Top Ten Surprises of the Obama-Karzai Meet on Afghanistan’s Future

Posted on 01/12/2013 by Juan

1. President Obama moved the deadline for the end of US combat missions in Afghanistan up from July 31 to “this spring.” At that point, the Afghanistan National Army will take the lead in all military actions against Taliban and other militants. US troops will mainly be training the ANA or providing close air and logistical support. The troop withdrawal will be accelerated.

2. US forces will be withdrawn from villages.

3. Karzai reversed himself by pledging to at least try to get Afghans to accept immunity from prosecution in Afghan courts for any remaining US troops after December, 2014, the number of which Obama said would be ‘very limited.”

4. The Obama administration pledged to leave behind more military equipment for the Afghanistan National Army than earlier envisaged, including C-130 helicopters and other aircraft, according to Aimal Faizi, spokesman for President Karzai. (Pajhwok Afghan News)

5. The US agreed to turn over to the Afghanistan government the Bagram prison and other prisons, where the US holds large numbers of captured Taliban. These prisoners will be given to the Karzai government.

6. In Thursday discussions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US and Karzai agreed to build on so far desultory talks with the Taliban. Likewise, Karzai met with the acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell. It was agreed that the Taliban would be allowed to open a political office in Qatar, so that negotiations could be pursued with them, and that further political bureaus might be opened in Saudi Arabia or Turkey.(Pajhwok Afghan News)

7. The NATO military (ISAF) deputy head for operations and plans, Brig. Gen. Adam Findlay, says that 80 percent of military operations are now led and carried out by the Afghanistan army, while 20 percent of “complex offensives” are still led by ISAF. (Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News)

8. Findlay said that only 17 districts in the country accounted, he said, for half of all operations by Taliban and other militants.

9. Of civilian non-combatants killed in the fighting, Findlay reported, 84 percent were killed by the Taliban and other militants in 2012.

10. Karzai is asking the US to establish branches of American universities in the war-ravaged provinces of Afghanistan. He is confident that this step will improve the situation for his country. (Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News)

ABC News reports:

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know about US Drone Strikes *but Were Afraid to Ask (Currier)

Posted on 01/12/2013 by Juan

Cora Currier writes at ProPublica:

You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach – remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s our guide to what we know— and what we don’t know.

Where is the drone war? Who carries it out?

Drones have been the Obama administration’s tool of choice for taking out militants outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones aren’t the exclusive weapon – traditional airstrikes and other attacks have also been reported. But by one estimate, 95 percent of targeted killings since 9/11 have been conducted by drones.  Among the benefits of drones: they don’t put American troops in harm’s way.

The first reported drone strike against Al Qaeda happened in Yemen in 2002. The CIA ramped up secret drone strikes in Pakistan under President George W. Bush in 2008. Under Obama, they have expanded drastically there and in Yemen in 2011.

The CIA isn’t alone in conducting drone strikes. The military has acknowledged “direct action” in Yemen and Somalia. Strikes in those countries are reportedly carried out by the secretive, elite Joint Special Operations Command. Since 9/11, JSOC has grown more than tenfold, taking on intelligence-gathering as well as combat roles. (For example, JSOC was responsible for the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden.)  

The drone war is carried out remotely, from the U.S.  and a network of secret bases around the world. The Washington Post got a glimpse – through examining construction contracts and showing up uninvited – at the base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti from which many of the strikes on Yemen and Somalia are carried out. Earlier this year, Wired pieced together an account of the war against Somalia’s al-Shabaab militant group and the U.S.’s expanded military presence throughout Africa.

The number of strikes in Pakistan has ebbed in recent years, from a peak of more than 100 in 2008, to an estimated 46 last year. Meanwhile, the pace in Yemen picked up, with more than 40 last year. But there have been seven strikes in Pakistan in the first ten days of 2013.

How are targets chosen?

A series of articles based largely on anonymous comments from administration officials have given partial picture of how the U.S. picks targets and carries out strikes. Two recent reports – from researchers at Columbia Law School and from the Council on Foreign Relations– also give detailed overviews of what’s known about the process.

Keep reading Everything You Always Wanted to Know about US Drone Strikes *but Were Afraid to Ask (Currier)

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Posted in Drone, FATA, Pakistan, Pakistan Taliban, Uncategorized, Yemen | 8 Comments

Krugman: Only a Big-Spending Government can Get us out of our Depression (Moyers)

Posted on 01/12/2013 by Juan

Bill Moyers interviews Paul Krugman, who attacks the GOP deficit hawks for interfering with our emergence from the Great Republican-caused Depression of the early 21st century. What we need, he says, is more government stimulus. But we’re not going to get it.

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Bombings in Pakistan Kill over 100, as Shiites are Targeted

Posted on 01/11/2013 by Juan

Pakistan on Thursday descended into the kind of violence that tends to occur in Iraq, with a distinct Sunni-Shiite cast to it. But the larger context was a spillover of enmities from Afghanistan.

Three bombs were set off in Quetta. The first targeted a pool hall in a Hazara Shiite neighborhood. When people came to the scene, including police and rescue workers, the attackers set off another bomb, killing many of the rescue workers.

People in Quetta complained bitterly about the lack of central government interest in their security problem. Pakistan’s government is weak and inefficient, and the government of President Asaf Ali Zardari is highly corrupt.

Aljazeera English reports

Baluchistan is a very lightly populated province, where only 8 million of Pakistan’s 180 million people live. Baluchistan as a territory, though, is huge and mostly desert and mountains, comprising 44% of Pakistan’s land mass. It is sort of like Pakistan’s Wyoming, only if Wyoming were nearly half the US. Baluchistan has natural gas, which its people feel is appropriated by other Pakistanis, so that they don’t benefit from it and even don’t have much electricity.

Its capital is Quetta, a city of 2 million. Quetta grew in the 1980s as Afghan refugees fled there, and after the US overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan, many of them relocated to Quetta.

Some 300,000 Hazara Shiites now live in Quetta, refugees from Afghanistan, which was occupied by the Soviets in the 1980s and then by the Taliban from the mid-1990s. Hazara are probably about 22 percent of Afghanistan’s 34 million people, that is, likely there are over 7 million of them. They are Shiites, unlike the Pashtuns and Baluch that are their neighbors, many of whom are hard line Sunnis. Afghans and Pashtuns often look down on Hazaras as menials.

Hazara speak Dari Persian and have distinctive East Asian facial features. They are said to be descendants of tho Mongol invaders of the 13th century.

There is a major Sunni-Shiite struggle in Pakistan that has cost minority Shiites hundreds of lives. The Taliban, hyper-Sunni fighters of Pashtun heritage, have a long set of grudges with the Shiites. There has been a deadly targetting of Hazara in Quetta for some years. The culprits are usually called Lashkar-e Jhagvi or Sipah-e sahaba (army of the Companions of the Prophet). They are technically banned but operate freely in the country.

On the other hand, Dawn newspaper blames one of the three blasts in Quetta on a Baluch separatist movement. [Not, as a kind reader pointed out, the bombings in the Hazara neighborhood but another one that struck Pakistani security forces.] Some Baluch may be upset about 300,000 Shiite immigrants.

Likewise, there is a Saudi-Iran rivalry inside Pakistan, with the Saudis supporting hard line Sunnis and Iran supporting Shiites. In that regard, Thursday’s events in Pakistan are part of a larger Sunni-Shiite struggle that affects Syria and Bahrain, as well.

On the other hand, Quetta is a major smuggling thoroughfare between Pakistan and Iran, and you could imagine ethnic gangs involved in a turf war (the kind of thing that happens in Karachi).

There was also a bombing in Swat Valley, where the Taliban have been weakened but not expelled by the government.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Pakistan Taliban | 7 Comments

How Zero Dark Thirty Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love Torture (Greenberg)

Posted on 01/11/2013 by Juan

Karen J. Greenberg writes at Tomdispatch.com

On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date — a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices — euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — that went with them.  It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.

As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty — for anyone who doesn’t know by now — is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding.  Of course, you know how it all ends.

However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.

Here, then, are the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.

First, Rouse Fear. From its opening scene, Zero Dark Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the need for torture. The movie begins in darkness with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams for help of people trapped inside the towers of the World Trade Center: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?… It’s so hot. I’m burning up…” a female voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black screen yields to a full view of Ammar being roughed up by men in black ski masks and then strung up, arms wide apart.

The sounds of torture replace the desperate pleas of the victims. “Is he ever getting out?” Maya asks. “Never,” her close CIA associate Dan (Jason Clarke) answers.  These are meant to be words of reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11. Bigelow’s first step, then, is to echo former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s mantra from that now-distant moment in which he claimed the nation needed to go to “the dark side.”  That was part of his impassioned demand that, given the immense threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was the only way to seek retribution and security.

Keep reading How Zero Dark Thirty Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love Torture (Greenberg)

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Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Cole : “The Syrian Regime Will Likely Fall, but it Could Take Time” (WorldView Show)

Posted on 01/11/2013 by Juan

I was interviewed by Denis G. Campbell of the UK Progressive for his internet news and affairs program, the WorldView Show, and the exchange has just been posted. We mainly talked about the ongoing violence in Syria and its regional implications, and about the plight of the Palestinians.

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Posted in Israel/ Palestine, Syria | 4 Comments

8,775 Firearm Murders a Year in US, Equiv. of 290 in UK

Posted on 01/10/2013 by Juan

Updated. 2013 Reprint edn.

Number of Murders, United States, 2010: 12,996

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775

Number of Murders, Britain, 2011*: 638
(Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders)

Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2011*: 58
(equivalent to 290 US murders)

Number of Murders by crossbow in Britain, 2011*: 2 (equivalent to 10 US murders).

For more on murder by firearms in Britain, see the BBC.

The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners among civilians per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita over all.


h/t Christopher Majka

In the case of Britain, firearms murders are 30 times fewer than in the US per capita. [Don't bother with flawed citations of Switzerland or Israel, where most citizens are the equivalent of military reservists.]

Do hunters really need semi-automatic AR-15 assault weapons? Is that how they roll in deer season? The US public doesn’t think so.

*British crime statistics are September to September, so 2011 is actually 2010-2011.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 37 Comments

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