Tom Ricks, hagiographer to generals and much-lauded fellow of the Obama administration's "counterinsurgency HQ" at the Center for a New American Security, finally comes out and says it: the US has accepted the White Man's Burden from previous colonial empires and will be meddling in the Middle East for centuries, "following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British".

For thousands of years, it has been the fate of the West's great powers to become involved in the region's politics. [as if they had no choice - C] Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French influence suffered a major reduction, it has been the United States' turn to take the lead there. And sitting on that wall, it struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East, the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it.

President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

...So, to address the perceptive question that Petraeus posed during the invasion: How does this end?

Probably the best answer came from Charlie Miller, who did the first draft of policy development and presidential reporting for Petraeus. "I don't think it does end," he replied. "There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis, for decades. . . . We're thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War."

He goes on to explain that, no matter when the US eventually leaves, there'll be a civil war in Iraq.

Toby Dodge, a British defense expert who was an occasional adviser to Petraeus, "the current Iraqi government is full of Iranian clients. You'll almost certainly end up with a rough and ready dictatorship . . . that will be in hock to Iran."

...Maj. Matt Whitney, who spent 2006 advising Iraqi generals, predicted that once U.S. forces were out of the way, Iraqi commanders would relapse to the brutal ways of earlier days: "Saddam Hussein taught them how to [suppress urban populations] and we've just reinforced that lesson for four years," he said. "They're ready to kill people -- a lot of people -- in order to get stability in Iraq."

..."When you got to know them and they'd be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous," said Maj. Chad Quayle, who advised an Iraqi battalion in south Baghdad during the surge.

So can someone explain to me how squandering "blood, treasure, prestige and credibility" for decades to simply delay the inevitable is better than getting out now? And if that explanation is forthcoming from military-enamoured liberal COIN hawks, maybe while they're at it they can explain why, in extolling the virtues of their new and improved war-fighting and nation-building formula, they keep neglecting to be specific about the generations-long colonialism it entails.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

CNN report via CSpanJunkie

"we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights."
Barrack Obama, July 15, 2008

Well, Musharraf is long gone but his handpicked general, a former head of the ISI, is still in charge of Pakistan's armed forces. And on Friday President Obama's administration carried through on his promise to act. Airstrikes by American pilotless drones killed 17 people in two successive attacks in North and South Waziristan. Although we do not know from reports whether Musharraf's successor as head of the Pakistani army, General Kayani, or President Zardari refused or were unable to take action on any solid intelligence, we do know that three children as well as a "possible" senior Al Qaeda leader were reported killed. The airstrikes were part of a program begun by the Bush administration and authorized to continue by President Obama, but he himself does not personally authorize each strike.

I continue to think this program is a massive mistake. Firstly, on purely "realist" terms for reasons I've long-ago explained and that some reports say the US intelligence community warned Bush about - they're dangerously destabilizing to a nuclear-armed nation on the very precipice of civil collapse. The aim of these raids is to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership. But if a strike is to kill Bin Laden, or the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar, it will likely do so at a safe house owned by the ISI which would cause an anti-American explosion in Pakistan's military and convulsions in Pakistani society which would certainly oust anyone willing to back the US. Pakistani officials have previously condemned Bush's heavy-handed violation of their sovereignty, leading general katyani to say that such incursions would be prevented "at all costs". If Obama is really looking to stabilize the region, that's about as counter-productive as it is possible to get. As one former Pakistani official put it: "Maybe you'll get the fish, but you'll poison the pond around him." The most obvious retaliation Pakistan could take would be to close the supply route to Afghanistan from Pakistan's ports via the Khyber Pass. That might not hurt US forces much, but it would mean famine in Kabul as the Afghan countryside cannot support the capital on its own.

But secondly because such attacks really are morally unsupportable given the way they are planned and carried out. One attack inside Pakistan has already missed its target and killed entirely innocent civilians instead. We know from events in Afghanistan that the USAF seems to have a terrible predeliction for bombing wedding parties because some tribal enemy fingers the neighbouring village as being a nest of militants. And I simply don't believe the possible death of a "possible terrorist leader" is worth three children's lives under any circumstances. There's no point to reclaiming the moral high ground by closing prisons and banning torture if you're going to hand it away again with indiscriminate airstrikes - and airstrikes are by their nature indiscriminate despite what the PR brochures on "precision" bombs might say.

I've been very impressed with Obama's first couple of days in office but this is one campaign promise I believe he should either u-turn on or consider a drastically out-of-the-box alternative.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

"We were walking, I was holding my grandson's hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson's hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn't make out which part was which."

That's the testimony of one man caught up in the disastrous airstrike on a Afghan bridal party wrongfully identified as a Taliban force back in July. The carnage was so complete they had to bury the 47 victims in 28 graves. US and NATO troops have denied the attack, but say they are investigating. In another similiar attack back in August they denied involvement at first too. Then investigated and found themselves blameless, only to finally admit their culpability and apologise once independent footage of the destruction surfaced. In a third such incident, in November, footage surfaced before the kabuki dance could begin. So far this year, such mistakes have cost over 600 Afghans their lives.

The Guardian report from which the above quotation was taken also includes a video report which contains footage of Afghans mutilated and crippled by mistaken Western airstrikes.

Afghans understand what's going on here in a way that Western leaders don't seem to.

Continue reading »

The story of an American airstrike on an Afghan village on the night of August 21 keeps getting stranger. At first, the US military said that militants had been killed in the attack, then Afghan officials alleged that only civilians had died - over 80, including at least 50 children. The US military investigated and stuck by its story and then mobile phone video of dozens of civilian casualties, ostensibly from the strike, turned up.

Now, the US has dispatched a general to Afghanistan to look anew at the events surrounding the airstrike and re-appraise the military investigation's conclusion.

But the story has taken a new turn - it appears the original investigation relied on the corroboration of an embedded journalist when it concluded that the airstrike had, after all, only hit militants. That journalist has now been revealed to have been former Iran/Contra conspirator and FOX correspondent Colonel Oliver North.

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Sources close to one of the investigations said that a video film was shot by Afghan officials the morning after the attack. It corroborates the doctor’s footage but has not been made public.

In a statement released on Saturday, the commander of Nato forces, General David McKiernan, appeared to back away from previous US accounts. He said: “Following the recent operation in Azizabad, Shindand district, we realise there is a large discrepancy between the number of civilian casualties reported by soldiers and local villagers. I remain responsible to continue to try and account for this disparity in numbers, but above all I want to express our heartfelt sorrow to all families that lost loved ones in this firefight.”

(Some of the mobile phone footage is at that Times link. It was shot by a doctor and the Times says "has been edited to remove the most graphic footage of dead children and adults". Even so, it's not for the faint of heart.)

As my colleague Anderson wrote at Newshoggers:

It is entirely unclear just what North did to "corroborate" US military claims of Taliban deaths, but his efforts to bolster the military stance appear about to go down in the same flames that killed 90 Afghan civilians.

While doubtful, perhaps the US military should rethink their reliance on the fantastical stories of a known bullshit artist and pathological liar, someone who by all rights ought to be in prison.

I wonder if we'll see North answer questions about what he said and why he said it on FOX? Somehow, I doubt it.

Keith Olbermann covered the airstrike massacre during his Bushed! segment, its disastrous diplomatic aftermath and North's involvement on Monday: "Realising that a) he's not a journalist b) he's not independent and c) his eye-witnessing includes seeing things that aren't really there, the US military has now reversed its stance..."

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The US has kicked the investigation of an alleged airstrike-gone-wrong into high gear, sending a general to Afghanistan to take over from local commanders after they had confirmed that the airstrike hit militant targets. The reason? The UN has video evidence contradicting those local commanders.

Afghan and Western officials say Afghanistan's intelligence agency and the U.N. both have video of the aftermath of the Aug. 22 U.S. airstrikes on the village of Azizabad showing dozens of dead women and children.

The Afghan government and the U.N. have said the raid killed 90 civilians, including 60 children.

The U.S. military said in a statement Sunday it will send a general officer to review the findings of the initial U.S. investigation that up to 35 militants and seven civilians died.

Locals had alleged that the airstrike was based upon faulty intelligence after political enemies of a local leader falsely 'fingered' the village in return for a bounty payment.

The BBC adds more about the nature of the new evidence.

Video footage from mobile phones showing dozens of dead bodies has given increasing credibility to claims by local residents that up to 90 civilians were killed in the attack.

The footage shows bodies - many of them women and children - lined up in a mosque in the village of Azizabad, which was the subject of a combined ground operation and airstrike by US forces.

Both the Afghan government and the United Nations have already carried out their own investigations into the attack.

They say the video evidence, and the presence of a large number of fresh graves in the village, confirm the accounts of local people.

Until now, the US military has insisted that far fewer civilians died in what it says was a successful operation against Taleban militants in the area.

On Sunday, however, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, said that in light of new evidence, he had asked for the American investigation to be reopened.

You can watch some of the video as part of a BBC World news report on the incident here.  

Violence is still rising in Afghanistan, with a higher rate of US troop deaths now than Iraq even at its worse. More than more than 2,500 people, including 1,000 civilians, have been killed in the last six months and, overall, coalition forces have killed almost as many civilians as militants have. Airstrikes have been blamed for many of the deaths.

Just after the airstrike in Herat district, Afghan president Hamid Karzai visited grieving relatives and told them "I have been working day and night over the past five years to prevent such incidents, but I haven't been successful in my efforts. If I had succeeded, the people of Azizabad wouldn't be bathed in blood."

Watch it.

Afghans prepare graves for people killed by a US airstrike on Azizabad village in Herat province. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says it has has found "convincing evidence" that 90 civilians -- including 60 children -- were killed in US-led air strikes last week.(AFP/File/Reza Shirmohammadi)

Some of you might remember this story from last Sunday. The UN has backed Afghan claims that a recent airstrike in Afghanistan didn't kill Taliban militants as the US military claims but instead killed 90 civilians, about 60 of them children. Under pressure, the US has now agreed to a joint investigation.

Evidence from all sides regarding the raid has been scant, with no conclusive photos or video emerging to shed light on what happened in Azizabad. But the claim of high civilian casualties by the Afghan government, which is backed by the U.N., is causing new friction between the Afghan president and his Western backers.

... The U.S. military says civilians are never deliberately targeted and that forces go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.

... Three Afghan officials said Thursday that U.S. commanders were misled into striking some 15 houses in Azizabad.

They said U.S. special forces troops and Afghan commandos raided the village while hundreds of people were gathered in a large compound for a memorial service honoring a tribal leader, Timor Shah, who was killed eight months ago by a rival clan.

The officials said the raid was aimed at militants who were supposed to be in the village, but they said the operation was based on faulty information provided by Shah's rival, whom they identified as Nader Tawakal.

Afghans targeted in U.S. raids have complained for years of being pursued based solely on information given by other Afghans who sometimes are business rivals, neighbors with vendettas or who are simply interested in reward money for anti-government militants.

   The local Afghan version of what happened is terribly reminiscent of the "bounties for terrorists" system that led to literally tens of thousands of Iraqis being arrested after being fingered by neighbours with grudges. The US military have released 11,000 Iraqi detainees this year and about 20,000 remain in US-run prison camps at Camp Cropper in Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. It's also reminsicent of the bounty system that led to them filling Gitmo with detainees, over 80% of whom were later released without charge.

You'd think by now they'd have worked out that the bounty system isn't working, it's just being used to settle local grudges. That's piss poor COIN doctrine - losing hearts and minds even among the fingerers, who surely see the US as just an unthinking oppressor of whom they can take temporary advantage.

  There's a bit of a difference of opinion between NATO and Afghan authorities over the result of recent airstrikes.

American-led coalition forces killed 76 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, the interior ministry said.

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"Seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition forces operation in Herat province," the statement said.

Coalition forces bombarded the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province on Friday afternoon, the ministry said. Nineteen victims were women, seven were men, and the rest were children under 15, it said.

However, the coalition denied killing civilians. It said 30 militants had been killed in an air strike in Shindand district in the early hours of Friday and no further air strikes had been launched. Air strikes took place between 1am-2am after Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a Taliban commander in Herat, the US military said in a statement.

...Saeed Sharif, a council member where the strike occurred, said: "Last night at 2am some people were attending a holy Koran recitation in Shindand district when Americans started bombing."

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. What usually happens next is the NATO carries out an investigation and says it is in the clear while the Afghans stick to their story. Which makes me wonder about the disconnect between that absence of admission for culpability in individual incidents and the overall admission that airstrikes and shootings by coalition troops killed as many Afghans as the Taliban did last year. I'm sure Afghans wonder too - and then NATO wonders why the Taliban is resurgent.