March 28, 2013

fotojournalismus:

Afghan Villagers Flee Their Homes, Blame US Drones

“Barely able to walk even with a cane, Ghulam Rasool says he padlocked his front door, handed over the keys and his three cows to a neighbor and fled his mountain home in the middle of the night to escape relentless airstrikes from U.S. drones targeting militants in this remote corner of Afghanistan.

Rasool and other Afghan villagers have their own name for Predator drones. They call them benghai, which in the Pashto language means the “buzzing of flies.” When they explain the noise, they scrunch their faces and try to make a sound that resembles an army of flies.

“They are evil things that fly so high you don’t see them but all the time you hear them,” said Rasool, whose body is stooped and shrunken with age and his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Night and day we hear this sound and then the bombardment starts.”

The Associated Press — in a rare on-the-ground look unaccompanied by military or security — visited two Afghan villages in Nangarhar province near the border with Pakistan to talk to residents who reported that they had been affected by drone strikes.

“These foreigners started the problem,” Rasool said of international troops. “They have their own country. They should leave.”

From the U.S. perspective, the overall drone program has been a success.

Rasool said his decision to leave his home in Hisarak district came nearly a month ago after a particularly blistering air assault killed five people in the neighboring village of Meya Saheeb.

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, confirmed an airstrike on Feb. 24 at Meya Saheeb, but as a matter of policy would neither confirm nor deny that drones were used.

Rasool said that he, his son, half a dozen grandchildren, and two other families crammed into the back of a cart pulled by a tractor. They drove throughout the day until they found a house in Khalis Family Village, named after anti-communist rebel leader Maulvi Yunus Khalis, who had close ties to al-Qaida.

The village is not far from the Tora Bora mountain range where in 2001 the U.S.-led coalition mounted its largest operation of the war to flush out al-Qaida and Taliban warriors.

“Nobody ever comes here. It’s a little dangerous sometimes because of the Taliban,” said Zarullah Khan, a neighbor of Rasool’s.

But the historic significance of his newfound refuge was lost on Rasool.

“Who’s Khalis? We stopped when we found a house for rent,” he said, grumbling at the monthly $200 bill shared among the three families packed into the high-walled compound where he spoke with the AP.

Standing nearby, Rasool’s 12-year-old grandson, Ahmed Shah, recalled the attack in Meya Saheeb. The earth shook for what seemed like hours and the next morning his friends told him there were bodies in the nearby village. A little afraid, but more curious, he walked the short distance to Meya Saheed.

“I wanted to see the dead bodies,” he said. And he did — three bodies, all middle-aged men.

ISAF reported five militants were killed, but Rasool claimed they were businessmen. One of the dead had a carpet shop in the village, he said.

Disputes over the identities of those killed have been a hallmark of the 12-year war.

At the other end of the province from Meya Saheeb and Khalis Family Village lies the village of Budyali. To get there, one must drive along a long, two-lane highway often booby-trapped by militants, before turning turning off onto a narrow, dusty track and finally cross a rock-strewn riverbed.

A Budyali resident, Hayat Gul, says the sound of “benghai” is commonplace in the village. He says he was wounded nearly two years ago in a Taliban firefight with Afghan security forces at a nearby school that led to an airstrike.

Tucked in the shadow of a hulking mountain crisscrossed with dozens of footpaths, the school now is in ruins.

The early morning strike on the school took place on July 17, 2011, hours after the Taliban attacked the district headquarters and the Afghan National Army appealed to their coalition partners for help.

Gul said he and a second guard, 63-year-old Ghulam Ahad, were asleep in the small cement guard house at one end of the school. They awoke to the sound of gunfire as more than a dozen Taliban militants scaled the school walls around midnight, chased by Afghan soldiers.

A bullet struck Gul in the shoulder. Frightened and unsure of what to do, Ahad stepped outside the guard house and was killed. Bullet holes still riddle the badly damaged building.

Village elders and the school’s principal, Sayed Habib, said coalition forces responded to the army’s request for help with drones, fighter jets and rockets.

The air assault, which residents say began about 3 a.m. and likely included drone strikes, flattened everything across a vast compound that includes the school. Habib said 13 insurgents were killed.

ISAF confirmed that airstrikes killed insurgents in the Budyali area on that day but would not say what type of airstrikes or provide any other details.

Habib and a local malik or elder, Shah Mohammed Khan, said that in the days leading up to the airstrikes the sound of drones could be heard overhead.

“Everyone knows the sound of the unpiloted planes. Even our children know,” Habib said.

The elders were critical of the U.S. attack. They said they would have preferred that the Afghan soldiers try to negotiate with the Taliban to leave the school and surrender.

Habib and the village elders recalled the attack while sitting in the middle of the devastated school, where debris was still scattered across a vast yard. They pointed toward a blackboard, pockmarked with gaping holes.

“Shamefully they destroyed our school, our books, our library,” said Malik Gul Nawaz, an elder with a gray beard and a pot belly.

The roughly 1,300 students now take classes at a makeshift school made up of tents provided by UNICEF. Gul, who was taken to a U.S. military hospital at Bagram Air Base after the attack and treated for the bullet wound to his left shoulder, is now a watchman at the new school.

He held a small photograph of his dead colleague, Ahad, in his trembling left hand.

“We want to end this war,” Gul said. “Enough people have been killed now. We have to find unity.”

Photographs were taken on March 19-20, 2013.

[Credit : Anja Niedringhaus/AP]

LTMC: Hearts and minds.

12:03pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxhKKzee
(Notes: 841)
  
Filed under: politics drone attacks foreign policy afghanistan obama 
November 14, 2012
"Under the Geneva Conventions, mede­vac crews are supposed to be immune from fire, but the Geneva Conventions are often ignored. In the six months following Operation Hammer Down, for example, Army medevac helicopters—which rescue not only soldiers but civilians—were shot at 57 times. There’s a collective toll to pay for floating around unarmed in combat, an anecdotally higher rate of emotional prob­lems and frequent casualties. In essence the medevac mission hasn’t changed since it was created, 50 years ago this year. The banner outside the DUSTOFF 73 barracks in Jalalabad says “burning gas to save your ass.” But the patches they wear into battle are inscribed with a darker motto, the final words of Maj. Charles Kelly, the first mede­vac commander, shot through the heart as he refused orders to fly away from a dan­gerous rescue site in Vietnam. “I’ll leave,” he said, “when I have your wounded."

— Tony Dokoupil & John Ryan

10:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxXIwgXC
(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan war on terror military 
November 7, 2012
"The historian Tony Judt, in an essay, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” written in 2006 in The London Review of Books, excoriated American liberals for providing, as he put it, “the ethical fig-leaf” for the “brutish policies” of American neoconservatives. Judt was writing as a liberal to members of his tribe. Beyond the particular role played by any one group in supporting America’s military adventures, however, it is the ongoing ideological work undertaken by a whole army of academics, mediapersons, policy makers, and lay cheerleaders for the right of America to wage war that marks the death of a viable global culture of human rights. A textbook example is Samantha Power, a journalist, human rights expert and Obama advisor who played a central role in persuading the administration to invade Libya. In the more mundane space of Twitter, one finds academics like C. Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University, ardently advertising the magical power of drones to liberate Afghans and Pakistanis from their wretchedness of their lives. (Fair’s shilling for drones is interspersed with a regular exchange of insults with her Muslim interlocutors on Twitter)."

— Rohit Chopra, “The End of Human Rights”

10:20pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxWr0qMz
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: politics foreign policy afghanistan war on terror iraq drone attacks 
September 21, 2012
"Afghan Judicial Panel Refuses To Accept Indefinite Detention Law While Federal Court Allows It To Continue Under U.S. Law"

Good thing we’re on the cutting edge of this freedom business.

12:17am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxTnVUjZ
(Notes: 15)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan foreign policy war on terror 
August 22, 2012
2,003

That’s the number of American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since the inception of the war.  The New York Times has an excellent infographic that breaks down the numbers further by branch, province, age, and so forth.

Most telling, in my view, is the graph which demonstrates that the most violent years come after 2008, when we of course saw a policy shift from the Obama administration away from Iraq and focused on “winning” the war in the Afghanistan.  As you can see from the graph, the 2009 troop surge was consonant with the heaviest period of American casualties in the history of our involvement in Afghanistan:

More at the link.

11:12am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxRwD1MP
(Notes: 39)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan foreign policy 
August 3, 2012
SIGAR Report On Afghanistan

The National Defense Authorization Act for 2008 established the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).  The SIGAR recently released their report on the state of ongoing U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.  The report is less than optimistic about U.S. efforts to create a stable, functioning political infrastructure before U.S. troops are scheduled to leave:

As this report to Congress illustrates, a decade of struggle and bloodshed—and more than $89 billion of U.S. appropriations for Afghan reconstruction—has not cleared the landscape of serious problems…

Some examples:

• A significant portion of the U.S. government’s $400 million investment in large-scale infrastructure projects in fiscal year 2011 may be wasted, due to weaknesses in planning, coordination, and execution, raising sustainability concerns and risking adverse counter-insurgency effects.

• Security costs at reconstruction sites are likely to increase as a result of the mandated transition from private security companies to the state-owned Afghan Public Protection Force.

• USAID contracts to promote district-level stabilization in eastern Afghanistan are making slow progress, have high operating costs, and lack a country-wide exit strategy.

This one in particular is eye-brow raising:

• The U.S. Army accepted contract construction that is so poor it prevents some multimillion-dollar border police bases from being used as intended. One base is unoccupied because it has no viable water supply. Other deficiencies included leaking fuel lines, unconnected drain pipes, poorly built guard towers, and improperly installed heating and ventilation systems.

Read the rest of the report here.  (h/t thepoliticalnotebook)

See Also: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Report: “Violence Rising Amid Political Turmoil.”

11:08am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxQgVw_m
(Notes: 10)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan iraq war on terror foreign policy 
May 29, 2012
"The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars—”more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988,44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand,” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax, Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997)."

—

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism (via maozedongisnotcool)

h/t logicallypositive

(via rigatonideology)

8:39am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxMM9Wb0
(Notes: 221)
  
Filed under: politics cia war on drugs afghanistan 
January 31, 2012
watanafghanistan: Little Afghan girl. the scars left after an explosion. North of Kabul.

watanafghanistan:

Little Afghan girl. the scars left after an explosion. North of Kabul.

7:19pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxFi2l-f
(Notes: 3,219)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan war on terror 
January 16, 2012
stillmindstillcosmos: Shakira was one year old when Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama ordered the 2009 drone strike in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Swat valley that nearly killed her. With two other burned little girls, she was put in a trash bin to die. A volunteer doctor with House of Charity discovered the three babies and attempted to save them. Two of the little girls died from their injuries, but Shakira, who is now four, lived to be disfigured.CNN reports that Shakira arrived in Houston last week with her caretaker for a series of surgeries that “will make it easier for Shakira to grow older.” (“She will never look fully normal,” CNN adds.) Just to put this in context: In August 2010, TIME magazine featured a mutilated Afghanistan woman on its cover to illustrate the misogynist horrors visited on Afghan women by the religious zealots in the Taliban. The story made the explicit case that U.S. troops were necessary for protecting women from the Taliban. How things have changed since then! “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical,” Vice President Joe Biden recently told Newsweek.Perhaps TIME should plaster Shakira on its cover—alongside sixteen-year-old Muhammad Tariq, the Pakistani anti-war protester who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in late October—for a story about Pakistani children and the horrors of murder-drones. Or does that not fit the liberation narrative? LTMC: The “nobel peace laureate” point is well-taken, although I would suggest that Obama didn’t actually want the award.  He was damned if he accepted it and damned if he turned it down.  Otherwise, I agree entirely with the rest of the commentary.

stillmindstillcosmos:

Shakira was one year old when Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama ordered the 2009 drone strike in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Swat valley that nearly killed her. With two other burned little girls, she was put in a trash bin to die. A volunteer doctor with House of Charity discovered the three babies and attempted to save them. Two of the little girls died from their injuries, but Shakira, who is now four, lived to be disfigured.

CNN reports that Shakira arrived in Houston last week with her caretaker for a series of surgeries that “will make it easier for Shakira to grow older.” (“She will never look fully normal,” CNN adds.)

Just to put this in context: In August 2010, TIME magazine featured a mutilated Afghanistan woman on its cover to illustrate the misogynist horrors visited on Afghan women by the religious zealots in the Taliban. The story made the explicit case that U.S. troops were necessary for protecting women from the Taliban. How things have changed since then! “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical,” Vice President Joe Biden recently told Newsweek.

Perhaps TIME should plaster Shakira on its cover—alongside sixteen-year-old Muhammad Tariq, the Pakistani anti-war protester who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in late October—for a story about Pakistani children and the horrors of murder-drones. Or does that not fit the liberation narrative?

LTMC: The “nobel peace laureate” point is well-taken, although I would suggest that Obama didn’t actually want the award.  He was damned if he accepted it and damned if he turned it down.  Otherwise, I agree entirely with the rest of the commentary.

(via satans-advocate)

4:40pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxEtod6o
(Notes: 788)
  
Filed under: politics war on terror afghanistan 
January 11, 2012
Winning Hearts And Minds In Afghanistan

I think when U.S. soldiers urinate on the corpses of Taliban fighters, make a video, then post it on-line, they are probably making us less secure rather than more, by virtue of inciting disapprobation and hatred from Muslims, who generally are greatly offended by disrespect for the dead (see the judicious preparation of Osama Bin Laden’s body prior to his burial at sea).  That’s just me.

11:50pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxEePSf4
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: politics afghanistan war on terror 
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