Arab News Blog

As far as I can tell, no media outlets whatsoever have picked up on the recent announcement (below, courtesy of a UN news agency) from the UN Secretary-General. The latest figures on internally displaced persons demonstrate the utter disaster which the war in Afghanistan has brought for a wide swath of the population:

IDP numbers up in Afghanistan – UN

KABUL, March 17 (IRIN) – Armed hostilities have boosted the number of internally displaced persons (IDP’s) to over 296,000 but an effective humanitarian response is being hampered by insecurity, the UN Secretary-General says in a new report to the UN Security Council…

“The deterioration of Afghanistan’s security situation has continued, with 2009 being the most volatile year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, averaging 960 security incidents per month, as compared with 741 in 2008. The situation worsened in January 2010, with the number of security incidents 40 per cent higher than in January 2009,” [the report] said… (link)

Related blog posts:

October 2006: The Senlis Council’s Norine MacDonald reports that IDP’s are “starving” while Canadian soldiers are stationed some 15 minutes away with no mandate to assist them.

November 2007: UNHCR counts 129,000 IDP’s just in southern Afghanistan – a figure which does not include an additional 100,000 people recently displaced by conflict in the south.

May 2008: IDP’s are cautious of returning home. One northerner said: “Commanders and warlords in the north are still seizing people’s land and forcing them to abandon their houses; so how can we return?”

February 2009: UNHCR counts 235,000 IDP’s.

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Just when I thought that all the angles for killing were covered, the New York Times exposes a type of killing force we haven’t seen or heard from before. We have seen there are CIA teams in Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are Afghan special forces operating outside Afghan military command; there are foreign special forces including German ones, Canadian ones and Australian ones; there are unofficial tribal militias; etc. etc. Now this.

It’s a bizarre and intriguing tale:

Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
By Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti

KABUL, Mar 15 (NYT) – Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said…

[S]ome American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he now is the subject of a criminal investigation…

Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said…

Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan… (link)

Robert Young Pelton, mentioned in story, is co-author of alternative travel guide The World’s Most Dangerous Places. The website he set up for the contract was an open source project at www.afpax.com, and it is still online.

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Town residents grill president over casualties, corruption and reconstruction. By Aziz Ahmad Tassal in Helmand (ARR No. 355, 12-Mar-10)Afghan president Hamed Karzai faced an angry reception from people in the southern town of Marja last weekend following
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Last fall, an American special forces commander acquired the fawning nickname “Lawrence of Afghanistan” after he published a study on military tactics in Afghanistan. Based on his own experiences, Major Jim Gant advocated for an alternative to reigning counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy and apparently caught the attention of General McChrystal, who widely redistributed the report.

The report involves a case study in Kunar province where his team of special forces operated in 2003. At first this involved Armed Reconnaissance Patrols through the countryside, “basically announcing our presence and inviting contact, friendly or hostile.” At one village, they were told there was a “problem” in a different village called Mangwel, to where his eight-man team then went and subsequently met a local leader, Malik Noorafzhal.

Here’s how Gant recounts the forming of a significant relationship with Noorafzhal, a tribal leader in Kunar province:

… there was a “highland” people and a “lowland” people… The highland people had taken and were using some land that belonged to the lowland people. The Malik told me the land had been given to his tribe by the “King Of Afghanistan” many, many years ago and that he would show me the papers. I told him he didn’t need to show me any papers. His word was enough. He then told me he had given the highlanders 10 days to comply with the request or he and his men would retake it by force…

He had asked for help, a thing he later would tell me was hard for him to do (especially from an outsider) and I had many options. Could I afford to get involved in internal tribal warfare? …

I made the decision to support him. “Malik, I am with you. My men and I will go with you and speak with the highlanders again. If they do not turn the land back over to you, we will fight with you against them.” …

Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that the dispute with the highlanders was resolved… (link to pdf)

The current term for actions of this sort is ethnic cleansing, which according to a US State Dept study “entails the systematic and forced removal of members of an ethnic group from their communities to change the ethnic composition of a region.” When official enemies do this, it is cause for an international crisis and accompanying vilification in the media. However, when our side does it, few so much as take notice.

Even on its own terms, Gant’s approach, as he describes it, hardly merits the term strategy as tribal alliances like the one he modeled are quite ad hoc and don’t readily lend themselves to horizontal spread. Thus the basic requirement, under military doctrine, of “unity of effort” would be elusive at best.

In a review of Gant’s paper the Long War Journal similarly notes some fundamental flaws in his argument:

[Gant] himself points out that he and his team were safer in the village than in their outpost, and that he was unable to prevent the attacks the village suffered as a result of its cooperation. In other words, there’s a real confusion about who was protecting whom… (link)

It is worth noting, however, that one innovation which Gant proposes appears to have been taken up by US military commanders. The latest military jargon for COIN theorists and commentators insists that troops have to live among the people. General McChrystal himself told the New York Times about his hopes in such terms, saying “we literally want to go in there and squat among the people.”

Recent announcements indicate that that approach is being operationalised and the above comments from the Long War Journal thus apply equally to McChrystal’s emerging strategy.

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Der Spiegel Online has a very interesting piece on the German army’s new found enthusiasm for air strikes and armed drones:

It was a summer’s day in June 2009 when the German army in Afghanistan first used US Army drones in combat. With hindsight, some observers say that was the day the German military lost its innocence in Afghanistan. The firing of deadly rockets from drones on the orders of a German commander was part of the new reality of war in northern Afghanistan.

Before that the Germans had only used US drones, lent out to them by the US military as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, to observe Taliban movements. They didn’t take advantage of the drones’ deadly Hellfire rockets. But on June 15 last year, Colonel Georg Klein pushed the red button for the first time. Seconds later, a booby trap that had been detected on the side of a road was destroyed.

Klein went on to order a deeply controversial air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers on Sept. 4, 2009…

Since last June, the use of the unmanned aircraft has become routine to the Germans, in a similar fashion to their use of air support… (link)

The report indicates a pretty high degree of escalation of German involvement in the war — a very touchy issue in that country where a strong majority disapprove of the war. I don’t know of any reports at all of Canadian troops actually calling in an air strike and neither have I seen anyone asserting the the CF use armed drones. This might be due to rules for journalists which forbid reporting on such things, or it could be that Canadian forces don’t call in air strikes or use armed drones.

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The Times (UK) breaks the story:

Nato ‘covered up’ botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five
Jerome Starkey – The Times

KHATABA, PAKTIA, Mar 13 – A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times.

The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery”, Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room.

A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown…

Nato said that the troops were part of a joint “Afghan-international” force but, despite new rules requiring them to leave leaflets identifying their unit, the family said they left nothing. Local US forces denied any involvement…

Nato’s original statement said: “Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed.” The family maintain that no one threw so much as a stone. Rear Admiral Greg Smith, Nato’s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up…

“I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.” (link)

One man who witnessed the Paktia raid told an AP reporter he saw “U.S. special forces” surrounding the compound.

Reading the above piece carefully, one notes that NATO didn’t say it was their own “Afghan-international” force, at least as it is worded in the article. Despite the American denial, the unit could be a US special forces operation, either under NATO or otherwise. Although the U.S. military recently put more of its special forces units in Afghanistan under NATO command, there are still some who operate outside that command.

In any case, it is not the first time that evidence has suggested that US special forces have committed an atrocity. In November of 2007, residents of Toube village in Helmand province alleged that foreign troops, accompanied by Afghan soldiers, killed over a dozen civilians, including babies, in a commando-style night raid. In October, 2008, locals in Balkh province described a raid by Afghan and foreign special forces in which the foreigners beat civilians while the Afghans looted. A NATO spokesperson confirmed the attack and said NATO forces provided supplies for the operation.

And the Americans aren’t the only ones in on such dastardly deeds. In 2008, the CBC reported that American, British and Canadian JTF-2 special forces have conducted “hunt and kill” raids in Afghanistan. Note that such a mode of operation would constitute a targeted assassination, which is illegal under international law.

We have also seen that CIA-trained Afghan special forces, which are not under Afghan command, have been used in the fight against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the drug industry in Afghanistan.

Finally, here’s an AP summary of the new NATO guidelines for night raids:

KABUL, Mar 5 (AP) – A new directive from NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan orders coalition forces to avoid night raids when possible, but to bring Afghan troops with them if they must enter homes after dark…

[I]f night raids are conducted, Afghan security forces “should be the first force seen and the first voices heard by the occupants of any compound entered.”

The order requires that Afghan troops must be included in the planning and execution of all night raids, and that Afghan government representatives must be notified in advance. When possible, community elders also need to be consulted. (link)

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Long-lost Russian scientific supplies set to benefit students 25 years after arrival. By Shafi Ferozi in Herat (ARR No. 355, 10-Mar-10)A vast hoard of school laboratory equipment, chemicals and samples sent by the Soviet Union 25 years ago has been
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Female officers at checkpoints will stop male insurgents dressed in burqas. By Habiborrahman Ibrahimi in Kabul (ARR No. 354, 4-Mar-10)Afghanistans interior ministry hopes to recruit up to 5,000 women police officers, no easy task in a traditional Muslim
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Jail officials admit overcrowding but say their efforts to deal with it have come to naught. By Ramesh Nabizadah in Parwan (ARR No. 354, 2-Mar-10)Inmates have complained of inhumane conditions in a provincial Afghan prison, amid uncertainty over the
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US and Afghan troops agree to leave town at the request of Kabul officials. By Mohammad Saber Saffor in Charikar (ARR No. 354, 2-Mar-10)A military coordination centre staffed by United States and Afghan forces is moving away from a provincial capital
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