Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged Kabul

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Paul Merrell

Hamid Karzai International Airport - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...d_Karzai_International_Airport

war & peace Afghanistan Kabul Airport Dubai air-routes

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Hamid Karzai International Airport (Persian: میدان هوائی بین المللی حامدکرزی‎‎, Pashto: د حامدکرزی نړيوال هوائي ډګر‎, IATA: KBL, ICAO: OAKB), also known as Kabul International Airport (real name Kabul Khwaja Rawash International Airport), is located 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) from the city center of Kabul in Afghanistan. It serves as one of the nation's main international airports and as one of the largest military bases, capable of housing over one hundred aircraft. It was given the new name in October 2014 in honor of former President Hamid Karzai. The decision was made by the National Assembly of Afghanistan and the Cabinet of President Ashraf Ghani.[2] The airport has been expanded and modernized in the last decade. A new international terminal (which has free wi-fi) was added and the older terminal is now used for domestic flights. A number of military bases were also built around the airport, which are used by the United States Armed Forces and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The military of Afghanistan also has a base there, while the Afghan National Police provide security inside the passenger terminals. As of March 2015 the most frequently serviced destination from the airport was Dubai-International with no less than five passenger airlines flying the route, some with multiple daily flights.
  • Hamid Karzai International Airport (Persian: میدان هوائی بین المللی حامدکرزی‎‎, Pashto: د حامدکرزی نړيوال هوائي ډګر‎, IATA: KBL, ICAO: OAKB), also known as Kabul International Airport (real name Kabul Khwaja Rawash International Airport), is located 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) from the city center of Kabul in Afghanistan. It serves as one of the nation's main international airports and as one of the largest military bases, capable of housing over one hundred aircraft. It was given the new name in October 2014 in honor of former President Hamid Karzai. The decision was made by the National Assembly of Afghanistan and the Cabinet of President Ashraf Ghani.[2] The airport has been expanded and modernized in the last decade. A new international terminal (which has free wi-fi) was added and the older terminal is now used for domestic flights. A number of military bases were also built around the airport, which are used by the United States Armed Forces and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The military of Afghanistan also has a base there, while the Afghan National Police provide security inside the passenger terminals. As of March 2015 the most frequently serviced destination from the airport was Dubai-International with no less than five passenger airlines flying the route, some with multiple daily flights.
  • 3 Airlines and destinations 3.1 Passenger 3.2 Cargo
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Oct 15
     
    Interesting factoid to remember: "As of March 2015 the most frequently serviced destination from the airport was Dubai-International with no less than five passenger airlines flying the route, some with multiple daily flights." Also two cargo routes, according to the fine print. Dubai is the largest city in United Arab Emirates. Any reason that route should get flown so much other than Dubai being a travel hub?
Paul Merrell

Taliban assault Camp Bastion, storm foreign guest house in Kabul - The Long War Journal - 0 views

www.longwarjournal.org/...taliban_assault_camp.php

war & peace Afghanistan Taliban

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Fighting between Afghan forces and the Taliban inside Camp Bastion, the large military complex in Helmand province that was evacuated by US and British troops just one month ago, continues for the third day. Meanwhile, in the capital of Kabul, the jihadist group overran a guest house used by foreigners and may have taken hostages. The Taliban initially launched their attack on Camp Bastion on Nov. 27, and Afghan officials quickly claimed the assault was defeated and the jihadists did not penetrate the perimeter of the base. But the attack continued as the Taliban attacked Camp Bastion from two sides, according to Pajhwok Afghan News. An Afghan Army general who commands a regiment in Helmand said that heavily armed fighters with assault weapons and suicide vests are still fighting Afghan forces inside the base.
  • British and US forces handed over Camp Bastion, which served as the British headquarters in the country, to Afghan forces on Oct. 26. The base, along with neighboring Camp Leatherneck, which was the US Marine headquarters in the south, were the main hubs of counterinsurgency and air operations against the Taliban in Helmand, Nimroz, and Farah provinces. Leatherneck was also turned over to Afghan control on Oct. 26. The Taliban have successfully breached security at Camp Bastion once in the past. On Sept. 14, 2012, a 15-man Taliban team penetrated the perimeter at the airbase, destroyed six USMC Harriers and damaged two more, and killed the US squadron commander and a sergeant. Fourteen of the 15 members of the assault team were killed, while the last was wounded and captured. Coalition forces captured one of the leaders of the operation days later, while the Taliban released a video that highlighted the attack.
  • Also today, Taliban fighters assaulted a "foreign guesthouse" just 200 meters from the Afghan parliament building in the capital, according to Pajhwok Afghan News. It is unclear which organization runs the guesthouse. The Taliban claimed it was run by "a Christian organization seeking to convert Muslims," Reuters reported. According to eyewitnesses, "three gunmen in military uniforms" opened fire on the guesthouse, while others stormed the compound and engaged security guards inside. Two fighters wearing suicide vests are said to have entered the compound. Afghan officials said there may be hostages. Today's attack in Kabul is the fourth major assault against Western targets in the capital this week.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The recent attacks in the capital are likely executed by what the International Security Assistance Force and US military officials have previously called the Kabul Attack Network. This network is made up of fighters from the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, and pools resources and cooperates with terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and al Qaeda. Top Afghan intelligence officials have linked the Kabul Attack Network to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate as well. The network's contacts extend outward from Kabul into the surrounding provinces of Logar, Wardak, Nangarhar, Kapisa, Kunar, Ghazni, and Zabul.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Nov 14
     
    I haven't been posting bookmarks for action inside Afghanistan for some time because the trend has been stable, with attacks by the Taliban and other Muslim groups on the U.S. trained and supplied Afghan Army continuing. Even Kabul's Green Zone has seen plenty of action. Prognosis: Taliban retakes control of Afghanistan soon after the last NATO troops withdraw. Obama's prolonging of U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan only postpones the inevitable. But that has been the prognosis for many years now.  
Paul Merrell

The US's Vicious Colonial War - LewRockwell.com - 0 views

www.lewrockwell.com/...the-uss-vicious-colonial-war

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Afghanistan war-on-drugs™

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The last British soldiers were airlifted out of Afghanistan last week, marking the sorry end of Britain’s fourth failed invasion of Afghanistan. With them went the last detachment of US Marines in Helmand. Well has Afghanistan earned its title, “Graveyard of Empires.” To be more precise, this honor belongs to Afghanistan’s Pashtun (or Pathan) mountain tribes, who bend their knees for no man and take pride in war.
  • The US garrison in Kabul will continue to make Afghanistan safe for opium, which is the base for heroin. Americans have simply turned a blind eye to their ownership if the world’s top producer of heroin. As Washington orates about the so-called War on Drugs, Afghan opium production rose in 2013 from $2 billion to $3 billion. The UN says over 500,000 acres of land in Afghanistan are now devoted to the opium poppy – right under the eyes of the US garrison. While US-installed rulers in Kabul pay lip service to opium eradication, the rural warlords who support them, and receive stipends from CIA, continue to grow rich on the opium trade. Trying to blame Taliban for the scourge of opium is dishonest: when Taliban was in power it eradicated almost all of the nation’s opium production, reported he UN Drug Agency, except in the region controlled by the Communist Northern Alliance – which today shares power in Kabul. When the full history of the Afghan war is finally written, CIA’s involvement in that nation’s drug trade will become a notorious episode. French intelligence became deeply involved in the Laotian opium trade to pay its Lao mercenaries. The US was up to its ears with its Contra allies in the Central American cocaine trade.
  • Any native “disturbance” would be bombed and strafed by the RAF. In the 1920’s, Winston Churchill authorized RAF to use poison gas bombs against restive Pashtun and Kurdish tribesmen. Ironically, seven decades later I discovered British scientists who had been sent by HM government to Iraq to build germ weapons for Saddam Hussein to use against Iran. Similarly, the “Pax Americana” will be enforced by US airpower based at Bagram. US warplanes flying from Bagram, Qatar, and aircraft carriers on 24 hour call have been the only force keeping the Pashtun movement Taliban at bay. Without intense employment of US air power, western occupation forces, like the Imperial British armies before them, would have been driven from Afghanistan. Without US air power, garrison troops and large numbers of “civilian contractors” and old-fashioned mercenaries the Kabul puppet regime would soon be swept away. Afghanistan’s government army is likely to collapse as quickly as Iraq’s did before ISIS. Most of southern Afghanistan would declare for Taliban which, however harsh, is the nation’s only authentic political movement apart from the Tajik and Uzbek Communists in the north.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The old imperialists are gone, but the occupation of Afghanistan continues. The new regime in Kabul just installed by Washington to replace uncooperative former ally Hamid Karzai, rushed to sign an “agreement” allowing the United States to keep some 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan for years. This garrison will be exempt from all Afghan laws. However, there’s much more to this arrangement. The US combat troops, tactfully labeled “trainers” or “counter-terrorist forces,” are too few in number to dominate all Afghanistan. Their task is to defend Kabul’s sock puppet government from its own people and to defend the all-important US Bagram airbase. Washington clearly plans to continue ruling Afghanistan and Iraq the same way that the British Empire did. Small numbers of British troops garrisoned the capital; white officers led the native mercenary army. But Britain’s real power was exercised by RAF units based in Iraq and Northwest Frontier Province.
  • Now, US intelligence has besmirched its name once again aiding and abetting Afghan drug lords so as to supposedly wage war on “terrorists.” In dirt-poor Afghanistan, there are only two sources of income: money from Washington, and from narcotics. The collusion of senior members of government, military and police is necessary to export tons of opium to either Pakistan, Central Asia or Russia – where morphine addiction is now a major epidemic. Adding to this shameful record, the US Congressional auditor for Special Reconstruction of Afghanistan just reported that much of the $104 billion appropriated for Afghan “reconstruction” has to no surprise been wasted or stolen. Some of it has been used to irrigate opium poppy fields. Spare parts are unavailable for Russian helicopters bought by the US for use in battling Taliban and supposed opium fighting. Why? Because the US-imposed trade sanctions on Russia bars the US from buying the spare part. Catch-22.
  • By now, the longest war in US history has cost some $1 trillion, maybe more. No one can properly account for the billions and billions of US dollars flown into Afghanistan and Iraq and dished out to the natives – or the numbers of Afghans killed. For Washington’s allies, like Canada and Britain, the war has been a total waste of lives and treasure. For Canada, 158 dead for nothing; for Britain 453. Forget all the phony claims about “mission” and “nation building.” This has been yet another dirty little colonial war that is better forgotten – and never repeated. So this war will simmer on, at least until Washington finds some face-saving way out of the mess in the Hindu Kush. If the US was wise, it would simply quit Afghanistan. But power, like opium, is highly addictive. So America’s longest war will drag on and on.
Paul Merrell

Endless Afghanistan? US-Afghan agreement would keep troops in place and funds flowing, ... - 0 views

worldnews.nbcnews.com/...s-flowing-perhaps-indefinitely

war & peace Afghanistan U.S.-Afghan-Agreement perpetual-war

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • While many Americans have been led to believe the war in Afghanistan will soon be over, a draft of a key U.S.-Afghan security deal obtained by NBC News shows the United States is prepared to maintain military outposts in Afghanistan for many years to come, and pay to support hundreds of thousands of Afghan security forces.The wide-ranging document, still unsigned by the United States and Afghanistan, has the potential to commit thousands of American troops to Afghanistan and spend billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.The document outlines what appears to be the start of a new, open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan in the name of training and continuing to fight al-Qaeda. The war in Afghanistan doesn’t seem to be ending, but renewed under new, scaled-down U.S.-Afghan terms. Advertise | AdChoices “The Parties acknowledge that continued U.S. military operations to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate and agree to continue their close cooperation and coordination toward that end,” the draft states.
  • The 25-page “Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement Between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” is a sweeping document, vague in places, highly specific in others, defining everything from the types of future missions U.S. troops would be allowed to conduct in Afghanistan, to the use of radios and the taxation of American soldiers and contractors.The bilateral security agreement will be debated this week in Kabul by around 2,500 village elders, academics and officials in a traditional Loya Jirga. While the Loya Jirga is strictly consultative, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he won’t sign it without the Jirga’s approval.
  • The copy of the draft -- the full text is available here --  is dated July 25, 2013. As a working draft, it is particularly revealing because it shows the back and forth negotiations, as U.S. and Afghan officials added words and struck out paragraphs. The changes are marked by annotations still revealed in the text. The document is a work in progress. US officials say there have been more changes since July. The draft, however, does indicate the scope of this possible agreement with major implications for Washington, Kabul, U.S. troops and the continuation of America’s longest war.Taken as a whole, the document describes a basic U.S.-Afghan exchange. Afghanistan would allow Washington to operate military bases to train Afghan forces and conduct counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda after the current mission ends in 2014. For that foothold in this volatile mountain region wedged between Pakistan and Iran, the United States would agree to sustain and equip Afghanistan's large security force, which the government in Kabul currently cannot afford. The deal, according to the text, would take effect on Jan. 1, 2015 and “shall remain in force until the end of 2024 and beyond.” It could be terminated by either Washington or Kabul with two years advance written notice.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • There is however what U.S. officials believe is a contradiction in the July draft, which would effectively ask American troops to provide training and confront al-Qaeda from the confines of bases. While it says operations against al-Qaeda may be necessary, it also says US troops will not be allowed to make arrests or enter Afghan homes. Advertise | AdChoices “No detention or arrest shall be carried out by the United States forces. The United States forces shall not search any homes or other real estate properties,” it says.“[The contradiction] was a matter of serious consternation at the highest levels” of the Obama administration over the weekend, according to one senior defense official. “It is the one remaining issue that could ultimately kill the deal." However, US officials believe that in a more recent draft, which was circulated among key Pentagon officials and US lawmakers on Monday, the US has won its position on this point.The document doesn’t specifically say how many U.S. and NATO troops would remain in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Afghan officials tell NBC News they hope it will be 10 to 15 thousand. U.S. officials tell NBC News the number is closer to seven to eight thousand, with an additional contribution from NATO. Factoring in troop rotations, home leave, and breaks between deployments, the service of tens of thousands of American troops would be required to maintain a force of seven to eight thousand for a decade or longer. The anticipated costs would likely run into the billions quickly.
  • Afghan officials tell NBC NEWS the agreement is critical to Afghanistan’s future stability. Without ongoing military assistance, training and funding, those officials say the government could collapse and Afghanistan would enter a civil war. If the agreement passes, the draft says Washington would commit to a long -term, indefinite military involvement in this land-locked Asian nation.A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council did not comment on the draft version of the agreement, but said that "the President is still reviewing options from his national security team and has not made a decision about a possible U.S. presence after 2014."The agreement circulating this week is unlikely to be the last. It first must pass through the Loya Jirga, then go onto parliament for final approval. “We’re looking at 60-days or more” before the US and Afghanistan sign any agreement, defense officials said. Here are highlights of the July draft of the bi-lateral agreement:
Paul Merrell

Declassified Papers Shed Light on US Role in Liaquat's Murder | Arab News - 0 views

www.arabnews.com/287940

U.S.-foreign-policy assassinations Pakistan Ali-Khan

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • 18 July 2006 — Oil, Iran and air bases, seem to be issues of recent times. Not indeed. It was some 55 years back that these issues were very much in play and a recently declassified document indicates that these were the reasons behind the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister on Oct. 16, 1951.
  • A recent declassified document from the US State Department brings to light some interesting facts. According to the document, a telegram was sent by the American Embassy in New Delhi on Oct. 30, 1951. “Is Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination a result of a deep-laid American conspiracy?” The telegram from the US Embassy in New Delhi carried the summary of an article published in the Urdu daily of Bhopal, “Nadeem” on Oct. 24, 1951, charging the US with the responsibility of Khan’s death. The summary then points to the facts raised in the Nadeem article, “It was neither a local incident nor connected with the Pashtoonistan movement (as some may have believed then). It had behind it a deep-rooted conspiracy and recognizable hand.” The article then says that the then Afghan government “knew about the conspiracy and the assassin was an Afghan, yet, the plot was hatched neither in Kabul nor in Karachi (the then capital of Pakistan).”
  • The declassified document reveals that the day before assassination, the secretary to the American ambassador in Karachi absent-mindedly jotted down “holiday” for Oct. 19 in a table diary and then immediately struck it off. Following the secretary’s departure, Mohammad Hussain, a Pakistani employee at the American Embassy in Karachi asked the secretary’s British clerk about the holiday. The clerk described it as a possible slip. “Mistake meaningful,” however, because “the secretary knew the embassy would be closed (on) Oct. 17 (sic) although no American or Pakistani holiday was scheduled then to fall that day. The story in Nadeem then points to another fact, as given in the declassified document. The American ambassador (in Karachi) offered condolences to Liaquat’s wife (Raana Liaquat Ali Khan) on the phone, some three and a half minutes before even the Governor General of Pakistan Khawaja Nazimuddin managed to offer his condolences. This was despite the fact that the governor general was the first to be informed (of the killing) by the Rawalpindi authorities. Indeed with no mobile connection, no live transmissions, even no TV, those were different days and the flow of information was much slower than today. The question that the newspaper article thus tried to raise was how did the American ambassador come to know of the assassination before the governor general of Pakistan found out?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The newspaper article, as summarized by the declassified US document, then discusses the possible reason for the disenchantment of the US and the UK governments with the Pakistan prime minister and his government. Liaquat was not ready to toe the US line, the newspaper pointed out and hence the US wanted him eliminated.
  • According to the article, Liaquat Ali Khan declined to accede to the request. “The US then threatened to annul the secret pact on Kashmir (between Pakistan and the US). Liaquat replied that Pakistan has annexed half of Kashmir without American support and would be able to take the other half too.” Not only that, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan also demanded that the US vacate air bases in Pakistan. “Liaquat’s demand was a bombshell for Washington. Americans who had been dreaming of conquering Soviet Russia from Pakistan air bases were flabbergasted,” the article emphasized. And hence the plot to kill Liaquat was hatched, says the article. However, “the US wanted a Muslim assassin, so as to obviate international complications. The US could not find a traitor in Pakistan (apparently for the reason that the new country was then brimming with nationalistic pride and hope for future),” the article added. The US then turned to Kabul. “Washington contacted the US Embassy in Kabul. They in turn got in touch with Pashtoonistan leaders, pointing to Liaquat as their only hurdle and assuring them that if some of them could kill Liaquat, the US would undertake the task of establishing Pashtoonistan by 1952.”
  • At this the “Pashtoon leaders induced Akbar to take the job and also made arrangements for him to be killed immediately after so as to conceal the conspiracy. The Pakistani currency recovered from the assassin’s body also reveal that others were also involved. Due to already strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan no currency exchange was then taking place between the two countries. Hence only the “American Embassy (in Kabul) could have supplied the Pakistani currency notes to the assassin,” the summary argued. The article also mentioned that the cartridges recovered from the body of the assassinated Pakistani premier were US made. The type of bullet used to kill the Pakistani prime minister were in “use by high-ranking American officers”, and were “not usually available in the market”. The rest is for us to deduce. The article then summarized that all these facts prove that the real culprit behind the killing was the US, which had committed similar acts in the Middle East as well.
Paul Merrell

Secret Docs Reveal Dubious Details of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...-in-afghanistan-a-1010358.html

war & peace drone attacks Afghanistan Pakistan leaked-docs

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Combat operations in Afghanistan may be coming to an end, but a look at secret NATO documents reveals that the US and the UK were far less scrupulous in choosing targets for killing than previously believed. Drug dealers were also on the lists.
  • The child and his father are two of the many victims of the dirty secret operations that NATO conducted for years in Afghanistan. Their fate is described in secret documents to which SPIEGEL was given access. Some of the documents concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the NSA and GCHQ intelligence services are from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Included is the first known complete list of the Western alliance's "targeted killings" in Afghanistan. The documents show that the deadly missions were not just viewed as a last resort to prevent attacks, but were in fact part of everyday life in the guerilla war in Afghanistan. The list, which included up to 750 people at times, proves for the first time that NATO didn't just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale. Some Afghans were only on the list because, as drug dealers, they were allegedly supporting the insurgents.
  • Different rules apply in war than in fighting crime in times of peace. But for years the West tied its campaign in Afghanistan to the promise that it was fighting for different values there. A democracy that kills its enemies on the basis of nothing but suspicion squanders its claim to moral superiority, making itself complicit instead. This lesson from Afghanistan also applies to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen. The material SPIEGEL was able to review is from 2009 to 2011, and falls within the term of US President Barack Obama, who was inaugurated in January 2009. For Obama, Afghanistan was the "good" war and therefore legitimate -- in contrast to the Iraq war. The president wanted to end the engagement in Iraq as quickly as possible, but in Afghanistan his aim was to win.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • After Obama assumed office, the US government opted for a new strategy. In June 2009, then Defense Secretary Robert Gates installed Stanley McChrystal, a four-star general who had served in Iraq, as commander of US forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal promoted the aggressive pursuit of the Taliban. Obama sent 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, but their deployment was tied to a demand that military officials provide a binding date for the withdrawal of US forces. At the same time, the president distanced himself from the grand objectives the West had proclaimed when it first marched into Kabul. The United States would not try to make Afghanistan "a perfect place," said Obama. Its new main objective was to fight the insurgency.
  • This marked the beginning of one of the bloodiest phases of the war. Some 2,412 civilians died in Afghanistan in 2009. Two-thirds of them were killed by insurgents and 25 percent by NATO troops and Afghan security forces. The number of operations against the Taliban rose sharply, to between 10 and 15 a night. The operations were based on the lists maintained by the CIA and NATO -- Obama's lists. The White House dubbed the strategy "escalate and exit." McChrystal's successor, General David Petraeus, documented the strategy in "Field Manual 3-24" on fighting insurgencies, which remains a standard work today. Petraeus outlined three stages in fighting guerilla organizations like the Taliban. The first was a cleansing phase, in which the enemy leadership is weakened. After that, local forces were to regain control of the captured areas. The third phase was focused on reconstruction. Behind closed doors, Petraeus and his staff explained exactly what was meant by "cleansing." German politicians recall something that Michael T. Flynn, the head of ISAF intelligence in Afghanistan, once said during a briefing: "The only good Talib is a dead Talib."
  • Under Petraeus, a merciless campaign began to hunt down the so-called shadow governors and local supporters aligned with the Islamists. For the Americans, the fact that the operations often ended in killings was seen as a success. In August 2010, Petraeus proudly told diplomats in Kabul that he had noticed a shifting trend. The figures he presented as evidence made some of the ambassadors feel uneasy. At least 365 insurgent commanders, Petraeus explained, had been neutralized in the last three months, for an average of about four killings a day. The existence of documents relating to the so-called Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) has only been described in vague terms until now. The missions by US special units are mentioned but not discussed in detail in the US Army Afghanistan war logs published by WikiLeaks in 2010, together with the New York Times, the Guardian and SPIEGEL. The documents that have now become accessible provide, for the first time, a systematic view of the targeted killings. They outline the criteria used to determine who was placed on the list and why.
  • When an operation could potentially result in civilian casualties, ISAF headquarters in Kabul had to be involved. "The rule of thumb was that when there was estimated collateral damage of up to 10 civilians, the ISAF commander in Kabul was to decide whether the risk was justifiable," says an ISAF officer who worked with the lists for years. If more potential civilian casualties were anticipated, the decision was left up to the relevant NATO headquarters office. Bodyguards, drivers and male attendants were viewed as enemy combatants, whether or not they actually were. Only women, children and the elderly were treated as civilians. Even officers who were involved in the program admit that these guidelines were cynical. If a Taliban fighter was repeatedly involved in deadly attacks, a "weighing of interests" was performed. The military officials would then calculate how many human lives could be saved by the "kill," and how many civilians would potentially be killed in an airstrike.
  • The document also reveals how vague the basis for deadly operations apparently was. In the voice recognition procedure, it was sufficient if a suspect identified himself by name once during the monitored conversation. Within the next 24 hours, this voice recognition was treated as "positive target identification" and, therefore, as legitimate grounds for an airstrike. This greatly increased the risk of civilian casualties. Probably one of the most controversial decisions by NATO in Afghanistan is the expansion of these operations to include drug dealers. According to an NSA document, the United Nations estimated that the Taliban was earning $300 million a year through the drug trade. The insurgents, the document continues, "could not be defeated without disrupting the drug trade."
  • According to the NSA document, in October 2008 the NATO defense ministers made the momentous decision that drug networks would now be "legitimate targets" for ISAF troops. "Narcotics traffickers were added to the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) list for the first time," the report reads. In the opinion of American commanders like Bantz John Craddock, there was no need to prove that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban to declare farmers, couriers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.
  • In early 2009, Craddock, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at the time, issued an order to expand the targeted killings of Taliban officials to drug producers. This led to heated discussions within NATO. German NATO General Egon Ramms declared the order "illegal" and a violation of international law. The power struggle within NATO finally led to a modification of Craddock's directive: Targets related to the drug production at least had to be investigated as individual cases. The top-secret dossier could be highly damaging to the German government. For years, German authorities have turned over the mobile phone numbers of German extremists in Afghanistan to the United States. At the same time, the German officials claimed that homing in on mobile phone signals was far too imprecise for targeted killings. This is apparently an untenable argument. According to the 2010 document, both Eurofighters and drones had "the ability to geolocate a known GSM handset." In other words, active mobile phones could serve as tracking devices for the special units.
  • The classified documents could now have legal repercussions. The human rights organization Reprieve is weighing legal action against the British government. Reprieve believes it is especially relevant that the lists include Pakistanis who were located in Pakistan. "The British government has repeatedly stated that it is not pursuing targets in Pakistan and not doing air strikes on Pakistani territory," says Reprieve attorney Jennifer Gibson. The documents, she notes, also show that the "war on terror" was virtually conflated with the "war on drugs." "This is both new and extremely legally troubling," says Gibson.
  • A 2009 CIA study that addresses targeted killings of senior enemy officials worldwide reaches a bitter conclusion. Because of the Taliban's centralized but flexible leadership, as well as its egalitarian tribal structures, the targeted killings were only moderately successful in Afghanistan. "Morover, the Taliban has a high overall ability to replace lost leaders," the study finds.
Gary Edwards

Tomgram: Anand Gopal, How to Create an Afghan Blackwater | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...to_create_an_afghan_blackwater

Anand-Gopal The-Real-Afghan-War

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Real Afghan War How an American Fantasy Conflict Created Disaster in Afghanistan By Anand Gopal [This essay is taken from chapter five of Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of Metropolitan Books.]
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 15
     
    "The other day, as I was reading through the New York Times, I came upon this headline: "Powerful Afghan Police Chief Killed in Kabul." His name was Matiullah Khan.  He had once been "an illiterate highway patrol commander" in an obscure southern province of Afghanistan and was taken out in a "targeted suicide bombing" on the streets of the capital -- and I realized that I knew him!  Since I've never been within a few thousand miles of Kabul, I certainly didn't know him in the normal sense. I had, you might say, edited Matiullah Khan. He was one of a crop of new warlords who rose to wealth and power by hitching their ambitions to the American war and the U.S. military personnel sent to their country to fight it.  Khan, in particular, made staggering sums by essentially setting up an "Afghan Blackwater," a hire-a-gun -- in fact, so many guns -- protection agency for American convoys delivering supplies to far-flung U.S. bases and outposts in southern Afghanistan. He became the protector and benefactor of a remarkable Afghan woman who is a key character in Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which I edited and published in the American Empire Project series I co-run for Metropolitan Books. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Gopal covered the Afghan War for years in a way no other Western journalist did. He spent time with crucial allies of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and with a Taliban commander, with warlords and American Special Ops guys, politicians and housewives. He traveled rural Afghanistan as few American reporters were capable of doing.  In the process, he made a discovery that was startling indeed and has yet to really sink in here. In a nutshell, in 2001, the invading Americans put al-Qaeda to flight and crushed the Taliban.  From most of its top leadership to its foot soldiers, the Talibs were almost uniformly prepared, even eager, to put down thei
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: US looks to bypass Karzai on Afghanistan security deal, sources say | Natio... - 0 views

www.adn.com/...ass-karzai-on-afghanistan.html

war & peace Afghanistan negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • U.S. officials seeking to resolve a tense standoff with Afghan President Hamid Karzai were exploring on Tuesday whether they could bypass him and get other senior officials to sign a security deal authorizing American troops to remain in the country after 2014. A day after Karzai abruptly said he would not sign unless Washington agreed to additional conditions, the Obama administration was pushing for Foreign Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani or another official to endorse the agreement on behalf of the government in Kabul, Afghanistan, several U.S. officials said. The Pentagon has been saying for months that it needs the security pact in place by the end of the year to give planners time to draft deployment schedules and secure funding for post-2014 operations. Without a signed agreement, U.S. officials say, they will begin planning a complete withdrawal of the remaining 47,000 American troops next year. That means Afghanistan could be left to face a still-potent Taliban insurgency without substantial foreign military assistance.
  • Susan Rice, Obama's national security advisor, told Afghanistan's Tolo television station that it was not possible for the United States to postpone signing the deal until the spring, as Karzai has called for. She brushed aside Karzai's call for the release of all Afghans held at the naval prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other demands. "We've concluded the negotiations of the agreement," Rice said at the end of a three-day visit to Kabul. "We're getting the text ready, and we'll sign it at a high level," an apparent acknowledgment that someone other than Karzai could sign for the Afghans. But U.S. officials concede that the notion of bypassing Karzai poses enormous difficulties and is probably not a viable solution to the standoff unless Karzai himself accepts the idea. "The heads of state wouldn't have to sign the document, but they would have to delegate that authority," said a senior U.S. official in Kabul familiar with the discussions. "So I don't think it's clear here if it could be put into effect without (Karzai's) approval."
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13
     
    The Obama Administration dislikes puppets who protest having a string jerked.
Gary Edwards

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012 - The Daily Beast - 2 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ll-change-the-gop-in-2012.html

Banksters Ron-Paul Libertarians Peter-Beinart

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11
     
    Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi
Paul Merrell

Taliban attacks in Afghanistan surge as Coalition ends combat mission - The Long War Jo... - 0 views

www.longwarjournal.org/...taliban_attacks_in_a.php

war & peace Afghanistan U.S.-foreign-policy U.S.-combat-role restarted

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The Taliban followed up two deadly attacks in Kabul earlier last week with a series of bombings, assaults, and suicide attacks in the capital and four provinces over the weekend. Twelve de-mining personnel, 11 Afghan soldiers and police, two Coalition troops, and a Supreme Court official are among those killed.
  • The Taliban have increased offensive operations in Kabul and the provinces as the US and NATO are ending the combat mission in Afghanistan. The rise in violence has forced the US to change the rules of engagement for next year and allow forces to conduct combat missions, as well as keep an additional 1,000 troops in country (10,800 troops will remain in Afghanistan as opposed to the planned 9,800).
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Dec 14
     
    Well, Obama's end to the U.S. combat role in just ended. U.S. combat troops are back in action.  An analogous situation might have been if the U.S. reinvaded South Viet Nam just as the last helicopter lifted off from the U.S. Embassy carrying refugees from the North Vietnamese onslaught.  Some wars can't be won. Viet Nam is one of them. Afghanistan is another. The time when the Taliban will not take over soon after the U.S. removes its combat troops will never come.  But not being the President who lost a war is apparently far more important in the White House than the expense of even more lives wasted in a military stalemate. At least Mikhail Gorbachev had the sense to get out of Afghanistan when he recognized that the Soviets were were incapable of winning their futile war. But not Barack Obama, who is increasingly looking like the sorriest excuse for a President that the U.S. ever had. 
Paul Merrell

Statement by the President on Afghanistan | whitehouse.gov - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/...tatement-president-afghanistan

war & peace Afghanistan American-Foreign-Policy Obama broken-campaign-promises

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • THE PRESIDENT:  Good morning.  Last December -- more than 13 years after our nation was attacked by al Qaeda on 9/11 -- America’s combat mission in Afghanistan came to a responsible end.  That milestone was achieved thanks to the courage and the skill of our military, our intelligence, and civilian personnel.  They served there with extraordinary skill and valor, and it’s worth remembering especially the more than 2,200 American patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan.
  • Following consultations with my entire national security team, as well as our international partners and members of Congress, President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah, I’m therefore announcing the following steps, which I am convinced offer the best possibility for lasting progress in Afghanistan. First, I’ve decided to maintain our current posture of 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of next year, 2016.  Their mission will not change.  Our troops will continue to pursue those two narrow tasks that I outlined earlier -- training Afghan forces and going after al Qaeda.  But maintaining our current posture through most of next year, rather than a more rapid drawdown, will allow us to sustain our efforts to train and assist Afghan forces as they grow stronger -- not only during this fighting season, but into the next one. Second, I have decided that instead of going down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul by the end of 2016, we will maintain 5,500 troops at a small number of bases, including at Bagram, Jalalabad in the east, and Kandahar in the south.  
  • Third, we will work with allies and partners to align the steps I am announcing today with their own presence in Afghanistan after 2016.  In Afghanistan, we are part of a 42-nation coalition, and our NATO allies and partners can continue to play an indispensable role in helping Afghanistan strengthen its security forces, including respect for human rights.    And finally, because governance and development remain the foundation for stability and progress in Afghanistan, we will continue to support President Ghani and the national unity government as they pursue critical reforms.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15
     
    Political cowardice by the U.S. Psychopath in Chief who lacks the military discipline to order a retreat when a battle cannot be won. Better that our troops and Afghans continue to die and be maimed than to let it be said that Mr. Obama lost the war in Afghanistan. So he kicks the can down the road to the next President.
Paul Merrell

Afghanistan Exit Is Seen as Peril to C.I.A. Drone Mission - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-peril-to-drone-mission.html

war & peace Afghanistan drone attacks Pakistan Karzai Obama negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The risk that President Obama may be forced to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year has set off concerns inside the American intelligence agencies that they could lose their air bases used for drone strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and for responding to a nuclear crisis in the region. Until now, the debate here and in Kabul about the size and duration of an American-led allied force in Afghanistan after 2014 had focused on that country’s long-term security. But these new concerns also reflect how troop levels in Afghanistan directly affect long-term American security interests in neighboring Pakistan, according to administration, military and intelligence officials.
  • The concern has become serious enough that the Obama administration has organized a team of intelligence, military and policy specialists to devise alternatives to mitigate the damage if a final security deal cannot be struck with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has declined to enact an agreement that American officials thought was completed last year. If Mr. Obama ultimately withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan, the C.I.A.’s drone bases in the country would have to be closed, according to administration officials, because it could no longer be protected. Their concern is that the nearest alternative bases are too far away for drones to reach the mountainous territory in Pakistan where the remnants of Al Qaeda’s central command are hiding. Those bases would also be too distant to monitor and respond as quickly as American forces can today if there were a crisis in the region, such as missing nuclear material or weapons in Pakistan and India.
  • Their base inside Pakistan was closed after a shooting involving a C.I.A. security contractor, Raymond Davis, and the raid into Pakistani territory that killed Osama bin Laden, both in 2011. Crucial to the surveillance of Bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was the use of an RQ-170 drone. Pakistani officials talked openly in the weeks after that raid about their fear that the unmanned aircraft was also being used to monitor their nuclear arsenal, now believed to be the fastest growing in the world. The raid, and those drones, came out of American facilities just over the Afghan border.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The C.I.A.’s drone bases in Afghanistan, including one in the eastern part of the country, allow operators to respond quickly to fresh intelligence. The proximity to Pakistan’s tribal areas also allows the Predator drones and their larger, faster cousin, the Reaper, to fly longer missions without having to return to base.
  • The Reapers, the newest, largest and most capable of the unmanned armed vehicles, have a range of up to 1,100 miles. That puts Pakistan’s tribal areas within range of some bases the American military has flown from, especially in Kyrgyzstan, where for more than a decade the Pentagon has conducted air operations, include cargo and troop flights, out of a base at Manas. But the United States said last fall that it would pull out of that base in July. Other allied countries are within the Reaper’s range — in the Persian Gulf, for example. But the distances would be too great to carry out drone operations effectively, officials said, and it is very unlikely that any of those nations would approve launching the diplomatically sensitive strikes missions from their soil.“There’s no easy alternative to Afghanistan,” one former senior American counterterrorism official said.
Gary Edwards

Mice and Men: The Failures of Closing our MidEast Embassies | We Meant Well - Peter Van... - 0 views

wemeantwell.com/blog

Peter-Van-Buren Islamic-Wars post-Constitutional-America Embassy-Closures

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • What do you call it when you follow the same strategy for twelve years not only without success, but with negative results? What if time shows that that strategy actually helps the enemy you seek to defeat? Failure.
  • Failing to Learn America’s global war of terror can this week be declared officially a failure, total and complete. After twelve years of invasions, drones, torture, spying and gulags, the U.S. closed its embassies and consulates across (only) the Muslim world. Not for a day, but in most cases heading toward a week, with terror warnings on file lasting through the month. The U.S. evacuated all non-essential diplomatic and military personnel from Yemen; dependents are already gone from most other MidEast posts. Only our fortress embassies in Kabul and Baghdad ironically were considered safe enough to reopen a day or two ago. The cause of all this? Apparently a message from al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri to his second in command in Yemen telling him to “do something.”
  • Failure to Understand All this might be read in one of three ways: – The simplest explanation is that the threat is indeed real. Twelves years of war has simply pushed the terror threat around, spilled mercury-like, from country to country. A Whack-a-Mole war. – U.S. officials, perhaps still reeling from Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, chose to exaggerate a threat, in essence creating a strawman that could then be defeated. In favor of this argument are the many “leaks” noted above, essentially disclosing raw intel, specific conversations that would clearly reveal to the al Qaeda people concerned how and when they were monitored. Usually try to avoid that in the spy biz. The Frankenbomber stuff is pure 2001 scare tactic recycled. The idea that al Qaeda sought to seize infrastructure is a certain falsehood , as the whole point of guerrilla war is never to seize things, which would create a concentrated, open, stationary target that plays right into the Big Hardware advantage the U.S. holds. Just does not make sense, and supports the idea that this is all made-up for some U.S. domestic purpose. – However, the third way of looking at this is that the U.S. has failed to walk away from the climate of fear and paranoia that has distorted foreign and domestic policy since 9/12, Chicken Littles if you will. What if the U.S. really believed that al Qaeda was planning to take over Yemen this week in spite of the odd inconsistencies? What if “chatter” was enough to provoke the last Superpower into a super-sized public cower?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Failure to Not Act The why in this case may not matter, when the what is so controlling.
  • That sadly predictable resort to violence by the U.S. shows that we have fundamentally failed to understand that in a guerrilla war one cannot shoot one’s way out.
  • You win by offering a better idea to people than the other side, while at the same time luring the other side into acts of violence and political repression that make them lose the support of those same people.
  • This is asymmetrical warfare 101 stuff.
  • –In the populations al Qaeda seeks to influence, claiming they “humbled and scared” the US twelve years after 9/11 simply by ramping up their chatter seems an effective al Qaeda strategy.
  • As with the British thrashing about as their empire collapsed, the world’s greatest military defeated by natives with old rifles, so now goes the U.S., by its own hand.
  • “We continue to pay in blood because we can’t learn how to do something besides fight.”
Paul Merrell

White House tells Hamid Karzai: Take deal, or U.S. troops are leaving Afghanistan - Was... - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...mid-karzai-take-deal-or-us-tro

war & peace Afghanistan bilateral-security-agreement

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The White House issued President Hamid Karzai an ultimatum Monday night, telling him that all U.S. troops will exit Afghanistan in 2014 if he doesn’t sign on to the newly drawn security pact.The tough talk comes as Ambassador Susan Rice and Mr. Karzai met for dinner in Kabul. Mr. Karzai, NBC reported, tried to outline new conditions for the bilateral security agreement, or BSA
  • The White House said in a statement: “Ambassador Rice reiterated that, without a prompt signature, the U.S. would have no choice but to initiate planning for post-2014 future in which there would be no U.S. or NATO troop presence in Afghanistan.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 13
     
    Ooooh! Sounds like there is hope that Obama will end the Afghan War. But somehow, I'm not seeing any deadline for Karzai's signature.
Paul Merrell

US, Afghan security deal at risk as Karzai calls for delay in signing | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...zai-calls-for-delay-in-signing

war & peace Afghanistan Pipelinestan U.S.-Afghan-Agreement

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The tentative security deal reached between Secretary of State John Kerry and Afghan President Hamid Karzai could be at risk after Karzai told a gathering of elders that the signing should be put off until after next year's Afghan presidential election -- and signed only if it is approved by the council and the parliament. 
  • A delay in the signing would be problematic for the U.S. government, which wants an agreement as soon as possible to allow American planners to prepare for a military presence after 2014, when the majority of foreign combat forces will have left Afghanistan.  Despite the decision to defer signing the agreement until after the scheduled April 5 election, Karzai spoke in support of the deal on the first day of the meeting of the 2,500-member national consultative council of Afghan elders known as the Loya Jirga Thursday in Kabul.  At one point, Karzai acknowledged there was little trust between his government and Washington. He was quoted by Reuters as saying "My trust with America is not good. I don't trust them and they don't trust me. During the past 10 years I have fought with them and they have made propaganda against me.'' 
  • Karzai did not address one of the biggest points of contention in the proposed deal, the U.S. request for jurisdiction over its own troops. Lack of agreement over that issue helped scuttle a similar agreement with Iraq and prompted Washington to order most troops out of that country in 2011.  The Loya Jirga retains the right to revise or reject any clause of the deal. If the deal is approved by the council, whatever version of the pact that is extant must also be approved by the Afghan parliament. 
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13
     
    Here's hoping that the Jirga or Afghan Parliament will nix the deal as Iraq did, by refusing to grant U.S. troops and contractors immunity from Afghan criminal law. I read the leaked U.S. markup version of the deal two days ago. It would extend the U.S. Afghan War until 2024 or beyond. Kerry and Obama might be upset; both announced that Kerry had signed the deal this morning. According to Kerry, U.S. involvement will gradually wind down to about 15K troops plus who-knows-how-many contractors and subcontractors. Number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan when Obama took office: 26,607. Number of U.S. troops there as of October, 2013: roughly 51,000. Our Nobel Peace Prize Prez who jokes to his staff about how many people he kills. Ha, ha. Funny. Not.  Let's remember that as recently as June, Obama said that the U.S. could have all troops out before the present deal expires in 2014 if there's no new agreement. I can hope.
Paul Merrell

UN representative Samantha Power: U.S. has 'nothing to apologize' to Afghanistan for | ... - 0 views

www.rawstory.com/...o-apologize-to-afghanistan-for

war & peace Afghanistan Pipelinestan U.S.-Afghan-Agreement

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Washington’s UN representative Samantha Power said Thursday Afghanistan is owed no apology for US actions in the country since the overthrow of the Taliban 12 years ago. “We have nothing to apologize for. Our soldiers have sacrificed a great deal,” Power told CNN, as Washington hammered out the details of a new security agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. The issue of whether or not the United State would offer an apology for mistakes made during the Afghan conflict had emerged as a possible sticking point in the final stages of long drawn out negotiations with Kabul.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13
     
    As I've said before, a war of aggression does not stop being a war of aggression just because 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has new tenants. Considering that we hung German and Japanese leaders for their wars of aggression, I'd say that our head of state needs at the very least to apologize. Better if he's prosecuted, but an apology might be viewed as a mitigating factor come sentencing time.
Paul Merrell

Latest Online News | Agenzia Giornalistica Italia | AGI - 0 views

www.agi.it/...reach_agreement_on_afghanistan

war & peace Afghanistan criminal-immunity

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • (AGI) Kabul, Oct 12 - Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai announced that an agreement on bilateral security was not reached with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been in Afghanistan for two days. Kerry explained that there was agreement on many points, but not on the key issue of immunity for U.S. soldiers who will stay past 2014 to aid Afghan security forces. The lack of an agreement would force the U.S.   to withdraw all U.S. and NATO troops - including Italy's - from Afghanistan, like in Iraq in 2011.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13
     
    Iraq redux? We'd still have troops there if the Iraqi government had not refused to grant U.S. troops immunity from Afghan criminal prosecution. It would be very nice if the Karzai government did the same, leading to the U.S. withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. 
Paul Merrell

US arrest of Taliban leader 'enrages' Afghan president Karzai - RT News - 0 views

rt.com/...taliban-afghanistan-karzai-114

war & peace Afghanistan Taliban

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • US forces detained Taliban commander Latif Mehsud, the US State Department said Friday, an announcement that has reportedly infuriated Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who hoped to use Mehsud as interlocutor for peace talks. During a military operation in the Logar province in eastern Afghanistan, US troops seized Mehsud, identified as a senior commander in the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a group that claimed responsibility for a 2010 attempted bombing in Times Square, New York. “Mehsud is a senior commander in [Tehreek-e-Taliban], and served as a trusted confident of the group’s leader, Hakimullah Mehsud,” Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the US State Department, said in Washington on Friday. The group “claimed responsibility… for the attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010 and has vowed to attack the US homeland again. TPP is also responsible for attacking our diplomats in Pakistan and attacks that have killed countless Pakistani civilians.”
  • Pakistani intelligence said US forces seized Mehsud while he was with the Afghan army, and that they no longer know where he is. According to reports, the arrest, which actually occurred several weeks ago, enraged Afghan President Karzai, as Afghan intelligence agents had spent months attempting to recruit Mehsud as a mediator for peace talks between Kabul and the Taliban, the Washington Post reported. Karzai also apparently viewed the arrest of the Taliban leader as a violation of Afghan sovereignty, a senior Afghan official told AP on condition of anonymity.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13
     
    Tactical success; strategic blunder?
Paul Merrell

CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
  • “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
  • Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”The report is divided into three volumes — one that traces the chronology of interrogation operations, another that assesses intelligence officials’ claims and a third that contains case studies on virtually every prisoner held in CIA custody since the program began in 2001. Officials said the report was stripped of certain details, including the locations of CIA prisons and the names of agency employees who did not hold ­supervisor-level positions.One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public. The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture. CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst,
  • “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.” The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.” But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.
  • Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously indicated that harsh CIA interrogation measures were of little value in the bin Laden hunt. “The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in a 2013 statement, responding in part to scenes in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” that depict a detainee’s slip under duress as a breakthrough moment.
  • As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. On Sept. 22, 2003, he was flown from Kabul to a CIA black site in Romania. In 2006, he was taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His attorneys contend that he suffered head trauma while in CIA custody. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Baluchi’s attorneys for information about his medical condition, but military prosecutors opposed the request. A U.S. official said the request was not based solely on the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.
  • Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Paul Merrell

US Government Labeled Al Jazeera Journalist as Al Qaeda - 0 views

firstlook.org/...al-qaeda-member-put-watch-list

surveillance state NSA Al-Jazeera metadata phone-metadata

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata. The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
  • The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns. In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors. According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata. It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.
  • Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.” “He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained. The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.” For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states. The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.
  • According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”
  • The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.” As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.” Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.
  • A History of Targeting Al Jazeera  The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda. During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.” That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.
  • During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets. So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003. But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”
  • Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 May 15
     
    It was crazy. I was at home in Idaho sitting there watching TV and chatting with my internet buddy in Croatia. Then the black helicopters came for me ... 
1 - 20 of 33 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page