY TIMES - The Air Force has conducted more than 2,000 air strikes in Afghanistan over the past six months, a sharp increase in bombing that reflects the growing demand for American air cover since NATO has assumed a larger ground combat role, Air Force officials said. . .

To carry out the heavier mission load, the Air Force's entire complement of B-1 bombers was shifted over the summer from the British air base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to a Middle Eastern airfield closer to Afghanistan. . .

The 2,095 attacks by American aircraft since June is many times greater than the number of air strikes in Iraq, where the terrain and nature of the conflict are less susceptible to bombing campaigns. There have been only 88 attacks by American aircraft in Iraq since June, according to Air Force figures. Unlike in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq are largely in urban areas and do not often mass in groups large enough to warrant use of airstrikes, Air Force commanders said. . .

This year in Afghanistan, American aircraft have dropped 987 bombs and fired more than 146,000 cannon rounds and bullets in strafing runs, more than was expended in both categories from the beginning of the American-led invasion in 2001 through 2004, the Air Force said. During those years, a total of 848 bombs and just over 119,000 bullets were used by aircraft, according to Air Force figures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/world/asia/17bomber.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

BLAIR'S FAVORITE GENERAL CALLS AFGHANISTAN EFFORT 'CUCKOO'

NED TEMKO AND MARK TOWNSEND, OBSERVER - Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan. The remarkable rebuke by General the Lord Guthrie came in an Observer interview, his first since quitting as Chief of the Defense Staff five years ago, in which he made an impassioned plea for more troops, new equipment and more funds for a 'very, very' over-committed army.

The decision by Guthrie, an experienced Whitehall insider and Blair confidant, to go public is likely to alarm Downing Street and the Ministry of Defense more than the recent public criticism by the current army chief Sir Richard Dannatt. 'Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan - anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] - to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq is cuckoo,' Guthrie said.

In a unprecedented show of scepticism towards Blair, he said the Prime Minister's promise to give the army 'anything it wants' was unrealistic. 'I'm sure he meant what he said. He is not dishonest. But there is no way you can magic up trained Royal Air Force crews, or trained soldiers, quickly. You can't magic up helicopters, because there aren't any helicopters,' said Guthrie, promoted from chief of army staff to become overall head of the military for Blair's first term of office.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1934382,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=15|

UN CHIEF: NATO CANNOT DEFEAT TALIBAN BY FORCE

GUARDIAN - NATO "cannot win" the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job, the UN's top official in the country warned yesterday. "At the moment NATO has a very optimistic assessment. They think they can win the war," warned Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the UN mission in Afghanistan. "But there is no quick fix."

In forthright comments which highlight divisions between international partners as NATO battles to quell insurgency, Mr Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban was crucial. "They [the ANA] can win. But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951222,00.html

SEPTEMBER 2006

BUSH REGIME A GIFT TO OPIUM GROWERS IN AFGHANISTAN

CARLOTTA GALL, NY TIMES - Afghanistan's opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul. He described the figures as "alarming" and "very bad news" for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001. He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country's prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations. . . He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

JUNE 2006

JUST WHAT AN AFGHAN FARMER NEEDS

PR WATCH - Hill & Knowlton will head "a complex $3.8M PR effort" for the U.S. State Department, "targeting Afghan citizens and stakeholder groups to dissuade Afghan farmers from cultivating poppies and boosting global drug trade." Poppy production has soared since the 2001 U.S. invasion. Afghanistan provided 86 percent of the world's heroin in 2005, and "planting has significantly increased in 2006," according to a State Department official. Hill & Knowlton will "deploy communications through seven Afghan provinces" and "build capability" within the Agriculture, Interior and Counter-narcotics Ministries, by providing "communications professionals" and developing each ministry's own communications office. "Foreign and domestic media will be brought along" on poppy eradication missions, and "alternative livelihood efforts" will be promoted in the PR campaign. Current messages include, "Growing poppies is against Islam and harmful for the reputation of Afghanistan." Previous U.S.-funded PR work, by the Rendon Group and others, has been called costly and ineffective by Afghan officials.

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/

UN REPORT ACCUSES AFGHAN OFFICIALS OF WAR CRIMES

DECLAN WALSH, GUARDIAN - A controversial UN report that has been shelved for 18 months names and shames leading Afghan politicians and officials accused of orchestrating massacres, torture, mass rape and other war crimes. The 220-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights, which the Guardian has obtained, details atrocities committed by communist, mujahideen, Soviet and Taliban fighters over 23 years of conflict. Originally scheduled for release in January 2005, the report's publication has been delayed repeatedly due to sensitivities over identifying former warlords still in positions of power. . . Debate over the role of former warlords has grown more heated since anti-foreigner riots rocked Kabul two weeks ago, casting clouds over the $12bn western-funded reconstruction effort. European diplomats are angered that days after the riots President Hamid Karzai appointed 13 former commanders with links to drugs smuggling, organized crime and illegal militias to senior positions in the police force. The names were inserted at the last minute into a list of 86 police chiefs that had been selected by US, German and Afghan officers as part of a drive to professionalize the corrupt force. . .

A European official said the 13 appointments had strained Mr Karzai's relationship with foreign donors and further eroded his credibility with ordinary Afghans. "This is not acceptable to us. If we let people who have committed human rights abuses and economic crimes slip through, Afghans are going to start asking what we are doing here," he said.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13582.htm

APRIL 2006

OUR FORGOTTEN COLONY

PROGRESS REPORT - In a visit last month to Afghanistan, President Bush depicted the country as an unqualified success story, describing it as "inspiring." The reality is much more complicated and troublesome. A report released this month by the Council on Foreign Relations provides the grim details. The Council describes a country "challenged by a terrorist insurgency that has become more lethal and effective and that has bases in Pakistan, a drug trade that dominates the economy and corrupts the state, and pervasive poverty and insecurity."

Last year "was the deadliest [year] in rebel violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001." With the country on the verge of becoming "a disastrous situation," the United States is withdrawing troops and disbursements of financial assistance are declining. Counter-terrorism expert Steven Simon predicts, "There will likely be a crescendo of violence, focused largely on Kabul, this summer." It's time to face reality and change course.

Even the Bush administration "has now admitted that the insurgency [in Afghanistan] is growing and becoming more effective." Attacks "have increased in lethality, with increased use of tactics seen in Iraq, including suicide bombings, which...have quadrupled in the past year, and improvised explosive devises, whose use has doubled." . . . Some experts attribute the spike in violence to "a vast canvas of weakly governed and unprotected territory in which drug traffickers, feuding tribesmen and opportunistic criminals -- as well as Taliban gunmen on motorbikes and mysterious suicide bombers -- operate with increasing ease." Last year "1,600 people, including 91 U.S. troops, were killed...more than double the total in 2004." Violence is expected to increase further as "insurgents will try to test the NATO forces that are moving in to take over from more seasoned US military troops.

In 2005, Afghanistan produced 87 percent of the world's opium. With the exception of 2001, when coalition forces deposed the Taliban, opium production has steadily increased since 1995. Last year, the export value of the illicit opium was $2.7 billion, accounting for more than 50% of the Afghan economy. About 2 million Afghans (about 9% of the population) is involved in opium production. It's not hard to understand why. The average yearly gross income for an opium-growing family ($1800) is about nine times Afghanistan's average per capita GDP ($226). Ultimately, "efforts to stabilize Afghanistan will fail if the licit economy does not expand fast enough to provide enough employment, income, and investment to more than balance the loss of income from opiates."

The key to economic expansion in Afghanistan is reconstruction. In 2002-2003, per capita economic assistance in Afghanistan "was far below all Balkan operations, East Timor, and Iraq, and even below Namibia and Haiti" during the first two years of stabilization operations in those countries. . . One big problem: "much of the increase in aid has gone to the security sector, which has cost far more than projected." Richard Holbrooke, former Ambassador to the UN, noted, "With so much at stake, it is surprising that the administration asked for a pittance (about $40 million) for Afghan reconstruction in its recent supplemental, after the State Department and the U.S. Embassy requested about 10 times as much. Still worse, Congress compounded the lowered funding request by cutting the appropriation to $4 million."

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=1331575&ct=2197353

FEBRUARY 2006

A United Nations report concluded last year that Afghanistan remains one of the world's least developed countries, ranking 173rd out of 178 countries surveyed. For every 1,000 babies born in Afghanistan, 142 die before their first birthday. An Afghan woman dies in pregnancy every half-hour. Overall life expectancy is estimated at just under 42 years. Three-quarters of adults are illiterate and few girls go to school. But no problem haunts the country more than its displaced peoples - the UN estimates four million Afghans are refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and another two million are uprooted in their own country. The total, a fifth of the population, represents the largest refugee crisis in the world.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1702513,00.html

NOVEMBER 2004

BUSH GETS AFGHAN ECONOMY GOING

NY TIMES - Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the source of most of the opium and heroin on Europe's streets, was up sharply this year, reaching the highest levels in the country's history and in the world, the United Nations announced on Thursday. . . Afghan officials and foreign diplomats called the sharp rise in cultivation and production a major failure for President Hamid Karzai and the international effort to counter narcotics. More than 321,236 acres of land were planted with poppy in 2004, a 64 percent increase over last year, the United Nations survey found. Poppy has spread to every province in the country, it said. . . The scale of poppy cultivation is particularly alarming, because of the growing stranglehold wealthy traffickers and drug lords hold over farmers, and their influence over the economy and government, Afghan officials and foreign experts said. The income from production and trafficking of opium in 2004 was estimated at $2.8 billion, equivalent to about 60 percent of the country's legal gross domestic product, or more than a third of the total economy, the report said.

EARLIER STORIES

BACK AGAIN: THE RENDON GROUP TO SPIN AFGHANISTAN

DAILY SPIN - "The Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group to counsel and coordinate communications for Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The U.S., according to the New York Times, wants to bolster the leadership of Karzai by promoting 'visible signs of reconstruction.' The paper reports that Karzai's government, in recent weeks, has issued 'choreographed announcements about hundreds of schools and clinics to be built or rehabilitated in the next few months.' Karzai and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the country's defacto CEO, made a media splash on April 17 with a ceremony to celebrate the planting of 850,000 trees as part of the 'greening of Kabul' campaign." But Afghanistan is far from the success story that the Bush administration has been projecting, according to a recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. An unpublished report commissioned by the Pentagon found that "the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all," Hersh writes.

DISINFOPEDIA - The Rendon Group is a secretive public relations firm that has assisted a number of U.S. military interventions in nations including Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Panama and Zimbabwe. Rendon's activities include organizing the Iraqi National Congress, a PR front group designed to foment the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein

In May 1991, then-President George Bush, Sr. signed a presidential finding directing the CIA to create the conditions for Hussein's removal. The hope was that members of the Iraqi military would turn on Hussein and stage a military coup. The CIA did not have the mechanisms in place to make that happen, so they hired the Rendon Group to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign. Rendon's postwar work involved producing videos and radio skits ridiculing Saddam Hussein, a traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, and radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect. . . According to ABC, Rendon came up with the name for the Iraqi National Congress and channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to it between 1992 and 1996. Writing in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh says the Rendon Group was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the CIA" for its work with the INC.

WOMEN BANNED FROM AFGHAN BROADCASTS

MS NEWS - Female performers in an Afghan province have been banned from performing on television and radio. According to Reuters, female entertainers have been declared un-Islamic in the Southeastern province. . . Earlier this year, for the first time in over a decade a video with footage of a famous Afghan female singer was broadcast on public television. The footage of the female performer came just a few weeks after the approval of Afghanistan's new constitution that endorses equal rights for women and men. However, Afghanistan's Supreme Court protested the video, stating that they were opposed to women singing. From 1992-1996, during Afghanistan's civil war, the Islamic mujahadeen did not allow images of women to be broadcasted on television. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they banned television altogether

U.S. AFGHANISTAN FORCES CHARGED WITH TORTURE, OTHER ABUSES

U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan have arbitrarily detained civilians, used excessive force during arrests of non-combatants, and mistreated detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. Human Rights Watch concludes that the U.S.-administered system of arrest and detention in Afghanistan exists outside of the rule of law.

"The United States is setting a terrible example in Afghanistan on detention practices," said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "Civilians are being held in a legal black hole – with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections."

The report also details mistreatment in U.S. detention facilities. Released detainees have said that U.S. forces severely beat them, doused them with cold water and subjected them to freezing temperatures. Many said they were forced to stay awake, or to stand or kneel in painful positions for extended periods of time. "There is compelling evidence suggesting that U.S. personnel have committed acts against detainees amounting to torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment," said Adams.

The report also describes frequent arbitrary arrests of civilians, apparently based on mistaken or faulty intelligence, and numerous cases of civilians—grocers, farmers, or laborers—who were held incommunicado and indefinitely.

Human Rights Watch said that many of the violations documented were reported in non-combat situations, and emphasized that many abuses—especially arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of detainees—were inexcusable even within the context of war.

THE LIST
AFGHAN BOMBINGS EVEN BUSH REGIME ADMITS WERE WRONG

- Dec 2001: 65 killed in bombing of convoy of tribal elders

- April 2002: Four Canadian soldiers killed

- July 2002: 48 killed when bomb hits wedding party

- April 2003: 11 killed by bomb in village of Shkin

- Dec 2003: Nine children killed by bombing in Ghazni Province; six children killed in raid in Paktia province

[BBC]

THE TALIBAN RETURNS

JASON BURKE, OBSERVER, UK - Last week the resurgent Taliban began striking into the cities and against heavily armed coalition troops. Their efforts were once limited to hit-and-run attacks on far-flung government outposts or aid projects and the assassination of moderate clerics. But in the past eight days they have attacked a column of armored vehicles near the Pakistani border, killing a Romanian soldier, and detonated a series of bombs in Kandahar city itself and in Qalat, capital of Zabul province. The Taliban's leaders are also refusing to surrender a Turkish engineer who was kidnapped two weeks ago while working on the key road from Kabul to Kandahar. Instead, they issued threats to kidnap Western journalists. The Taliban are expanding fast. The deputy governor of Zabul admits most of his province is now controlled by the militia. Most of Oruzgan province and around half of Kandahar province is now beyond government authority.

AMERICAN TORTURE SECRET

HENRY PORTER, GUARDIAN - [The] Washington Post alone has pressed the US government on the legality of Guantanamo Bay and the processes instituted there, not by lawyers, but the jesuitical neo-conservative mandarins of the Pentagon, and it has gone some way to exposing the "stress and duress" techniques applied to prisoners at the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Researching my book Empire State, a novel set against the background of these abuses, I discovered that the information is not terribly difficult to come by. In March, prisoners at Bagram reported being beaten, deprived of sleep and made to lie naked on a sheet of ice. The same month, US military coroners ruled that the deaths of two prisoners in mysterious circumstances were homicides. Just before the invasion, I met an American who is attached to a shadowy military/espionage operation; I asked him about the rumors of torture. He replied with a look of astonishment, "Are you crazy? Of course. That's the war we've got on our hands. We didn't ask for it this way."

By far the most disturbing development is the American practice of handing over recalcitrant prisoners to be tortured by compliant regimes in Jordan, Morocco and particularly Egypt, where beating, drowning and even electric shock treatment are used. When a man is transported bound and blindfolded - in the American parlance "packaged" - it is said that he has been "rendered" to a foreign service, and from the unutterable hell of his subsequent experience come "extreme renditions." . . .

Naturally, the CIA officers are not themselves applying the electrodes to genitals or rubber truncheons to the soles of the feet, but in the case of prisoners being tortured in Saudi Arabia, they are on hand, in the words of CIA director George Tenet, to "share the debriefing results".

AFGHANISTAN GETS SHORT-CHANGED

IRIN - Less than one percent of the money requested by US president George W Bush, in an overall funding request of US $87 billion to cover post-war activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, would go towards Afghan reconstruction, the representative of a leading NGO in the country said on Wednesday. . . A sum of just US$ 800 million has been earmarked for reconstruction in Afghanistan, forcing CARE to promptly issue a press statement, following the budget's announcement on Monday evening, suggesting that more priority appeared to be attached to Iraq - a country with at least some semblance of a physical infrastructure in place - than to Afghanistan

 AFGHANISTAN'S ROAD TO RUIN

AFGHAN LIBERATION GREAT FOR DRUG LORDS

AFGHANISTAN FALLING BACK INTO OLD WAYS

AFGHANISTAN NO MODEL FOR IRAQ

TWO DECADES OF WAR TURNS AFGHANISTAN INTO ECOLOGICAL WRECK

MEET YOUR NEW ALLIES

[Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum is a nasty piece of work, an Afghan warlord and drug lord who easily qualifies as an international war criminal. He'll be visiting Washington soon and you can expect the media to overlook his seamy side, perhaps giving the general a makeover much as the National Geographic did describing a piece by its writer Robert Young Pelton]

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - Though Dostum's name is almost always preceded in print by the seemingly oxymoronic "brutal warlord," Pelton paints a more benign portrait, calling the general "gentle" and "shy." . . . Dostum's appointment [to the new government] was met with understandable controversy, given his initial opposition to the interim government and his reputation for political infidelity - a reputation Pelton disputes. "Afghanistan is a collection of alliances. It's like Survivor on steroids," says Pelton. "You don't get to the top by being a traitor or by undermining people or backstabbing people. You get to the top by forming people around you who trust and support you." Among those people who came to trust and support Dostum were the 12 Green Berets assigned to the general. Pelton spent much of his several-week stay in their company and was "blown away" by what he saw.

[Now here is an excerpt from a document filed in federal District Court by lawyers for John Walker Lindh to support their motion that he be released from jail pending his trial on charges of conspiring with Al Qaeda to kill Americans]

JOHN WALKER LINDH FILING: In early November 2001, troops of the State of Afghanistan defending a battle line against Northern Alliance advances in the Takhar region retreated toward Kunduz. Mr. Lindh walked without rest for about two days, covering approximately 50 miles through mountainous terrain before arriving in Kunduz. Upon arrival, he was exhausted, severely dehydrated and in physical and psychological shock that impaired his ability to speak. On approximately Nov. 24, 2001, Mr. Lindh and others surrendered their weapons to troops under the command of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and were driven by truck to the fortress at Qala Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif.

At Qala Jangi, Mr. Lindh was held prisoner by Dostum's forces. Dostum and his troops have a reputation for massacring, raping and looting prisoners. That reputation was known to Mr. Lindh and others. On or about Nov. 25, 2001, Mr. Lindh was seated on the ground in the area around the Qala Jangi fort with his hands bound behind him. At that time, he heard an explosion. When Mr. Lindh attempted to run, he was hit by shrapnel or bullets and fell to the ground, where he lay for some hours until he was helped into the basement of the fort by other prisoners.

Mr. Lindh remained in the Qala Jangi fort basement for about seven days until Dec. 1, 2001. During that time, Mr. Lindh had almost no food and very little drinking water. While Mr. Lindh was in the basement, Dostum's soldiers threw grenades through ventilation ducts, killing prisoners below.

At one point, Dostum's soldiers poured oil or diesel fuel down a duct into the basement. About 5 to 10 minutes later, Dostum's soldiers lit the fuel and also poured it into another area of the basement, in which prisoners were more tightly packed. Many prisoners died from the fire. Dostum's soldiers also fired large rockets into the basement through a ventilation shaft, killing many prisoners.

Toward the end of the week, Dostum's soldiers directed ice cold water through the ducts to flood the basement. As the water rose, Mr. Lindh was able to stand up with the help of other prisoners to avoid drowning. Around Mr. Lindh, other prisoners who could not stand were drowned. Wounded, starved and freezing, Mr. Lindh emerged from the fort on Dec. 1, 2001. He was dizzy and numb from the events and apparently still had shrapnel or bullets imbedded in his body.

YURY RAZGULAYEV, PRAVDA, November 2001: The Northern Alliance . . . have weaker funding sources, so they were earning their income from selling drugs. General Dostum had a factory producing heroin.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - As the 1989 to 1995 civil war ground on, Dostum enjoyed an increasingly ferocious reputation. According to Ahmed Rashid's book, "Taliban," he once had one of his own soldiers - accused of stealing - tied to the treads of a tank and rolled to his death. In one Taliban attempt to take Mazar-e Sharif in 1997 - and again when they were retreating last fall - soldiers who might have surrendered or been captured seem to have wound up in mass graves. Only last month, prisoners being held in a jail here were found near starvation . . .

[DOSTUM] WAS suspected of earning huge profits by exporting drugs via Uzbekistan" - Cooley, Unholy Wars

ASIA TIMES, August 27, 1997 - The analytical unit of the Russian Federal Security Bureau recently issued a classified intelligence report on the current situation in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. The report pins the primary blame for the present aggravation of the military-political situation in the republic on the powerful Afghan warlords, and the Uzbeki warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in particular . . . Why were Dostum's henchmen interested in perpetuating a destabilized Tajikistan? Simple, say specialists from the FSB: The Afghan warlords are interested in continuation of the civil war in Tajikistan because the violence and unrest facilitates the task of smuggling huge amounts of drugs into the republic and from there to Russia, Europe and North America. The report specifically emphasizes that drug trafficking is a primary source of income for different warring factions in Afghanistan. More importantly, of course, drug trafficking supplements the personal income of the leaders from the various Afghan factions -- including Taliban officials.