Category: Afghanistan

Obama’s $106 billion war fund approved in House

US Congress passed the supplemental by a vote of 226 to 202.
US Congress passed the supplemental by a vote of 226 to 202.

US President Barack Obama’s election on an anti-war ticket looks even more hollow by the day. First there was the admission that US troops would remain in Iraq in some capacity until 2011 (or beyond, should the Iraqis request it of course). Now Obama’s the re-invasion of Afghanistan is to be escalated after Congress narrowly passed a supplemental $106 billion support fund for its continuation.

Looking at the breakdown of these huge sums we can see that Obama’s Af-Pak policy differs little from that of his predecssors with $80 billion going towards military operations with only $10.4 billion allotted to international development (about $7 billion will go towards the swine flu epidemic). The Neo-cons too showed little concern for the aftermath of their destruction. The measure will go through the Senate today. With no exit-strategy for the quagmire in Af-Pak, Katrina Vanden Heuvel writes that this action threatens both Obama’s ability to “re-engage the international community” and also his domestic plans.

Just a few minutes ago, the Obama Administration’s $106 billion war supplemental passed on the House floor by a vote of 226-202. Congressional Democrats who oppose military escalation were in a tough position. They were whipped aggressively by both Speaker Pelosi and the White House. And they support President Obama. Which is exactly why they did the right thing in voting no.

President Obama himself has said, “There’s got to be an exit strategy.” Yet we are sliding into a military escalation and commitments without a full and necessary national debate about the ends, means, or exit strategy for this war. Continue reading “Obama’s $106 billion war fund approved in House”

Obama’s bulldozer risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan’s Khmer Rouge

The caption reads Pakistan first
The caption reads "Pakistan first"

Pankaj Mishra is one of the most astute analysts of South Asian politics. In the following he argues that ‘Unless the US president can break his hardline posture, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan could prove his Vietnam’.

Last month Richard Holbrooke, the US state department’s special representative, met students from Pakistan’s north-west tribal ­areas. They were ­enraged by drone attacks, which – ­according to David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to General Petraeus – have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 700 civilians. One young man told Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a Predator drone strike. “You killed 10 members of his family,” he said. ­Another claimed that the strikes had unleashed a fresh wave of refugees. “Are many of them Taliban?” Holbrooke asked. “We are all Taliban,” he replied.

Describing this scene in Time, Joe Klein said he was shocked by the declaration, though he recognised it as one “of solidarity, not affiliation”. He was also bewildered by the “mixed loyalties and deep resentments [that] make Pakistan so difficult to handle”. One wishes Klein had paused to wonder if people anywhere else would wholeheartedly support a foreign power that “collaterally” murders 50 relatives and friends from the air for every militant killed.

Continue reading “Obama’s bulldozer risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan’s Khmer Rouge”

Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly (portrait by Robert Shetterly)

The brave and tireless Kathy Kelly who founded Voices in the Wilderness to campaign against the genocidal UN-US sanctions on Iraq is presently touring the Pakistani conflict zones.Yesterday we published her moving report from the Shah Mansoor refugee camp in Swabi. Today she sent us two of her earlier dispatches which we have published below. All her future dispatches from the region will also be appearing on PULSE.

9 June 2009, Waziristan — In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:

“The planes always come…like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.”

The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20th, 2009.  A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.

Continue reading “Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan”

Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice – James Petras

“The Deltas are psychos… You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance.

Continue reading “Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice – James Petras”

U.S. stirs a hornet’s nest in Pakistan

Eric Margolis presents an overly idealized portrait of the Pakhtun but is otherwise astute in his analysis. One thing however needs to be made clear: while Margolis is right to point out that the government fails to make a distinction between Taliban and Pakhtun, the actual Taliban constitute a very small and radical minority within the larger Pakhtun nation. In the past they were completely marginal. If today they have turned into a political force requiring large scale military operation to tame them it testifies to the fact that the grievances run deeper and the way this operation has been conducted it will only confirm the view that this is a war on the indigent Pakhtuns, and is a war wage for the US. Despite the Pakistani elite’s embrace of the war as ‘our war’, let us not forget that it has taken the US invasion of Afghanistan, the drone attacks across the border, and the Pakistani military’s indiscriminate operations to turn a domestic nuisance into a national predicament.

PARIS — Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 “terrorists” killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people — most of Swat’s population — made refugees.

Continue reading “U.S. stirs a hornet’s nest in Pakistan”

Rumsfeld’s roving band of executioners

Afghan villagers sift through the rubble of destroyed houses after the coalition air strikes in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, Afghanistan
Afghan villagers sift through the rubble of destroyed houses after the coalition air strikes in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, Afghanistan

The Independent reports that US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, which was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents, including the recent bombing in Bala Baluk, in Farah  which killed up to 147 people including more than 90 women and children. This news comes just days after the Special Forces Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, who was himself involved in the coverup of the death of Pat Tillman, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle against the Afghan resistance.

According to the paper MarSOC faces opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community with an article in the Marine Corps Times accusing the unit of bringing shame on the corps. The US Army commander in Nangahar likewise said he was “deeply ashamed” of the units behavior which is “a stain on our honour”. Apparently at the first sign of danger, these ‘special forces’ pansies panick and call in the airforce to bomb everything within sight. These are apparently the same skills that they are now imparting to the Pakistani military with, as we have noted, very similar consequences.

Continue reading “Rumsfeld’s roving band of executioners”

US policy in Pakistan

US policy makes things worse in Pakistan (Part One)

Aijaz Ahmad: US policy will lead to thousands of new recruits for al- Qaeda.

US Pakistan policy is floundering (Part Two)

US must work with regional states and pull out of Afghanistan to find Pakistan solution.

Continue reading “US policy in Pakistan”

Afghan Parliament Wants Law to Curb Foreign Troops

The following is by Sayed Salahuddin in Reuters.

An Afghan girl injured during an air strike in Garni village in western Farah province, recovers in hospital, on May 9, 2009. The United Nations said Monday that whoever was behind "significant" civilian deaths in heavy fighting and US air strikes in Afghanistan last week must be held accountable. (AFP/Reza Shirmohammadi)
An Afghan girl injured during an air strike in Garni village in western Farah province, recovers in hospital, on May 9, 2009. The United Nations said Monday that whoever was behind "significant" civilian deaths in heavy fighting and US air strikes in Afghanistan last week must be held accountable. (AFP/Reza Shirmohammadi)

KABUL – Afghan lawmakers on Monday demanded legal restrictions on foreign forces fighting in their country, to prevent further civilian deaths, then closed for half a day to protest the latest casualties from U.S. air strikes.

The attacks on homes packed with civilians, during a protracted battle last week, have damaged ties with Washington and stoked popular anger about the presence of western troops, over rising non-combatant deaths.Debate about innocent casualties dominated the morning’s session and the delegates said they had given the government one week to come up with a way of regulating foreign fighters.

“To prevent the bombardment and killing of our people, the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) has decided the government must come up with a plan, within one week, to regulate the foreign forces,” said Wolesi Jirga secretary Abdul Sattar Khawaasi.

Continue reading “Afghan Parliament Wants Law to Curb Foreign Troops”

The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam

Af and Pak at the press conference with Obama

Tony Karon–The Rootless Cosmopolitan–nails it in this excellent analysis of the myopic US policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There was something almost painful about watching President Barack Obama last week reprising a track from his predecessor’s Greatest Hits when he hosted the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just like Bush, Obama invited us to suspend well-grounded disbelief and imagine that Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari have the intent, much less the capability, to wage a successful war against the Taliban. Then again, there had been something painful even earlier about watching Obama proclaim Afghanistan as “the right war” and expanding the U.S. footprint there, reprising the Soviet experience of maintaining an islet of modernity in the capital while the countryside burns.

It requires a spectacular leap of faith in a kind of superheroic American exceptionalism to imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in November 2001 will end any differently from any previous invasion of that country. And it takes an elaborate exercise in self-delusion to avoid recognizing that the Taliban crisis in Pakistan is aneffect of the war in Afghanistan, rather than a cause — and thatPakistan’s turmoil is unlikely to end before the U.S. winds down its campaign next door.

Continue reading “The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam”

Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Sober advice for Obama from Graham E. Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of The Future of Political Islam.

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

— Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

— The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

— It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

Continue reading “Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan”