Fisk and Safi on the Afghan Massacre and Media

Below, see two pieces on the media coverage of the recent Afghan massacre. In the first piece, Fisks suggests that frustration and revenge may be more common among the US soldiers, instead of exceptions among few individuals, because of losing the Afghan war. But the media presented the massacre in exactly the latter terms, as exceptions. I would add that the soldiers could also be driven by revenge just because of it, and a sense of national superiority and tribalism, for these attitudes are strongly cultivated in their military training. Also see Omid Safi's piece quoted below with my comments.

Madness is not the reason for this massacre
Robert Fisk, March 17, 2012,
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-madness-is-not-the-reason-for-this-massacre-7575737.html

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the "experts" when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the "deranged" bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn't know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have "disappeared" 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that's what it's about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that's too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

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Below, also see Omid Safi's piece on the Afghan massacre. Omid Safi compares the media coverage of the Afghan massacre to the coverage of the 2009 Fort-Hood-shooting (by a person from Muslim background). Safi limits himself to criticizing the media's double standards. He also hopes that, "future investigations would demonstrate that Hasan’s actions were indeed the actions of a lone person, not part of a broader campaign."

I feel that he could have made a more incisive argument there, questioning if the Fort Hood issue should be seen as a "Muslim" issue at all. Furthermore, he could have scrutinized the pressure and politics that compell American Muslims to respond to Fort-Hood-like events in an apologetic way. In other words, why is it that American Muslims as a collectivity feel threatened and compelled to issue apologetic statements (to the general Americans) anytime someone does something in any part of the world.

Also, are there good and bad Muslim causes from an Islamic perspective, some of which may have resorted to violent struggle as their mode of resistance? Would the American Muslims support the good resistance causes that involve killing of oppressors -- for instance, that in Palestine and Lebanon? And how would that synchronize with the moral compass that Safi presents at the end of his piece? Could such a compass also de-legitimize the legit movements (in addition to removing the messy history from the equation in each case, putting the oppressor and oppressed, powerful and powerless, all on the same level)? (On these critical questions, also see: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Cracking the Media Code from IslamicInsights.com).

There may be a lead in the MLK quote that Safi refers to while describing his moral compass. To quote MLK in full: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." The "content of character" may be a way to add the needed distinctions to Safi's moral compass. How do we judge the good and bad character and from whose perspective and with what assumptions and politics would be the key questions.

When Americans Kill vs. When Muslims Kill
by Omid Safi, Mar 19, 2012
http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/omid-safi/when-americans-kill-vs.-when-muslims-killl3

The news from Afghanistan over the last few weeks has been heart-wrenching, devastating, and infuriating. An American soldier named Robert Bales (on the left in the image below) walked into the midst of an Afghan civilian community, and shot 16 people dead, including 9 children and 3 women.

The shooting in Afghanistan has eerie echoes of the Fort Hood Shooting from November 5th, 2009, when an American Muslim military member, Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire inside a military base, and killed 13 people.

And yet the media coverage of the two episodes has been diametrically opposed. When Americans kills, it is portrayed as an aberration, an act of a tormented and troubled individual. When Muslims kill, it is covered as a signal of a communal, global genocidal tendency. Let’s go over some details.

Here is how Fox covered the shootings by Major Malik Nadal in the Fort Hood shootings:

The murders at Ft. Hood are about the radicalization of individuals by an extremist ideology -- jihadism -- which fuels acts of terror.
The main question we should be asking is when did Hasan become radicalized and who indoctrinated him?

Fox’s “analysis” was written by Walid Phares, the same person that Mitt Romney had picked as his Middle East foreign policy adviser. The very same person who has been identified as a major Islamophobes, and involved in massacres in Middle East.

Phares and Fox News take great pains to point out that Nadal’s actions are not about one individual man, but part of a grander Islamist war against America. Here is what they say:

Instead it is part of a wider ideological war, generated by radicalization and inciting individuals to perform such acts.
"Lone wolf" or not, organized or not, fully self-aware perpetrator or not, influenced by overseas radicals or not, this massacre of servicemen has moved America from stage to another.

Of course future investigations would demonstrate that Hasan’s actions were indeed the actions of a lone person, not part of a broader campaign.

In short, when a deranged Muslim kills Americans, Fox News tells us that it is “the largest terror act since 9/11,” and "it's jihadist evil and terrorism." When a deranged American kills Muslims, such as the actions of Robert Bales in Afghanistan in February 2012, Fox News and its subsidiaries behave in an entirely different fashion. We are offered the following litany of explanations and justifications:

*There was alcohol involved.
* it is an isolated act of a “troubled” person that in no way shape or form reflects on the noble ideals of America or Americans.
*The soldier was housed in the “most troubled” base in America.
*He was on his fourth tour of duty, and neither he nor his family wanted to go back.
*he simply “snapped.”
*He was experiencing martial difficulties.

The headline from Fox news read: “Money, career woes reportedly plagued Afghan Killing Suspect.” The first sentence of the article reads: “Bypassed for a promotion and struggling to pay for his house, Robert Bales was eyeing a way out of his job at a Washington state military base months before he allegedly gunned down 16 civilians in an Afghan war zone, records and interviews showed as a deeper picture emerged Saturday of the Army sergeant's financial troubles and brushes with the law.”

In short, the assumption that when we Americans kill, it is an aberration from our good nature. Even if the act is abominable, it is said to be purely an individual act totally disconnected from any larger institutional or political context. However, when Muslims kill, it is a sign of a world-wide, evil ideology of jihad and terrorism.

I have searched in vain to find a commentator in the United States that grasps the above double standard, and have not so far seen that insight in a mainstream American press. The only place I have seen it is in the UK, by Robert Fisk: Fisk correctly points that that most Western journalists use descriptions like how Robert Bailes was “"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose rampage was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro).

It is these types of double standards that are at the heart of the hypocrisy of our current situation vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims. What we should be saying is simply this: the life of each and every person in the world, civilian or military, American, Afghani, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi, Iranian, male or female, rich or poor, gay or straight, carries exactly and identically the same intrinsic value. Just as Dr. King taught us that the measure of a character is not connected to the color of our skin, we should be demanding that the measure of a human life is not connected to the nationality of the victim or the assailant. All human lives are sacred, all are sacrosanct. And all violations of human lives are equally morally repugnant.

Taking that type of an approach would restore a sense of dignity and honor to our standing in the world community, and it would allow us to recover the moral dignity that we have squandered over the last ten years.

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About Omid Safi: Safi is a bona fide scholar on Sufism and used to be part of the (now defunct) Progressive Muslim Union (PMU) of North America. He emphasizes compassion, love, and theological plurality drawing from the resources of various sufi traditions. On PMU-NA, see (with a pinch of salt):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Muslim_Union

http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/mwu_muslim_wakeup_and_pmu_progressive_muslims_union_progressive_voices/

http://pmunadebate.blogspot.com/2005/07/omid-safi-declares-takfir-on-irshad.html

The early beginnings of the Afghan War

Below, see a well-known and important article from The Nation that sets the record straight on how the 'Afghan war' started.

The American provocation may be true, but it is also true that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was part of the larger Soviet ambition of reaching the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. The Soviet-US politics should be viewed in the context of ongoing 'Cold War' which began long before the 1979 provocations and invasion.

On a critical note: The article seems to rely on the (false) assumption that 9/11 as well as Al-Qaeda were products (or 'blowback') of the Afghan war. Quite the contrary, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are separate entities with different geographic origins, leadership, and goals. They may have developed connections, but they (or some of their factions) also have been at odds with each other in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

'Blowback,' the Prequel
Eric Alterman, The Nation, October 25, 2001
Source

The story of what historians call the second cold war often begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which shocked Americans into their own overreaction in Central America and Africa, as well as into arming the mujahedeen resistance. Today, it is a truth universally acknowledged in the punditocracy that while the United States may have played an indirect role in the creation of the Taliban and perhaps even the bin Laden terrorist network through our support for the radical Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan, we did so only in response to that act of Soviet aggression. As Tim Russert explained on Meet the Press, "We had little choice." Speaking on CNN, former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen speaks of our "successful policy with the ordnance we sent to the mujahedeen to defeat the Soviets." Writing on "The 'Blowback' Myth" in The Weekly Standard, one Thomas Henriksen of the Hoover Institution rehearses the Soviet invasion and then notes, "First President Carter, then, more decisively, Ronald Reagan moved to support the Afghan resistance."

The truth is that the United States began a program of covert aid to the Afghan guerrillas six months before the Soviets invaded.

First revealed by former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, the $500 million in nonlethal aid was designed to counter the billions the Soviets were pouring into the puppet regime they had installed in Kabul. Some on the American side were willing--perhaps even eager--to lure the Soviets into a Vietnam-like entanglement. Others viewed the program as a way of destabilizing the puppet government and countering the Soviets, whose undeniable aggression in the area was helping to reheat the cold war to a dangerous boil.

According to Gates's recounting, a key meeting took place on March 30, 1979. Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe wondered aloud whether "there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, 'sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.'" Arnold Horelick, CIA Soviet expert, warned that this was just what we could expect. In a 1998 conversation with Le Nouvel Observateur, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted, "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."

Yet Carter, who signed the finding authorizing the covert program on July 3, 1979, today explains that it was definitely "not my intention" to inspire a Soviet invasion. Cyrus Vance, who was then Secretary of State, is not well enough to be interviewed, but his close aide Marshall Shulman insists that the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it, though he says he was unaware of the covert program at the time. Indeed, Vance hardly seems to be represented at all in Gates's recounting, although Brzezinski doubts that Carter would have approved the aid unless Vance "approved, however unenthusiastically."

No one I interviewed--those who did not mind the idea of a Soviet invasion, and those who sought to avoid it--argues that Carter himself wished to provoke one. Gates, who was then an aide to Brzezinski, says the President did not think "strategically" in that fashion. "He was simply reacting to everything the Soviets were doing in that part of the world and felt it required some kind of response. This was it." Brzezinski, similarly, says he did not sell the plan to Carter on these terms. The President understood, he explained on the phone, that "the Soviets had engineered a Communist coup and they were providing direct assistance in Kabul. We were facing a serious crisis in Iran, and the entire Persian Gulf was at stake. In that context, giving some money to the mujahedeen seemed justified." Why Carter actually approved the aid remains unclear, however. Carter, it should be added, does not seem to remember much about the initial finding. Otherwise, he would not have asked his aide to fax me the pages from his memoir Keeping Faith, which ignores it entirely, and like the rest of the pre-Gates memoirs of the period, professes great shock and horror regarding the onset of the Soviet tanks.

The news of the covert program has provoked considerable confusion among those who seek to blame the United States for the September 11 massacre. Proponents of an overly schematic "blowback" scenario, including at least one vocal supporter of the Soviet "rape" of Afghanistan, have seized Brzezinski's comments to claim that Osama bin Laden is merely one of America's "chickens coming home to roost." This is both simplistic and obscene. Blowback exists in absolutely every aspect of life, because nothing comes without unintended consequences. Does it make sense to blame the destruction of the World Trade Center on a $500 million nonlethal aid program that took place more than twenty years ago? We cannot even know for certain why the Soviets decided on their invasion.

Nor can we ever know for certain whether the US officials wished to inspire one. Memories deceive, records get destroyed and even original documents can be written to be deliberately misleading, as were the period's official memoirs--save, ironically, that of Gates, the former spymaster. The covert action was undoubtedly approved by those involved for a host of reasons, some of which may be contradictory. Helping the Afghans resist Soviet domination was not exactly a controversial policy in 1979, though no one at the time could even dream that it might lead to the evil empire's eventual disintegration.

Brzezinski argues that even given the 20/20 hindsight after September 11, the covert aid remains justified. He shares the common view that America's most significant mistake was to abandon the nation to its unhappy fate following the Soviet withdrawal. Our terrorist problem, he insists, would be much worse with the Soviets still around to support their terrorist minions among the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Libyans, the Iraqis, etc.

Certainly this is much too kind to the Reagan-era military aid to Taliban-like elements. But a more accurate historical record can only lead to more intelligent debate about the future.

Pakistan's current political situation

Tariq Ali shares some neat bits in his latest piece published by the London Review of Books (Vol. 33, No. 2., Jan 20, 2011). Below I quote the excerpt that I thought was the most insightful. In the piece, he focuses on the politics of why the military has not taken over yet. But if the question is asked this way, "how come Zardari is still in power?", it would also point to Washington's active support (financial, diplomatic, etc.). Some credit also goes to Zardari's political maneuverings and his successes (so far) in soliciting support from the power-holders in the 'marginalized provinces'. Apparently, PML-N, the largest opposition party in the country with a strong hold in Punjab, also finds no other option but to support the status quo at the moment (for one, the military establishment has made it very clear on a number of occasions that it would not let PML-N's chief Nawaz Sharif come to power. A disappointed Sharif seemed to have pleaded with Washington, but, apparently, it was of no use.). For a background on the military-civilian relations, see also here and here.

Excerpt:

"Even before this killing [of Salman Taseer], Pakistan had been on the verge of yet another military takeover. It would make things so much easier if only they could give it another name: military democracy perhaps? General Kayani, whose term as chief of staff was extended last year with strong Pentagon approval, is said to be receiving petitions every day asking him to intervene and ‘save the country’. The petitioners are obviously aware that removing Zardari and replacing him with a nominee of the Sharif brothers’ Muslim League, the PPP’s long-term rivals, is unlikely to improve matters. Petitioning, combined with a complete breakdown of law and order in one or several spheres (suicide terrorism in Peshawar, violent ethnic clashes in Karachi, state violence in Quetta and now Taseer’s assassination), is usually followed by the news that a reluctant general has no longer been able to resist ‘popular’ pressure and with the reluctant agreement of the US Embassy a uniformed president has taken power. We’ve been here before, on four separate occasions. The military has never succeeded in taking the country forward. All that happens is that, instead of politicians, the officers take the cut. The government obviously thinks the threat is serious: some of Zardari’s cronies now speak openly at dinner parties of ‘evidence’ that proves military involvement in his wife Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. If the evidence exists, let’s have a look. Another straw in the wind: the political parties close to the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, have withdrawn from the central government, accusing it of callousness and financial malfeasance. True, but hardly novel.

Another necessary prerequisite for a coup is popular disgust with a corrupt, inept and failing civilian government. This has now reached fever pitch. As well as the natural catastrophes that have afflicted the country there are local wars, disappearances, torture, crime, huge price rises in essential goods, unemployment, a breakdown of basic services – all the major cities go without electricity for hours at a stretch and oil lamps are much in demand in smaller towns, which are often without gas and electricity for up to 12 hours. Thanks to the loan conditions recently imposed by the IMF – part of a gear change in the ‘war on terror’ – there have been riots against the rise in fuel prices in several cities. Add to this Zardari’s uncontrollable greed and the irrepressible desire of his minions to mimic their master. Pakistan today is a kleptocracy. There is much talk in Islamabad of the despised prime minister’s neglected wife going on a shopping spree in London last month and finding solace in diamonds, picking up, on her way back home, a VAT rebate in the region of £100,000.

Can it get worse? Yes. And on every front. Take the Af-Pak war. Few now would dispute that its escalation has further destabilised Pakistan, increasing the flow of recruits to suicide bomber command. The CIA’s New Year message to Pakistan consisted of three drone attacks in North Waziristan, killing 19 people. There were 116 drone strikes in 2010, double the number ordered in the first year of the Obama presidency. Serious Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and the News, claim that 98 per cent of those killed in the strikes over the last five years – the number of deaths is estimated to be between two and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every ten civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to military rules of engagement, with the result that drones are often used for revenge attacks, notably after the sensational Khost bombing of a CIA post in December 2009.

What stops the military from taking power immediately is that it would then be responsible for stopping the drone attacks and containing the insurgency that has resulted from the extension of the war into Pakistan. This is simply beyond it, which is why the generals would rather just blame the civilian government for everything. But if the situation worsens and growing public anger and economic desperation lead to wider street protests and an urban insurgency the military will be forced to intervene. It will also be forced to act if the Obama administration does as it threatens and sends troops across the Pakistan border on protect-and-destroy missions. Were this to happen a military takeover of the country might be the only way for the army to counter dissent within its ranks by redirecting the flow of black money and bribes (currently a monopoly of politicians) into military coffers. Pakistani officers who complain to Western intelligence operatives and journalists that a new violation of sovereignty might split the army do so largely as a way to exert pressure. There has been no serious breach in the military high command since the dismal failure of the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy, the first and last radical nationalist attempt (backed by Communist intellectuals) to seize power within the army and take the country in an anti-imperialist direction. Since then, malcontents in the armed forces have always been rapidly identified and removed. Military perks and privileges – bonuses, land allocations, a presence in finance and industry – play an increasingly important part in keeping the army under control."

On Critically Reading the Wikileaks

On Critically Reading the Wikileaks

Only a small proportion of the announced documents has been released so far by Wikileaks. As such, it is a bit early to conclusively suggest anything as to the value of these documents and their impact. While following the release, a few tentative thoughts came to mind that I want to share here in the interest of starting a constructive discussion. The examples I mention below are not from Wikileaks, but they are close to some of the released bits I have seen in news. The purpose here is not to analyze specific cables, but to elaborate a critical perspective for reading these leaks. (And, more broadly, for reading news on government- and corporate-owned media as well as non-corporate and user-generated forums like blogs and wikis.)

Rarely do diplomats speak out their minds in candid terms. The most sensitive information is almost always communicated in person, not over digital lines or mails. Therefore, one needs to think about not only what was said in these cables but also what was not said.

Even for communications over digital lines and mails, on important issues the US diplomats and other government officials usually use plain but coded language. The person sitting on the other end has to decipher the language and read between the lines. The dots can be hard to connect for an outsider, who may understand no more than just the apparent meaning of a leaked text. However, the added layers can be uncovered by placing such texts in the context of the politics and interests of the involved political players.

A person's perspective matters a lot for this reason. For example, a leak could suggest that, “Iran is a threat to regional stability and the Arab nations fear its nuclear capabilities.” Now, this message may mean one thing to a devout FOX News follower and another to the one critical of the American hegemonic ambitions and support to the status-quo regimes of the Middle East. Hence, the interpretation and value of such a statement depends on the perspective with which people judge it and how critically informed are those perspectives.

In my view, when Washington talks about ‘regional stability’, it first and foremost means the protection of the American and Israeli interests in the region. Iran is a ‘threat’ because it challenges those interests and supports the resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon, among other things.

Words like ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘terrorist groups’ may also be codes in these cables which could refer to different groups in different countries. In Yemen, for example, they could also refer to the Houthi rebels who are challenging the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Both Washington and Riyadh are against that and have provided heavy financial and military support to the regime against these rebels. In Egypt, such labels may also be used to refer to the Sunni opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been repeatedly cracked down by the US-backed regime of Hosni Mubarak. Similarly, the terms “moderate states” and “moderate Muslims” are also codes that often refer to those who are in favor of and are protecting the American and Israeli interests in the region (for more on this, see “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”).

One also needs to distinguish the Arab rulers from the Arab masses. Many Arab rulers surely fear Iran, but the majority of their people support Iran’s stance on the nuclear issue and Iran's support to the resistances in Palestine and Lebanon. In a recent poll carried out by Zogby International and the University of Maryland in the summer of 2010, the people in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates were asked to name the countries that they thought were the greatest threat to their security. 88% replied Israel, 77% the US, and only 10% Iran.

At times, factual-sounding statements in diplomatic communications may in reality be policy statements. For example, a statement that, “Iran will further isolate itself if it continues to pursue nuclear ambitions,” could very well be a statement of what they would like to see in case Iran does not follow their wishes, not necessarily what the ground reality is, even from their own perspective. Because, again, the same Summer 2010 poll suggests that a “majority of the Arab public now see a nuclear-armed Iran as being better for the Middle East.”

The poll results, moreover, suggest an increasing support for Iran in the Middle East on a number of critical issues that also discredits the argument of some US scholars that ‘old feuds between Shia and Sunnis’ define the political attitudes of the region. Yet, 'sectarian divisions' and 'specter of a rising Shia crescent', both codes for what they would like to promote, is continually used by both the US and Israeli diplomats and their supported status-quo regimes of the Middle East with the hope of dividing up the masses and re-aligning their politics on sectarian lines (for more on this, see “Bahrain and Pakistan: The Shia Dilemmas”).

Without a critical interrogation, and with media spins, these codes and policy objectives may in fact perpetuate themselves through these leaks. No surprise if due to the media coverage of some of the latest leaks, the general public in the US got the impression that 'all Arabs are against the Iranians and see the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to their security' and that the fault lines in the Middle East politics lie within their ‘ethno-sectarian’ divisions. Both the Neocons and the Hawkish-Pragmatists in Washington are surely going to capitalize on such a gross misunderstanding. For one, the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated last Monday (Nov 29, 2010): "So if anyone reading the stories about these alleged cables thinks carefully, what they will conclude is that the concern about Iran is well-founded, widely shared, and will continue to be at the source of the policy that we pursue with like-minded nations to try to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Hence, in view of the above discussion, the leaked cables should not be taken at face value, even in instances where they may be authentic.

The Impact

Not many people will go through all the leaked documents. They will mostly hear what the mainstream media and political groups choose to focus on. The media spins and the politics of appropriation of these leaks, therefore, would make for an interesting discussion in coming days.

In Iran, for example, while quoting the leaks some have criticized the current government for its defiant stand on the nuclear issue which to them has resulted in Iran’s ‘increasing isolation’ in the international arena. While some others have expressed qualms about the veracity of these leaks in instances where they may suggest that direct US support was given to the post-election rioters (true or not, and whether they discredit any of the opposition's claims, that's another debate). President Ahmadinejad also has questioned the ‘legal value’ of the leaks.

What is troubling many governments is not necessarily the exposure of their 'ill-feelings' toward each other by Wikileaks. The governments already know these truths, and also that embassies and diplomats regularly do espionage for their respective governments. In the arena of international relations, interests and power largely drive politics, not feelings of good will. Mutual suspicion among states is often normal. Pak-US relations is one example (on the issues of the nuclear arsenal, ISI, and PPP/Zardari). Iran-Saudi relations is another (particularly on Iraq and Palestine-Lebanon).

The concern that many governments have with these leaks is that this politics is out in public and now more susceptible to media spins and the perceptions of their national and international masses. After the leaks, the thoughts and prejudices of people against other countries or their own governments may solidify (and in some instances, radically change), and it would become more difficult for these governments to put an all-friendly public face, or make pragmatic political shifts, or claim to support causes that they really don't (like the Saudi (non)support to the Palestinian cause. Also, the Saudi and other status-quo Middle Eastern regimes would not be happy if their geo-political interests appear too much in line with that of Israel).

Particularly for Washington, the leaks are not only an embarrassment in front of the world but they may also promote a further disillusion regarding Washington’s claim of championing democracy, freedom, and human rights. In this sense, the leaks are a direct attack on the propaganda machinery of its hegemonic ambitions. Hence, Washington might also charge Wikileaks with promoting "anti-Americanism", in addition to calling it "a crime", "risking lives of troops", "compromising national security", etc.

The Truth

Despite the huge uproar in the media, most of the fundamental strategic and policy related knowledge that has come out in the leaks so far was already known to the discerning observers; the leaks, surely, added further confirmation to it.

Among the things that the leaks confirm is that ‘Israel tried to plan the Gaza War with Egypt and PA’ (The Jerusalem Post, Nov 29, 2010). This suggests a) the Gaza massacre in 2008-9 was pre-meditated (we already knew it then, but now we have further support), and b) the Egyptian and the West Bank authorities knew about Israel's plan well ahead of time, even if, according to the leaks, the two (supposedly) did not say 'yes' to Israel. We do not know what was worked out in the later communications. Egypt and West Bank’s PA may have had logistical concerns but from looking at their policies during the massacre we know that their strategic interests were aligned with those of Israel. Egypt, for instance, refused to open its Rafah border to allow food and other daily supplies to the Gazans. For reading the leaks, this also suggests that the fragments of cables, even if they are authentic, can be very misleading if we do not scrutinize them with a critically informed perspective.

Wikileaks reports also "indicate that the US has mounted a secret effort to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani reactor since 2007..." (CSMonitor, Nov 29, 2010). Indeed, this was one of the key issues that embittered the relationship between Washington and Pakistan’s powerful military establishment in the last few years and perhaps explains some of the dramatic political changes and turmoil. Yet, this nuclear connection was persistently and emphatically dismissed by some journalists in the liberal elite circles of Pakistan who might still call it a “conspiracy theory”.

One should not discount the possibility of a good number of forged and fragmented documents intentionally released to Wikileaks by government apparatuses. That reason alone is enough to suggest that Wikileaks cannot be a measure of truth per se, but it is the perspective with which one judges its content, and since there can be multiple perspectives, the truth of these leaks will remain contested. Further, the accuracy of some documents in the leaks should not be taken as a verification of the rest of the documents. On the question of verification, Wikileaks website itself suggests that the "simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.”

Lastly, in any review of these leaks, one should also interrogate the sources used and the background and politics of the people working for Wikileaks. Because these considerations have a huge impact on what Wikileaks editors choose to release (and what they do not), their timing, and their targets. Perhaps, their politics and agenda will become clearer with the release of more leaked documents.



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For some bits on what has been released so far, check out the following report:

US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis
David Leigh, The Guardian, Nov 28, 2010
Source

The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

Among scores of disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:

• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, with officials warning that as the country faces economic collapse, government employees could smuggle out enough nuclear material for terrorists to build a bomb.

• Inappropriate remarks by Prince Andrew about a UK law enforcement agency and a foreign country.

• Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable alleging that vice-president Zia Massoud was carrying $52m in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Massoud denies taking money out of Afghanistan.

• How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticising him personally.

• Allegations that Russia and its intelligence agencies are using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations, with one cable reporting that the relationship is so close that the country has become a "virtual mafia state".

• The extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, which is causing intense US suspicion. Cables detail allegations of "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and the use by Berlusconi of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italiango-between.

• Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan by US commanders, the Afghan president and local officials in Helmand. The dispatches reveal particular contempt for the failure to impose security around Sangin – the town which has claimed more British lives than any other in the country.

The US has particularly intimate dealings with Britain, and some of the dispatches from the London embassy in Grosvenor Square will make uncomfortable reading in Whitehall and Westminster. They range from political criticisms of David Cameron to requests for specific intelligence about individual MPs.

The cables contain specific allegations of corruption, as well as harsh criticism by US embassy staff of their host governments, from Caribbean islands to China and Russia. The material includes a reference to Putin as an "alpha-dog" and Hamid Karzai as being "driven by paranoia", while Angela Merkel allegedly "avoids risk and is rarely creative". There is also a comparison between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler.

The cables names Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of terror groups, and provide an extraordinarily detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of US planes to bomb al-Qaida targets. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, then US commander in the Middle East, Yemeni president Abdullah Saleh said: "We'll continue saying they are our bombs, not yours."

Other revelations include a description of a near "environmental disaster" last year over a rogue shipment of enriched uranium, technical details of secret US-Russian nuclear missile negotiations in Geneva, and a profile of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who they say is accompanied everywhere by a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse.

Clinton led a frantic damage limitation exercise this weekend as Washington prepared foreign governments for the revelations, contacting leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, France and Afghanistan.

US ambassadors in other capitals were instructed to brief their hosts in advance of the release of unflattering pen-portraits or nakedly frank accounts of transactions with the US which they had thought would be kept quiet. Washington now faces a difficult task in convincing contacts around the world that any future conversations will remain confidential.

As the cables were published, the White House released a statement condemning their release. "Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the US for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."

In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "We condemn any unauthorised release of this classified information, just as we condemn leaks of classified material in the UK. They can damage national security, are not in the national interest and, as the US have said, may put lives at risk. We have a very strong relationship with the US government. That will continue."

The US ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, said: "We have briefed the UK government and other friends and allies around the world about the potential impact of these disclosures … I am confident that our uniquely productive relationship with the United Kingdom will remain close and strong, focused on promoting our shared objectives and values."

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was British ambassador to the US in the Blair years, thought the leaks would have little impact on diplomatic behaviour. "This won't restrain dips' [diplomats'] candour," he said. "But people will be looking at the security of electronic communications and archives. Paper would have been impossible to steal in these quantities."

The state department's legal adviser has written to the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his London lawyer, warning that the cables were obtained illegally and that the publication would place at risk "the lives of countless innocent individuals … ongoing military operations … and co-operation between countries".

The electronic archive of embassy dispatches from around the world was allegedly downloaded by a US soldier earlier this year and passed to WikiLeaks. Assange made it available to the Guardian and four other news organisations: the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. All five plan to publish extracts from the most significant cables, but have decided neither to "dump" the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals. WikiLeaks says that, contrary to the state department's fears, it also initially intends to post only limited cable extracts, and to redact identities.

The cables published today reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.

Classified "human intelligence directives" issued in the name of Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.

The most controversial target was the UN leadership. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top officials and their staff and details of "private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys".

PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman in Washington, said: "Let me assure you: our diplomats are just that, diplomats. They do not engage in intelligence activities. They represent our country around the world, maintain open and transparent contact with other governments as well as public and private figures, and report home. That's what diplomats have done for hundreds of years."

The acting deputy spokesman for Ban Ki-moon, Farhan Haq, said the UN chief had no immediate comment. "We are aware of the reports."

The dispatches also shed light on older diplomatic issues. One cable, for example, reveals, that Nelson Mandela was "furious" when a top adviser stopped him meeting Margaret Thatcher shortly after his release from prison to explain why the ANC objected to her policy of "constructive engagement" with the apartheid regime.

"We understand Mandela was keen for a Thatcher meeting but that [appointments secretary Zwelakhe] Sisulu argued successfully against it," according to the cable. It continues: "Mandela has on several occasions expressed his eagerness for an early meeting with Thatcher to express the ANC's objections to her policy. We were consequently surprised when the meeting didn't materialise on his mid-April visit to London and suspected that ANC hardliners had nixed Mandela's plans."

The US embassy cables are marked "Sipdis" – secret internet protocol distribution. They were compiled as part of a programme under which selected dispatches, considered moderately secret but suitable for sharing with other agencies, would be automatically loaded on to secure embassy websites, and linked with the military's Siprnet internet system.

They are classified at various levels up to "secret noforn" [no foreigners]. More than 11,000 are marked secret, while around 9,000 of the cables are marked noforn.

More than 3 million US government personnel and soldiers, many extremely junior, are cleared to have potential access to this material, even though the cables contain the identities of foreign informants, often sensitive contacts in dictatorial regimes. Some are marked "protect" or "strictly protect".

Last spring, 22-year-old intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was charged with leaking many of these cables, along with a gun-camera video of an Apache helicopter crew mistakenly killing two Reuters news agency employees in Baghdad in 2007, which was subsequently posted by WikiLeaks. Manning is facing a courtmartial.

In July and October WikiLeaks also published thousands of leaked military reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. These were made available for analysis beforehand to the Guardian, along with Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to the US authorities, said the soldier had told him in chat messages that the cables revealed "how the first world exploits the third, in detail".

He also said, according to Lamo, that Clinton "and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in searchable format to the public … Everywhere there's a US post … there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed".

Asked why such sensitive material was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs."

He added: "We have been taking aggressive action in recent weeks and months to enhance the security of our systems and to prevent the leak of information."

Mineral riches and the future of Afghanistan

Stories about the existence of such mineral resources in both Afghanistan and Pakistan were in circulation for quite sometime. They have been cited as one of the main reasons why imperial powers are so interested in this region. Learning from other cases, the future of Afghanistan might not be very different from what is described in the following clip by John Perkins.

Economic Hitmen


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Fzm1hEiDQ


[Update June 14, 2010: Paul Jay argues that the US knew about mineral riches at least from 2007. He writes:

One did not need to read an "internal Pentagon memo" to find about the discovery. Just visit the public website of the U.S. Geological Survey and read the press release "Significant Potential for Undiscovered Resources in Afghanistan Released: 11/13/2007 10:00:00 AM"...

In an interview with USGS's Stephen Peters published at the same time on the same site, Peters says there are "Known deposits of asbestos, mercury, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, beryllium, and lithium."

In the NYT story, this is all presented as a recent and pleasant surprise to the Afghan government. According to the NYT, after the USGS survey was completed in 2006 and '07, "the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments."

The problem is the USGS results were announced in 2007 at the 3rd annual U.S.-Afghan Business Matchmaking Conference organized by the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

The press release from the USGS included a quote from Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, who said at the time "Afghanistan's natural resources have a quality comparable to the highest-class minerals of the entire region."

Why the story broke in the NYT on Sunday could be linked to a desire by the Pentagon to create a reason why U.S. troops might want to stick around in Afghanistan for some time to come. Things are not going very well on the ground and the promise of vast mineral riches would sound enticing.

The Times story includes a quote from Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command who says, "There is stunning potential here."

The serious question is, Did the knowledge of these massive mineral deposits affect President Obama's decision to increase troop levels and widen the scale of operations in Afghanistan? Are Canada, the UK and other NATO countries aware of the USGS report?

Has securing this mineral bonanza become the real US/NATO mission in the region?]

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
By James Risen, NYTimes, June 13, 2010
Source

Excerpts:

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

...

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

“There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”

Update on US "Af-Pak" Strategy

See related posts on intelligence network and special operations here and here. One way to interpret the current US strategy is that the special operations are a means to pressurize the insurgents, the old- and neo- Taliban-s that is, to come to the negotiation table. But nothing more. Not only because the US does not have the logistical capacity to get rid of the insurgency fully - the very US presence and its military operations are fueling Talibanization in Afghanistan - but also because if they could tame the beast which got out of their hands - that is, coopt the Taliban once again as they have tried several times already - the Taliban can be a useful pressure against neighboring Iran. The Saudis would like that too. The Pakistani security establishment - still wishing to develop that "strategic depth" against India - would not mind that either. The establishment's romance with the Taliban - albeit, only with the "good Taliban" now - is not over yet. Some level of turmoil in Afghanistan, moderate or extreme depending on political climate but as long as it is controllable, is also functional for the greater interests of Washington as that legitimizes the US presence in the name of combating "terrorism" - but not without raising concerns of regional powers like China.

McChrystal shifts to raids - and Wali Karzai
By Gareth Porter, Asia Times Online, May 26, 2010
Source

WASHINGTON - General Stanley McChrystal's team once talked openly about the need to remove from power Ahmed Wali Karzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother and the most powerful man in Kandahar.

Last October, as reports of Wali Karzai's role in the opium trade were circulating, McChrystal's intelligence chief General Michael T Flynn said, "If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves."

"The only way to clean up Chicago," Flynn declared, "is to get rid of [Al] Capone." The parallel between the legendary crime boss and Wali Karzai could hardly have been clearer.

But by the end of March, Dexter Filkins was reporting in the New York Times that US officials had decided that Wali Karzai "will be allowed to stay in place".

That complete reversal on Karzai was the result of a decision by the US military to de-emphasize the much-touted promise of governance reform in the Kandahar operation and focus instead on Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids targeted against suspected Taliban leaders living in Kandahar city - operations for which McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, needs intelligence being provided by Karzai.

McChrystal's shift in emphasis toward the targeted raids against the Taliban was undoubtedly accelerated by the message from the Barack Obama administration in March that he had to demonstrate progress in his counter-insurgency strategy by the end of December 2010 rather than the mid-2011 deadline for beginning the withdrawal of US troops.

That earlier deadline, first reported by the Washington Post on March 31, was confirmed this month by US General Frederick Hodge, the director of operations for all of southern Afghanistan. "Our mission is to show irreversible momentum by the end of 2010 - that's the clock I'm using," Hodge told The Times of London

The Pentagon's report on the past six months of the war, written in late March and early April, reflected that shift from governance reform to night raids. It failed to mention McChrystal's "population centric" strategy as a factor in putting pressure on the Taliban but touted the "removal" of many "lower level" Taliban commanders, mainly by "special operations forces".

After a few weeks of watching the results of the Marjah operation, the officials of McChrystal's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command conceded that the Afghan government had taken too long to put representatives of relevant ministries into the two key districts of Helmand province. They doubted that it would do any better in Kandahar, as The Times reported on May 11.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who frequently registers the latest thinking of the military leadership, wrote a column on April 1 clearly reflecting the downgrading of governance reform in the McChrystal war plan for Kandahar and the new emphasis on targeting the Taliban.

"Shaking up the power structure might put the United States on the side of the Pashtun man in the street," wrote Ignatius, "but it would open up a power vacuum that could be exploited by the Taliban."

For US commanders, Ignatius revealed, "There isn't time for risky experiments in Kandahar."

What Ignatius didn't say is that McChrystal had already ordered a major intensification of SOF raids in Kandahar city and that those raids are dependent primarily on intelligence supplied by organizations controlled by Wali Karzai.

In an interview with The Times published on May 7, Karzai boasted that he alone has supplied "the majority of intelligence in this region", adding, "I'm passing tons of information to them."

A former NATO official had confirmed that reality a few weeks earlier. "Most of our intelligence comes directly or indirectly from him," said the official, according to Time magazine on March 19.

Neither the ISAF commanders nor US SOF commanders have well-developed intelligence networks of their own in Kandahar.

Karzai has dominated the flow of intelligence to NATO forces by gaining control over both the police and official Afghan intelligence agency in the province, according to a new study of the power structure in Kandahar.

The study, published last month by the pro-war Institute for the Study of War, shows how Karzai completed his consolidation of political control over the national police in Kandahar after using the Karzai private militia used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Kandahar Strike Force, to kill the province police chief and the chief of criminal investigation, who had been independent of his influence, in a June 2009 gunfight.

Even more important, Karzai controls the Kandahar branch of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), which combines the intelligence and secret police agencies, as the study reveals. NDS has by far the largest network of informants in the province and has long taken the lead in carrying out the raids against the Taliban in Kandahar city, because of the ineffectiveness of the national police.

In an e-mail to Inter Press Service, a spokesman for McChrystal, Lieutenant Colonel Tadd Sholtis, acknowledged that the command accepts intelligence from Karzai, and said it would be "foolish" to refuse it.

Sholtis said he could not comment on how much weight the ISAF command put on intelligence from Karzai but asserted that the command has "multiple methods and sources for collecting intelligence" in the province, and that "we evaluate all human sources with respect to self-interest or bias".

ISAF can presumably draw on Afghan army intelligence in the province, but its assets are believed to be minimal compared with that of the NDS. The command also uses information from drone reconnaissance aircraft to supplement what it gets from Karzai-controlled networks.

Reliance on drones for targeting, however, leads to constant mistakes by US troops. Carlotta Gall reported in the New York Times on March 26 that drone strikes had killed farmers digging ditches and bringing goods home from market on three different occasions in recent weeks.

The ISAF command's dependence on Karzai for intelligence allows him to use US power against his political enemies. Time's Tim McGirk reported on March 19 that critics in Kandahar said Karzai had threatened to call down NATO air strikes or night raids by US SOF units on any tribal elders who defied him.

Karzai is widely believed to have used raids by security forces under his control to target a number of tribal opponents, according to the Institute's study. Karzai is deeply engaged in intervening in tribal politics across the province, creating new alliances and making new enemies, the analysis said.

The reaffirmation of ties between the US and Karzai ensures that the whole military effort in the province is locked into Karzai's political strategy for maintaining his grip on power. But McChrystal, the former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made it clear he is ready to sacrifice the possibility for political change in order to be able to do what he does best.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

NYTimes: US is still using private spy network

In a previous IS post, I suggested that contrary to the suggestions about Michael Furlong being just a rogue element, he and his assignment are actually part of a well-established, current US strategy for the "Af-Pak" region: Furlong and the US Af-Pak Strategy

See the following report that confirms that connection and provides further information. [Edit May 26, 2010: See also, NYT's report (May 24, 2010): US Commander OK'ed Clandestine Missions in Mideast, Central Asia, and Horn of Africa]

U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts
By Mark Mazzetti, NYTimes, May 15, 2010
Source

WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department,” so it would be inappropriate to answer specific questions about who approved the operation or why it continues.

“I assure you we are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated,” he said. Spokesmen for General Petraeus and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, declined to comment. Mr. Furlong remains at his job, working as a senior civilian Air Force official.

A senior defense official said that the Pentagon decided just recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of May. While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.

The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.

The memo also said that Mr. Furlong had a history of delving into outlandish intelligence schemes, including an episode in 2008, when American officials expelled him from Prague for trying to clandestinely set up computer servers for propaganda operations. Some officials say they believe that the C.I.A. is trying to scuttle the operation to protect its own turf, and that the spy agency has been embarrassed because the contractors are outperforming C.I.A. operatives.

The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, dismissed reports of a turf war.

“There’s no daylight at all on this between C.I.A. and DoD,” he said. “It’s an issue for Defense to look into — it involves their people, after all — and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering.

The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to a “fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. There, they are fed into classified military computer networks, then used for future military operations or intelligence reports.

To skirt military restrictions on intelligence gathering, information the contractors gather in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas is specifically labeled “atmospheric collection”: information about the workings of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan or about Afghan tribal structures. The boundaries separating “atmospherics” from what spies gather is murky. It is generally considered illegal for the military to run organized operations aimed at penetrating enemy organizations with covert agents.

But defense officials with knowledge of the program said that contractors themselves regarded the contract as permission to spy. Several weeks ago, one of the contractors reported on Taliban militants massing near American military bases east of Kandahar. Not long afterward, Apache gunships arrived at the scene to disperse and kill the militants.

The web of private businesses working under the Lockheed contract include Strategic Influence Alternatives, American International Security Corporation and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.

One of the companies employs a network of Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis run by Duane Clarridge, a C.I.A. veteran who became famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.

The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A spokesman for Lockheed said that no Pentagon officials had raised any concerns about the work.

“We believe our subcontractors are effectively performing the work required of them under the terms of this task order,” said Tom Casey, the spokesman. “We’ve not received any information indicating otherwise.” Lockheed is not involved in the information gathering, but rather administers the contract.

The specifics of the investigation into Mr. Furlong are unclear. Pentagon officials have said that the Defense Department’s inspector general is examining possible contract fraud and financial mismanagement dating from last year.

In his only media interview since details of the operation were revealed, with The San Antonio Express-News, Mr. Furlong said that all of his work had been blessed by senior commanders. In that interview, he declined to provide further details.

Officials said that the tussle over the intelligence operations dated from at least 2008, when some generals in Afghanistan grew angry at what they saw as a paucity of intelligence about the militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were regularly attacking American troops.

In October of that year, Mr. Furlong traveled to C.I.A. headquarters with top Pentagon officials, including Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, then the deputy operations officer at United States Central Command. General Holmes has since retired and is now an executive at one of the subcontractors, International Media Ventures. The meeting at the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center was set up to inform the spy agency about the military’s plans to collect “atmospheric information” about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including information about the structure of militant networks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Mr. Furlong was testing the sometimes muddy laws governing traditional military activities. A former Army officer who sometimes referred to himself as “the king of the gray areas,” Mr. Furlong played a role in many of America’s recent adventures abroad. He ran psychological operations missions in the Balkans, worked at a television network in Iraq, now defunct, that was sponsored by the American government and made frequent trips to Kabul, Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years to help run a number of clandestine military propaganda operations.

At the C.I.A. meeting in 2008, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated, according to some in attendance, because C.I.A. officials were immediately suspicious that the plans amounted to a back-door spying operation.

In general, according to one American official, intelligence operatives are nervous about the notion of “private citizens running around a war zone, trying to collect intelligence that wasn’t properly vetted for operations that weren’t properly coordinated.”

Shortly afterward, in a legal opinion stamped “Secret,” lawyers at the military’s Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., signed off on a version of Mr. Furlong’s proposed operations, adding specific language that the program should not carry out “inherent intelligence activities.” In January 2009, General Petraeus wrote a letter endorsing the proposed operations, which had been requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan at the time.

What happened after that money began flowing to Afghanistan remains a matter of dispute. General McKiernan said in an interview with The Times that he never endorsed hiring private contractors specifically for intelligence gathering.

Instead, he said, he was interested in gaining “atmospherics” from the contractors to help him and his commanders understand the complex cultural and political makeup of the region.

“It could give us a better understanding of the rural areas, of what people there saying, what they were expressing as their needs, and their concerns,” he said.

“It was not intelligence for manhunts,” he said. “That was clearly not it, and we agreed that’s not what this was about.”

To his mind, he said, intelligence is specific information that could be used for attacks on militants in Afghanistan.

General McKiernan said he had endorsed a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan pitched to him a year earlier by Robert Young Pelton, a writer and chronicler of the world’s danger spots, and Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive. The project, called AfPax Insider, would have been used a subscription-based Web site, but also a secure information database that only the military could access.

In an interview, Mr. Pelton said that he did not gather intelligence and never worked at the direction of Mr. Furlong and that he did not have a government contract for the work.

But Mr. Pelton said that AfPax did receive reimbursement from International Media Ventures, one of the companies hired for Mr. Furlong’s operation. He said that he was never told that I.M.V. was doing clandestine work for the government.

It was several months later, during the summer of 2009, when officials said that the private contractor network using Mr. Clarridge and other former C.I.A. and Special Operations troops was established. Mr. Furlong, according to several former colleagues, believed that Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan had failed to deliver on their promises, and that the new team could finally carry out the program first envisioned by General McKiernan. The contractor network assumed a cloak-and-dagger air, with the information reports stripped of anything that might reveal sources’ identities, and the collectors were assigned code names and numbers.

Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.

Malalai Joya: 'TIME distorts truth about US occupation in Afghanistan'

Reminds me of a similar story about Malalai Joya discussed earlier: see here.

"TIME distorts truth about occupation"
PressTV, May 11, 2010
Source

Afghan political activist Malalai Joya has criticized TIME magazine, saying it has "painted a false picture" of her.

At the end of April, TIME named Malalai Joya one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, but the write-up in the issue where the annual list was published did not mention her struggle against the US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan and even went so far as to lecture her and advise her that she should begin supporting the occupiers.

"I am very angry with the way they have introduced me. TIME has painted a false picture of me and does not mention anything at all about my struggle against the occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. and NATO, which is disgusting. In fact every one knows that I stand side-by-side with the glorious anti-war movements around the world and have proved time and again that I will never compromise with the US and NATO, who have occupied my country, empowered the most bloody enemies of my people, and are killing my innocent compatriots in Afghanistan. What TIME did was like giving an award to someone with one hand and getting it back with another hand. I have sent my protest through my Defense Committee, but TIME did not bother to even answer the protest letter. Perhaps this is the kind of freedom of expression exercised by TIME and the US. But I'm happy to see that many of my friends and supporters have objected to the write-up and expressed it by posting their comments on TIME's site or sending me many emails," Joya said.

She made the remarks in an interview with Sonali Kolhatkar on Uprising Radio, which is broadcast on KPFK, the Pacifica network's radio station in Los Angeles.

The interview was posted on the internet on May 3.

The Defense Committee for Malalai Joya published the following response to the TIME magazine write-up:

"We strongly object to the inaccuracies in the write-up by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Malalai Joya here.

"We believe it is disrespectful of Ms. Joya not to make clear her consistent and vocal opposition to the NATO occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, it is her opposition to war which has made her influential throughout the world, since in the vast majority of NATO countries public opinion is also opposed to the war.

"Hirsi Ali criticizes Ms. Joya's views on the NATO occupation of Afghanistan without ever actually letting the reader know what they are. Surely the TIME 100 honorees have all earned the right to have their own views represented in a non-patronizing, accurate manner to your readers.

"The very first sentence — 'To be a woman growing up in Afghanistan under the Taliban and to survive is in itself a major feat' — betrays an unfamiliarity with the subject's biography.

"In fact, Ms. Joya grew up in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. The Taliban only came to power in the period of 1994-1996, and Joya only returned to her homeland in 1998, at the age of 19.

"The whole tenor and content of the write-up plays into the common misconception in the United States that the only fundamentalist, reactionary political forces in Afghanistan are the Taliban.

"There is no reference to the civil war and the massacres carried out by fundamentalist warlords — many of whom have been returned to power under the Karzai regime."

Elsewhere in the Uprising Radio interview, Ms. Joya said:

"The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has an office that carefully monitors all media in Afghanistan and if they find any of them reporting against U.S. interests, they try using different means to stop it. Bribes are a very common means used. For the U.S. it's not just fighting a war through military means, but also on the propaganda front. I think propaganda plays a major role. They are trying to show the war is justified. When they kill civilians they immediately deny it and say that all the people killed are Taliban. When there is no chance for any independent confirmation, the lies are the only things reflected in the world media. There are only a few cases where some brave and justice-loving journalists like Jerome Starkey have come forward to unmake their shameful lies."

"But I will continue the struggle as long as these criminals are in power, these sworn enemies of democracy, women's rights, human rights, and as long as these occupation forces are bombing from the sky, and supporting the enemies of my people and killing innocent people of my country," she added.