• In Iraq, we haven't learned the lessons of the last war Add to ... 

   

   

   DOUG SAUNDERS 

   

   The Globe and Mail

   

   

  Published Saturday, Feb. 27, 2016

• Is history repeating itself in Syria and Iraq? Has Canada learned the lessons of Afghanistan and applied them to its new military mission? Or are we about to repeat the same cycle of caution, bravado, overconfidence, distraction, failure, delusion, doubling down, deception, redefinition, amnesia and retreat?

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  It’s hard to tell, for the tough lessons of our four consecutive Afghanistan missions are still not really acknowledged by Canada or its military. Other countries are more transparent about this: The U.S. Army has an entire Center for Army Lessons Learned, headquartered at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., that openly publishes harsh assessments of every battlefield misstep and epiphany.

• Canada is, to put it mildly, more circumspect. Despite expending a decade, 158 lives and more than $20-billion on a war whose outcomes and results were a matter of constant deception, Ottawa does not want to examine the experience publicly. As the fourth mission was ending in 2011, the Harper government’s Privy Council Office organized a “formal lessons learned exercise to determine what went right and wrong,” according to Carleton University political scientist Stephen Saideman.

  Countless officials at every level of military and political office were interviewed, a formal report was drafted – and then it was promptly “buried in a cabinet drawer” and kept secret, not only from citizens and media, but from any military and political officials who might benefit from reading and applying those lessons. It appears to be permanently buried: Mr. Saideman’s recent request to obtain the report under the Access to Information Act was refused.

• We’re left to pick and choose our lessons. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his party appear to have taken the lesson that we should not engage either in air strikes – with their high risk of civilian deaths (even though air strikes were the basis of our one clear coalition success, in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999) – or in the sort of counterinsurgency campaign that turned Kandahar into a lengthy and expensive effort in ineffective frustration.

  Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, an Afghanistan veteran, finally got specific this week about what we are actually planning on doing in this new conflict – and his caution and hesitancy implied another lesson learned. He told the Senate that Canada is not really “at war,” despite having 830 troops holding weapons on the front lines there, arguing that applying that phrase to anything less than the full-scale mobilization of the World Wars is to devalue the term. But he did say, persuasively, that Canada should not be there unless it can participate “full-spectrum” as part of a coalition fight, involving front-line training, air support, logistics and intelligence operations, and the secret violence of special operations troops currently engaged there.

• One crucial lesson, pointed out in Mr. Saideman’s new book Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned from Canada’s War in Afghanistan, is that Canada, as with most countries, tends to enter wars for the wrong reason, at the wrong time, and then tries to find a purpose and something that could be called a success.

  If we were operating on purely moral grounds, we would have launched a military operation in Syria in 2011, when Bashar al-Assad brutally crushed a mass democracy uprising and then launched, with support from Russia and Iran, a truly horrific war against his people; in Afghanistan in about 1998, when the Taliban's theocratic horrors became apparent; and in Yugoslavia in perhaps 1990, when Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal intent was apparent but not yet active.

• But we enter other people’s wars, for self-interested reasons, long after they’ve become too complicated to win easily. And this often means shifting focus. We entered Afghansitan only because the Taliban came to Harbour an Arab jihadi group that launched spectacular attacks against a NATO ally, the United States; after successfully ousting Al Qaeda, we ended up having to strike deals with elements of the Taliban to maintain any stability we had helped create in Afghanistan. We only entered Syria and Iraq after Assad's civil war had caused the group that calls itself Islamic State to begin attacking the West (and after the war had produced a terrible refugee exodus). In order to maintain the very awkward coalition fighting the IS extremists, we may have to leave President Bashar al-Assad in power for a while longer, rather than defeating him immediately.

  Another lesson is that this is about us. Mr. Saideman concludes that Afghanistan could be called a success under its own terms, despite the ruin that is Afghanistan today, because among its goals were creating a more competent, qualified, fighting image for our military (accomplished) and showing a high level of support for NATO (accomplished).

  But that should not be a lesson we take to Syria and Iraq. We should be there to prevent the worst from occurring, not to try to put ourselves in the best possible light.

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• Press Statement
  Office of the Press Secretary
  Washington, DC
  February 27, 2003

• Joint Statement Between the United States of America and Afghanistan

  Released by the White House 

  President Bush and President Karzai reaffirm their common vision for an Afghanistan that is prosperous, democratic, at peace, contributing to regional stability, market friendly, and respectful of human rights. They affirm their ironclad and lasting partnership in pursuit of this vision, and will work together to ensure that Afghanistan is never again a haven for terrorists and that no resurgence of terrorism threatens Afghanistan  

  The United States has demonstrated its commitment to Afghanistan, providing U.S. forces to combat terror and secure stability, and granting over $900 million in assistance since 2001. Working together, Afghans, Americans, and our international partners have made great progress in ridding Afghanistan of Al Qaida and Taliban elements. We averted famine for some 7 million Afghans last year, and have begun the essential and challenging work of rebuilding after decades of dictatorship, war, and extremism. As a sign of confidence in the future, some 2 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan over the past year. But much remains to be done. This year will mark a shift toward long-term reconstruction projects and the rebuilding of Afghan institutions. The United States will be a full partner in this transition, helping to secure stability and supporting reconstruction throughout the country, including roads, schools, clinics, and agriculture. We will continue our work together, with other partners, to gather the resources that will hasten the day when all Afghans lead prosperous and secure lives.

• President Karzai has declared 2003 to be a year of national institution building for Afghanistan, a year when the economic and social benefits of peace are extended throughout the country.  

  Afghans are enjoying newfound freedoms and hope for a brighter tomorrow. The United States will work with Afghanistan to extend the accomplishments of the Bonn Accord of December 2001 and the Emergency Loya Jirga of June 2002 so that Afghans can build a democratic, constitutional government within the context of Afghanistan's unique culture and history.

• The United States military will continue with its primary mission to prevent terrorist elements from undermining the security environment, while also building the Afghan national army -- a central priority for both governments -- and facilitating reconstruction. President Karzai strongly favors the creation by the United States and other coalition partners of a number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams that will work closely with Afghan government ministries, UN agencies, and NGOs in advancing common reconstruction objectives while also working with the graduate battalions of the Afghan National Army to advance the mission of enhancing security nationwide.  

  President Bush reaffirms that the United States will continue to be a full partner in Afghanistan's reconstruction and, with the support of Congress, continue with a comprehensive program of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan at levels commensurate with the past. To support President Karzai's goal of seeing a transition to broad-based reconstruction efforts, the United States will focus its efforts on particular projects in the areas of transportation, agriculture, education, and health.
• • The United States has committed $80 million to the rebuilding of the Kabul-Kandahar-Herat road -- Afghanistan's main transportation artery. Japan and Saudi Arabia are joining us in this project. The United States, in partnership with Norway, will also provide $12 million to build a bridge over the river between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, forming a key road link.
   
  • Agricultural projects will include a package of irrigation programs, including $6 million to assist Afghanistan in managing water systems that are already being repaired under cash-for-work programs and a $15 million project to restore irrigation systems and other essential services.
   
  • In the area of education, the United States is initiating a $60 million program to build or repair 1000 schools, print 15 million textbooks, train 30,000 teachers, and offer accelerated learning programs to 60,000 students.
   
  • Health is also a priority sector for U.S. assistance, with $133 million planned for a three-year program that will construct or rehabilitate 550 primary health care centers, expand access to health services in rural areas, and address the basic health care needs of women and children.
   

  The United States and Afghanistan will work together toward that day when Afghanistan is fully secure and self-sufficient. In Afghanistan as elsewhere, the United States covets no resources and seeks no special advantage. President Bush and President Karzai reaffirm the bond of friendship that unites the peoples of America and Afghanistan in the common pursuit of a safer, freer, and more prosperous world for the benefit of all.

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• America's utter failure in Afghanistan, in one depressing statistic

     

    Updated by Jennifer Williams   on February 26, 2016

• A new government report on Afghanistan reconstruction includes a startling fact: The US has spent more money — a lot more money — trying to rebuild Afghanistan than we did rebuilding Europe after World War II.

   

  The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) submitted a statement to Congress on Wednesday in a hearing to review the fiscal year 2017 budget request and funding justification for the US Department of State. It included this line:

• Since FY 2002, Congress has appropriated approximately $113.1 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. That is at least $10 billion more, adjusted for inflation, than the amount the United States committed in civilian assistance to help rebuild Western Europe after World War II.

   

   

  This obviously depends on how you do the calculation. The method SIGAR says it used gave them an adjusted total of $103.4 billion in 2014 dollars for the Marshall Plan. When I ran a simple comparison of 1952 spending versus 2016 spending, adjusting for inflation, I found that US spending on the Marshall Plan actually translates into $118 billion in today's dollars, so a bit more than we spent in Afghanistan.

• But the point remains that our spending on Afghanistan today is pretty similar to what we spent to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. And despite spending a similar amount of money on a relatively narrower mission in Afghanistan, we have much, much less to show for it. It's staggering.

   

  Between 1948 and 1952, the US gave approximately $13.3 billion to 16 Western European countries to help them recover and rebuild in the aftermath of World War II. And although economists still debate exactly what role the Marshall Plan funds played in Europe's economic recovery, the fact remains that the Western Europe that emerged from the Marshall Plan years was a much more stable, prosperous, peaceful place than it had been beforehand.

• The political effects of the Marshall Plan were also profound. As Diane Kunz, a history professor at Yale University, explained in DW, "The Marshall Plan served as the economic and political foundation for the Western alliance that waged the Cold War."

   

     

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  So we spent the equivalent of more than $100 billion, and what we got for our money was a major continent-wide economic recovery and an alliance that defeated the Soviet Union. Not too shabby.

• Now let's compare that with what we've gotten for our $113.1 billion investment in rebuilding Afghanistan:

   
   
  • The Taliban is resurgent. According to another SIGAR report from last month, "The Taliban now controls more territory than at any time since 2001." Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, found as of October of 2015 that about one-fifth of Afghanistan was verifiably controlled or contested by the Taliban. In reality, he wrote then, "they probably either control or heavily influence about a half of the country."
   
  • ISIS has now established a foothold in Afghanistan. Though it is estimated to have only between 1,000 and 3,000 fighters in the country, it is launching attacks — including, most recently, bombing the Pakistani consulate in Jalalabad, killing seven people. And it is building what Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called "little nests" in the country's east.
• • The Afghan security forces are a mess. In August 2015, Afghanistan expert Gary Owen wrote, "Since the Afghans assumed control of the country’s security in 2014, more civilians have been killed, more soldiers have died, more Afghan troops have deserted than ever before, and security forces are still torturing one-third of their detainees."
   
  • Afghans are fleeing the country in droves. In just the third quarter of 2015 alone, some 56,700 Afghans filed applications seeking asylum in the EU, according to Eurostat data. Afghan refugees are second only to the number of Syrians seeking asylum in the EU from the brutal civil war in Syria.

• But while the US and other countries involved in Afghanistan haven't achieved anything quite like a Marshall Plan, there have been some positive developments.

   

  In August 2015, Stephen Watts and Sean Mann of RAND noted that according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators, in Afghanistan "child mortality rates have fallen by over one-quarter, more than half of children attend school (compared to approximately 15 percent — none of them girls — under the Taliban), and income levels are roughly six times what they were before the US intervention."

   

  Those positive developments are a reminder that while Afghanistan today sure doesn't look like Western Europe after the Marshall Plan, it also started at a much lower point.

• But it's also a reminder that the country's increasingly unstable security situation and resurgence of the Taliban threaten to undo even those modest achievements.

   

  The bottom line is that, unlike the brilliant success story that was Western Europe after the Marshall Plan, we have very little to show for the billions of dollars we have spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan.

   

  This is a major financial blow for US taxpayers and, more importantly, a tragedy for the millions of Afghans who were promised the world and are still waiting for that promise to be fulfilled.

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• November 13, 2015 

  Bernie and the Jets

   

    by Jeffrey St. Clair
• As Clintons are wont to do, Hillary laid a political trap and Bernie Sanders, in his Schlemiel-like way, stumbled right into it. In the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s smashing victory as the new leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Hillary’s super-PAC, Correct the Record, tarred Sanders as a Corbyn-lite renegade who has cozied up to untouchable figures like Hugo Chavez.

• About a decade ago, Sanders was part of a delegation that negotiated a sensible deal to bring low-cost heating oil from Venezuela to poor families in the northeastern United States. But instead of defending his honorable role in this ex parte negotiation, Sanders wilted. In a fundraising email to his legions of Sandernistas, Bernie fumed at being “linked to a dead Communist dictator.”

   

  Of course, Hugo Chavez represented everything that Bernie Sanders claims to be but isn’t. Namely, an independent socialist, whose immense popularity in his own country led to his Bolivaran Party winning 18 straight hotly-contested elections since 1996, not to mention surviving several coup attempts backed by the CIA and the editorial board of the New York Times, plots that elicited not a squeak of dissent from Bernie the Red.
• One might be tempted to cut the Vermont senator some slack on the matter. After all, Sanders seems to have given foreign policy in the post-911 era about as much attention as he has police violence in urban American. As the American military skids into Syria, one looks to Sanders (who else is there?) for new ideas, for a holistic political philosophy that links neoliberal economics to racism and imperial adventurism. Yet we see nothing of the kind. How does Sanders feel about the latest war we’ve backed our way into in the Middle East? Who can really say? No one is sure if Sanders himself really knows, and this not merely because Bernie so often seems to be speaking in tongues, without even the spiritual uplift a Pentecostal sermon provides.

• Sanders’ core political ideas seem scrawled on parchment, as stale and faded as those of the American politician he most resembles, Hubert H. Humphrey. The country’s most acerbic political journalist, Robert Sherrill, called Humphrey the Drugstore Liberal. The Minnesota Democrat was an economic populist, perhaps even to the Left of Sanders, who remained insensate to the horrors of the American war machine. Like Sanders, Humphrey directed almost all of his economic rhetoric at the middle class ­— what nearly everyone else in the world calls the bourgeoisie — a curious target demographic for an avowed socialist.

   

  As the nation sank deeper into the blood of Vietnam, Humphrey’s sole consolation was to dole out economic palliatives while talking up the number of high-paying jobs generated by the arms manufacturers. Like Humphrey, Sanders is a military Keynesian who seems to believe that the never-ending War on Terror is one sure-fire route toward full-employment. In other words, he’s a Cold War Liberal lost in a post-Cold War world.
• Still, Bernie clings to his death-dealing supersonic relics, most fervently to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet. As Andrew Cockburn reported in Harper’s, Sanders and his Vermont colleague Patrick Leahy waged a fierce bureaucratic fight to bring the jet to the Burlington Air Base as the premier weapon of the Green Mountain Boys, the 158th Fighter Wing of the Vermont Air National Guard. At $191 million per aircraft, the F-35 represents a technological wish-fulfillment for the defense lobby. Larded with the latest high-tech thanatic gizmos, the porcine and unstable Stealth fighter will prowl cloud-free skies (too dainty to fly in rain) on an endless quest to confront an enemy that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. The only people who will be terrorized by Bernie’s fleet of F-35s when they finally arrive are the poor residents of South Burlington, whose homes will be perpetually quaking from the caterwauling squeal of the jet’s after-burning turbofan engine.

• Award Bernie bonus points for consistency here. He is equally supportive of gun manufacturers, rejecting even the most timid restrictions on gun sales (the Brady Bill) and voting to shield weapons-makers from liability suits brought by victims of mass shootings. A few hours after the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, Bernie hypocritically tweeted out a statement of condolence for the victims which was notable only for the extreme banality of its sentiment.

   

  Two days later, when U.S. airstrikes targeted a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 medical workers and patients, Sanders’s twitter-wire went tellingly mute. But what could Sanders say about this war crime in real time, an attack that infused a new meaning to the phrase ‘surgical strike’? The miserable 14-year-long war on Afghanistan is the battle Sanders said had to be waged, a war without regrets.

• Alexander Cockburn used to say that one of the pre-conditions for being a “serious presidential contender” was the ability to confess publicly, often live on Meet the Press, that you were willing to launch nuclear weapons against (pick a country, any country will do….), even at the risk of incinerating life on Earth.

   

  Of course, these days, you also have to pledge support for Obama’s drone killing program, as Bernie Sanders has faithfully done. Sanders told George Stephanopoulos in August that if he becomes the next joystick bombardier in the Oval Office, he won’t pull the plug on the drones but he will endeavor to kill fewer innocent people. Rarely has the moral hollowness of American liberalism been expressed more clearly.

   

  Thank you, Comrade Bernie.

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• Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath

   

     

   02/14/2016
• Jeffrey Sachs Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University

• In the Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire:

     

   

  But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.

   

       

  This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit to be President. Clinton's role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.
• In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.

• As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason.

   

  Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.

• This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat" Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.

   

  Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.

• When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.

   

  In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made public its position: "Assad must go."

• Since then and until the recent fragile UN Security Council accord, the US has refused to agree to any ceasefire unless Assad is first deposed. The US policy--under Clinton and until recently--has been: regime change first, ceasefire after. After all, it's only Syrians who are dying. Annan's peace efforts were sunk by the United States' unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a ceasefire. As the Nation editors put it in August 2012:

   

   

  The US demand that Assad be removed and sanctions be imposed before negotiations could seriously begin, along with the refusal to include Iran in the process, doomed [Annan's] mission.

• Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called "Friends of Syria" to back the CIA-led insurgency.

   

  The U.S. policy was a massive, horrific failure. Assad did not go, and was not defeated. Russia came to his support. Iran came to his support. The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves radical jihadists with their own agendas. The chaos opened the way for the Islamic State, building on disaffected Iraqi Army leaders (deposed by the US in 2003), on captured U.S. weaponry, and on the considerable backing by Saudi funds. If the truth were fully known, the multiple scandals involved would surely rival Watergate in shaking the foundations of the US establishment.
• The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a "normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?
• This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup d'état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don't like their countries to be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.
• Removing a leader, even if done "successfully," doesn't solve any underlying geopolitical problems, much less ecological, social, or economic ones. A coup d'etat invites a civil war, the kind that now wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile international response, such as Russia's backing of its Syrian ally in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery caused by covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What surprise, then, the Clinton acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor and guide?
• And where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times finally covered a bit of this story last month in describing the CIA-Saudi connection, in which Saudi funds are used to pay for CIA operations in order to make an end-run around Congress and the American people. The story ran once and was dropped. Yet the Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert operations in Central America without consent or oversight by the American people).
• Clinton herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in deploying this instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid support for US-led regime change includes (but is not limited to) the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated insurrection against Assad from 2011 until today.

• It takes great presidential leadership to resist CIA misadventures. Presidents get along by going along with arms contractors, generals, and CIA operatives. They thereby also protect themselves from political attack by hardline right-wingers. They succeed by exulting in U.S. military might, not restraining it. Many historians believe that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures to the Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline rightwing opposition in the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government.

   

  Hillary Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension, in facing down the CIA. She has been the CIA's relentless supporter, and has exulted in showing her toughness by supporting every one of its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly hidden from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much to answer for regarding the disaster in Syria.

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• Western warmongers have all the answers, and they're all wrong

  #IslamicState

  

  Nafeez Ahmed

  Friday 29 January 2016
• The wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan failed not because of noble errors, but because short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of the people. And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again

• Despite an almost total lack of public debate, Western military escalation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is on the rise.

  Renewed military interventionism has been largely justified as a response to the meteoric rise of Islamic State networks, spreading across parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

  Missing from government pronouncements, though, is any acknowledgement that the proliferation of Islamist terrorism is a direct consequence of the knee-jerk response of military escalation.

  Discarded to the memory hole is the fact that before each of the major interventions in these three countries, our political leaders promised they would bring security, freedom and prosperity.

  Instead, they have done precisely the opposite.

• White man’s burden for Afghan freedom

  In October 2001, as US special forces were roaming Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden, Max Boot – a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations - wrote a gushing article in the Weekly Standard titled, The Case for American Empire.

  “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he said.

  “Occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over… Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

• Fifteen years into the war in Afghanistan, it is patently clear that this imperial dream is nothing more than a self-soothing fantasy. President Barack Obama has reneged on a promise to withdraw US troops, and will instead keep 9,800 there in 2016 – and has said that at least 5,500 will remain in the country indefinitely.

  The Taliban, far from being destroyed, is resurgent like never before. IS is now active in Afghanistan, and its reach is growing.

  Billions have been invested in this failed long-haul military effort – while the economy, infrastructure and basic public services remain underdeveloped, broken and ineffective.

  Instead, in the name of promoting democracy, the West has cynically supported fraudulent elections, endemic corruption, and warlord cronyism.

• According to the new Human Rights Watch World Report 2016, under the US-backed "democracy" in Afghanistan: “Little progress was made in reining in abusive militias, reducing corruption, promoting women’s rights, and reforming the courts.”

  The West’s response to this has been to turn a blind eye, because the corrupt regime we’re backing there by definition constitutes "the good guys".

  “Donors have been all too willing to ignore abuses taking place rather than using their influence with the government to end them,” said HRW’s senior Afghanistan researcher, Patricia Grossman.

  This hasn’t stopped Boot from touting himself as an expert on what the US should do next in Afghanistan.

• Blaming the troop withdrawal itself for the failure of US counterinsurgency operations, earlier this month Boot proclaimed: “Afghanistan is not lost even now. A greater US commitment can still save the democratic government in Kabul and stop a Taliban takeover.”

  What democratic government in Kabul?

  Boot conveniently ignores that the acceleration of the Taliban’s insurgency did not begin under Obama, but intensified under the Bush Doctrine.

  Between 2002 and 2006, the number of insurgent attacks increased by 400 percent, and the number of deaths from these attacks increased by more than 800 percent. Between 2005 and 2006, IED attacks more than doubled from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks near tripled from 1,558 to 4,542.

• From 2006 to 2007, insurgent attacks increased by a further 27 percent.

  Neither Bush nor Obama have shown much interest in addressing one of the key material causes behind the Taliban insurgency.

  According to Richard Armitage, a former deputy US secretary of state under Bush from 2000 to 2005: “We had substantial information that there was direct assistance from the Pakistan government to the Taliban between 2002 and 2004.”

  In fact, intelligence of this nature has continued to pour in seamlessly since then until today. But Pakistan is still the West's "ally" in the "war on terror".

• Civilising missions in Iraq and Syria

  Similarly, Washington Post veteran David Ignatius was one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq invasion, which he described as “the most idealistic war fought in modern times – a war whose only coherent rationale, for all the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda terrorists, is that it toppled a tyrant and created the possibility of a democratic future. It was a war of choice, not necessity, and one driven by ideas, not merely interests.”

  Ignatius also criticised commentators who wrote “darkly about America's designs on Iraqi oil, or a conspiracy to enrich Vice President Cheney's old friends at Halliburton… It would be nice, in a weird way, if the Iraq war were anchored to such worldly interests. But it isn't.”

• He went on to write an astonishingly glowing portrait of one of the war’s chief architects, then Pentagon war-planner Paul Wolfowitz, praising his deference to Arab intellectuals – like the late Ahmed Chalabi, who we now know fabricated the threat of Saddam’s WMD in cahoots with his Bush administration backers.

  Never mind that State Department and UK Foreign Office files prove unequivocally that opening up Iraq’s considerable oil resources to global markets was a major strategic goal of the 2003 invasion. Or that Cheney’s Halliburton made $39.5bn from the war, largely from no-bid contracts.

• No, despite that, Ignatius claims he admits his support for the war was a “mistake”, because the war itself was just a “mistake” – but he remains strangely unable to this day to acknowledge the neoconservative’s “worldly interests” behind the war.

  Despite that, Ignatius still thinks himself qualified to advocate solutions to the rise of IS across Iraq and Syria.

  In Iraq, he thinks, the solution is obvious: more military intervention to empower Sunni insurgents to fight IS – a prescription that ignores how al-Qaeda in Iraq arose directly in response to the US surge which empowered Sunni tribes, many of whom had previously fought alongside al-Qaeda in the first place.

• Meanwhile, the US has built up 3,700 "boots on the ground" in Iraq, and the Pentagon is complaining that more are needed.

  At least Ignatius has Max Boot to back him up. He recently recommended that the “necessary troop size” in Iraq ranges “from 10,000 personnel (according to General Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command) to 25,000 (according to military analysts Kim and Fred Kagan)”.

  He even threw in the idea of breaking up Iraq, a process he euphemistically calls “nation building”, without the slightest sense of irony about the failure of such hubris in creating the current crisis:

• “The United States should lay the groundwork for a post-conflict settlement in both Iraq and Syria that does not necessarily require keeping both political entities intact.”

  On Syria, Ignatius suggests in The Atlantic that the US should consider working with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, to undermine IS.

  "Some Qatari officials have told me they think Nusra can be split into several factions, and that many of its fighters can be co-opted by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey into less menacing groups that reject foreign terror operations.

  "This may be wishful thinking, but it’s worth exploring. The message to Nusra should be that attempts to spread terror outside Syria will provoke devastating US and allied attacks.”

  He says this might help the US build a “strong” ‘moderate’ opposition, paving the way for violent regime change. 

• “The shattered nation can gradually be stabilised if the United States and its allies seriously commit to building a new Syrian force that can help fill the vacuum, post-Assad.”

  He adds that the US will need to work with people from the incumbent Baathist establishment, fostering an opposition that “can merge with ‘acceptable’ elements of the Syrian army to manage a transition from Assad”.

  Conveniently absent from his tragic tale of America’s “feeble”, “weak” and “feckless” approach is the US role in deliberately fostering the militants – a process that Ignatius blames solely on US allies, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Turkey.

• Never mind that Obama’s former Pentagon intelligence chief Michael Flynn has confirmed that the Pentagon anticipated the rise of an IS-type entity in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of US support for Syrian jihadist groups. This support, he said, was funnelled through our allies, the Gulf states and Turkey.

  And unsurprisingly, Ignatius seems oblivious to the inherent contradiction in calling for “a political solution – jointly brokered by the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia” while demanding that the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey accelerate their war drive to topple Assad, backed by Iran and Russia.

• Cheerleading for ‘democracy’ in Libya

  Sadly, this sort of nonsense is routinely regurgitated by defence think-tanks and policy groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Consider the abysmal track record of Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

  “What will Free Libya look like?” he asked in a Telegraph comment in 2011. Celebrating Libya’s rebel forces as “one of the more cohesive and forward-thinking armed opposition movements to have emerged out of civil conflict in recent years,” he downplayed the danger from “Islamist factions”.

• He claimed they were “an entirely different flavour to those that percolated for decades in Afghanistan – less steeped in prolonged guerrilla warfare, without major state sponsors like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and in the shadow of an internationally recognised rebel committee”.

  In a jubilant op-ed for the Conservative Party’s Middle East Council, Joshi continued this thread: “Libya’s new rulers can now legitimately claim to have crossed the line from wartime to the democratic transition… The war in Libya has been an unqualified military success.”

  But Joshi’s unashamed propaganda published on the website of the incumbent War Party overlooked key facts.

• In March 2011, Nato-backed Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi openly admitted that al-Qaeda jihadists who had fought Western troops in Iraq were fighting on the frontlines to topple Gadhafi. “Members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting the invader,” he said.

  According to former CIA officer Bruce Reidel at the time, “There is no question that al-Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition. It has always been [Muammar] Gaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.”

• Canadian intelligence files show that senior Nato leaders knew military action would likely lead to “a long-term tribal/civil war” in Libya, especially if “opposition forces receive military assistance from foreign militaries”.

  The opposition, intelligence agencies confirmed, were strongly tied to al-Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups.

  The same batch of declassified Pentagon intelligence reports that former Pentagon intelligence chief Flynn acknowledged as accurate, documented close ties and weapons transfers between the US-backed operation in Benghazi and al-Qaeda affiliated rebels in Syria.

• In 2014, Flynn told the Armed Services Committee that the very “militias that won the revolution against the Gaddafi regime are now also threatening both the transition process and overall security.”

  The presence of IS fighters in Libya is thus a direct consequence of the Nato strategy that pundits like Joshi championed. Not that he can bring himself to acknowledge this while trying to distance the Nato intervention from those predicted consequences.

  Now the British prime minister, David Cameron, plans to dispatch 1,000 British troops to lead a US and EU 6,000 strong coalition to stop religious fighters from consolidating their control of a dozen of Libya’s major oil fields.
• The sad truth is that a significant portion of the pundit class that keeps trying to tell the public and government what to do, are clueless – and their ludicrous track records prove it.

• In Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, religious-fuelled insurgencies has been a direct product of a toxic combination: US and UK led military interventions, occupations, withdrawals, re-calibrations, and on and on and on; the ongoing billion dollars of support for the very groups that Western forces are fighting, by US and UK allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, among many others; and the installation and protection of corrupt, fraudulent, illegitimate regimes dressed up under the guise of "democracy promotion", all the while securing access to lucrative regional oil and gas resources.

  The fundamental reason the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya failed is not because of noble errors, but because in all three cases, short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of long-oppressed local populations.

  And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again.

• - Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of civilization.' He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

  The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

  Image: An Islamic State fighter watches as a missile launches into the air (AFP)

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•   Sat Feb 13, 2016 1:17pm EST   

    Related:     World,   Afghanistan   

   

  Afghan Taliban use captured Humvees in suicide attack

   

    LASHKAR GAH

• Taliban insurgents in captured military Humvee vehicles launched suicide attacks in the southern Afghan province of Helmand on Saturday, killing several members of the security forces in the district center of Sangin, a senior official said.

  The incident came amid bitter fighting in Helmand, a traditional Taliban heartland where insurgents have overrun many areas, leaving government forces in some district centers including Sangin and Marjah barely clinging on.

  Provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Sarjang said that after heavy fighting on Friday during which the Taliban lost around 40 fighters, suicide bombers in two captured Afghan army Humvees targeted the police and governor's headquarters.

• "The first Humvee was ordered by the police to stop but when he ignored warnings, the police fired a rocket-propelled grenade," Sarjang said.

  The second bomber detonated his vehicle near a checkpoint guarding the two headquarters. Four policemen were killed and seven wounded, he said, while an army spokesman said one soldier was killed and another was wounded.

     

  In Kabul, the outgoing commander of international troops in Afghanistan Gen. John Campbell confirmed the incident but said no American troops were involved.

  "I think right now the Afghan forces have a plan to go after that," he said.

• The Taliban have captured large amounts of weapons and equipment from Afghan government forces, including Humvees and other vehicles, as the insurgency has spread over the past year.

  Campbell recently ordered around 500 special forces personnel into Helmand to help bolster struggling Afghan security forces but their role is to act as trainers and advisers and only to get involved in combat if they come under attack.

• Last month in Helmand, an American special forces soldier was killed during a firefight near the district center of Marjah while he was on an operation with Afghan commandos.

  U.S. and British soldiers and marines suffered hundreds of casualties in Helmand where they fought for years against the Taliban for control of the province, one of the world's biggest opium-producing areas.

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• Sat Feb 13, 2016 12:49pm EST   

    Related:     World,   Afghanistan   

   

  Outgoing U.S. commander says mission in Afghanistan not changing

• U.S. troops in Afghanistan will not return to an active role fighting the Taliban despite the likelihood of another difficult year of combat, the outgoing commander of international forces, Gen. John Campbell, said on Saturday.

      U.S. special forces units assisting Afghan forces have been involved in firefights in the volatile southern province of Helmand, where a Green Beret was killed last month and where the Taliban have put government forces under pressure.

      Another 500 U.S. soldiers have been sent down to the province to bolster local forces that have been hard-pressed to hold on to key district centers such as Sangin and Marjah, but their role will remain to advise and assist.

•  "The mission hasn't changed," Campbell told reporters in Kabul in what is likely to be his final news conference before handing over to Lt. Gen. John Nicholson in March. But he said they would be able to defend themselves and call in air support if necessary.

      "They're not actively going out to fight but if they get attacked, they have to be able to provide force protection to themselves," he said. “That's where you see Apache helicopters, bombs, drones, those kind of things.”

     

      Afghan forces, which took over combat operations when NATO's fighting mission ended in 2014, have struggled and are expected to need international assistance for years to come.

      Around 9,800 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Under current plans that number is due to fall to 5,500 by the end of 2016.

• In addition to training Afghan forces, the U.S. military has stepped up operations against Islamic State fighters, mainly in the east of the country. With troop numbers set to fall, questions have been raised about what changes they will have to make to carry out both missions.

      Campbell said he has requested more flexibility in the authorization of force as well as in tactics and procedures used by U.S. forces against the Taliban. Except in very limited circumstances, current rules only allow him to order air strikes or other attacks against the Islamist insurgent movement when U.S. troops are threatened.

     

      In the meanwhile, Campbell said Afghan forces were trying to improve in areas including leadership and recruitment, reducing high rates of desertion and getting more soldiers off ineffective checkpoints and taking on the Taliban.

      "The Afghans need to focus on those four, five, six things to make sure that 16 is not like 15," he said.

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• Obama forced again to rethink troop numbers in Afghanistan
• By:   Deb Riechmann And Robert Burns The Associated Press    Published on Sat Jan 30 2016    

    

   

     

    

   

   

    

   

     

   

     

   

   

         

   

   

  WASHINGTON — Fifteen years into the war that few Americans talk about any more, conditions in Afghanistan are getting worse, preventing the clean ending that President Barack Obama hoped to impose before leaving office.

   

   

   

  Violence is on the rise, the Taliban are staging new offensives, the Islamic State group is angling for a foothold and peace prospects are dim.

   

   

   

  Afghanistan remains a danger zone. It's hobbled by a weak economy that's sapping public confidence in the new government. Afghan police and soldiers are struggling to hold together the country 13 months after the U.S.-led military coalition culled its numbers by 90     per cent  .

• The bottom line: For a second time, Obama is rethinking his plan to drop U.S. troop levels from 9,800 to 5,500 before he leaves office in January 2017.

   

   

   

  "I don't see any drawdowns" in the near future, said James Dobbins, Obama's former special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He predicted Obama would leave the decision to the next president.

   

   

   

  "They are just hoping that things hold together and they won't have to face a decision on whether to actually implement the force reduction they're talking about until late summer, early fall, by which time the administration will be on its last legs," Dobbins said.

   

   

   

  Top military officials, as well as Republicans and Democrats in Congress, think that trimming the force any more during Obama's presidency is a bad idea. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Thursday that Afghanistan was in a "crisis situation."

• Initially, Obama announced plans to reduce the force to 5,500 troops by the end of last year, and to 1,000 by the end of 2016. Last fall, Obama changed his mind, saying the situation remained too fragile for the American military to leave. He announced plans to keep the current force of about 9,800 in place through most of 2016 to perform not in an offensive combat role but to continue counterterrorism missions and advise Afghans battling a resurgent Taliban.

   

   

   

  It's been a tough year on the Afghan battlefield.

   

   

   

  Afghan soldiers and policemen — bankrolled by $4.1 billion in U.S. taxpayer money — fought virtually on their own last year for the first time since the U.S. invasion in 2001. NATO officials have told The Associated Press that Afghan troops are displaying prowess yet suffering sustained heavy casualties — 28     per cent  higher in 2015 than before the international combat mission ended in December 2014.

• Lt. Gen. John "Mick" Nicholson, Obama's pick to be the next top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said at his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday that the Afghan security forces have "more than held their own against the insurgency," but are not yet "self-sustainable."

   

   

   

  Asked whether the U.S. effort in 2015 had resulted in gains or losses, Nicholson replied: "The Taliban came at the Afghan security forces more intensely than perhaps we anticipated. Because of that, we did not make the advances we ... thought we would make."

   

   

   

  When U.S. and other foreign troops left on an announced schedule, the Taliban pounced.

• Last fall, they briefly seized Kunduz, a city of 300,000 in northern Afghanistan. It marked the militants' first capture of a major city since before the U.S.-led invasion and was marred by the mistaken U.S. strike on a charity hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, killing 42 people.

   

   

   

  Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, acknowledged that Kunduz was a setback. But he said it also reminded Afghans what life was like under the Taliban.

   

   

   

  "They don't want to return to that," he said.

• In the south, Afghan army units have been engaged in fierce fights with the Taliban for months in Helmand province, where militants sow more than $3 billion a year in opium revenue. The Afghan army in Helmand has been plagued by incompetence and corruption. The Afghan military recently fired and replaced top Afghan army leaders there.

   

   

   

  Also in the south, U.S. and Afghan forces last year killed 150 to 200 al-Qaida members in a large training camp, complete with tunnels, that was discovered in     neighbouring  Kandahar province, another militant stronghold.

   

   

   

  A current Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, acknowledged the army's many setbacks this year, but said the Taliban had sought to achieve major victories after the U.S.-led coalition announced it would end its combat mission on Dec. 31, 2015. Instead, they failed to retake huge swaths of land, the official said.

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• ISIS prompts call for 'enduring' presence in Afghanistan, new action in Libya

  

  

  By Ryan Browne and Barbara Starr, CNN

• Washington (CNN)Lt. Gen. John Nicholson, President Barack Obama's nominee for commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, said Thursday that "we do need to think about an enduring commitment to the Afghans."

  Speaking at his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, Nicholson said that the plan for an long-term U.S. military commitment was part of the President's policy shift that allowed for the retention of 5,500 troops beyond his presidency.

• While Obama had originally sought to withdraw all U.S. troops save for a small embassy presence, in October the President revised the draw-down plan to keep thousands of troops in Afghanistan into 2017.

  Nicholson was responding to a question as to whether he envisioned a U.S. commitment to Afghanistan resembling the decades-long deployment of U.S. military forces in Germany and South Korea.

  Currently, the 9,800 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan are split between the NATO-led training and assist mission, Operation Resolute Support, and a separate mission tasked with performing counterterrorism operations.

  Read More

  Nicholson said it was clear that "trans-national terrorist organizations," including ISIS and al Qaeda, were attempting to "establish sanctuary inside Afghanistan."

• Earlier this month, U.S. forces in Afghanistan were granted the authority to directly target ISIS in Afghanistan, also known as ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, as part of its counterterrorism mission.

  Nicholson recognized that the emergence of ISIS-K in 2015 and the continued presence of al Qaeda in Kandahar province meant that the counterterrorism mission had expanded in recent years, potentially requiring an increase in U.S. counterterrorism capabilities.

  Nicholson also acknowledged that the coalition's end of combat operations combined with a "shortfall in Afghan air power" had contributed to a lack of air support for the Afghan army's campaign against the Taliban. He said the Afghan air capability would take a long time to develop and that the U.S.-led coalition needed to address this gap in the interim.

  Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pressed Nicholson on whether there could be a combat role for US troops in the face of a major Taliban military victory, to which Nicholson responded that U.S. troops would not sit on the sidelines.

• Libya a growing concern

  Separately, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter canceled a planned trip in order to attend a National Security Council meeting at the White House Thursday to discuss a U.S. plan for countering ISIS's growing presence in Libya, according to several administration officials.

  Libya is now "the area of most growing concern," when it comes to ISIS, a senior defense official told CNN.

  Carter told reporters that ISIS is consolidating its presence in Libya and "part of its ideology is to attack Westerners, including Americans."

• He noted that the Libyan branch of ISIS was showing the "same kind of ambitions" that it had shown in Iraq and Syria, and that it was setting up training installations, attracting foreign fighters, and seeking to control the local economy.

  One U.S. official familiar with the latest intelligence said that it's estimated some 500 ISIS personnel may have traveled to Libya in the last months of 2015. And in many cases, ISIS handlers are now redirecting recruits who show up in Turkey to Libya instead because of the difficulty in crossing the border into Syria.

• Carter said the U.S. is focusing first on trying to support the political process in Libya in hopes a government can be installed. If that happens, the U.S. military can then work with that government to conduct air, and possibly ground, operations against ISIS targets.

  The Pentagon considers it essential to have some friendly elements on the ground in Libya that would support a U.S. effort before it could conduct ground operations in any substantial manner, the officials said.

• But there is also an understanding that ISIS might have to be dealt with sooner, due to its rapid expansion. To that end, the U.S. is planning on stepping up overhead reconnaissance and drone operations to begin to pinpoint and strike ISIS targets from the air, officials say.

  Carter said that counterterrorism operations, including airstrikes, would continue against ISIS in Libya, with or without the formation of a unity Libyan government.

  The National Security Council consultations also included the latest efforts to expand the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon in particular is seeking more contributions from allies of troops for training of Iraqi army and police forces.

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• Mon Jan 18, 2016 2:55pm EST   

    Related:     World,   Afghanistan   

   

  Desertions deplete Afghan forces, adding to security worries

   

    KANDAHAR, Afghanistan/KABUL  |   By Sayed Sarwar Amani and Andrew MacAskill

• Afghan Lieutenant Amanullah said he was ready to fight to the death to stop the Taliban making gains across the south of the country, where insurgents have already overrun a series of districts in their traditional heartland.

  In November, 15 months after joining up, he deserted, one of thousands of tired and frustrated soldiers who have shed their uniforms, seriously blunting the Afghan army's power to repel a growing militant threat.

  For Amanullah, everything changed late last year when, fighting on an empty stomach and without being paid for months, militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns attacked his base from all directions in a three-day battle.

  The final straw came when requests for reinforcements at the remote outpost went unanswered and colleagues bled to death around him because of a lack of medical care.When the ambush ended, he joined three friends shedding their uniforms and walking away from the base near Kandahar, an area that has long been a Taliban stronghold. "I joined the army so that I could support my family and serve my country, but this is a suicide mission," said Amanullah, 28, who, like many Afghans, uses one name.

• The attrition rate hits at the heart of the U.S. exit strategy in Afghanistan, which is to build a force capable of taking on the Taliban when it fully withdraws.

  NATO ended its combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, and a smaller force remains mainly training and advising Afghans. Alarmed by Taliban gains, the United States decided last year to slow the pace of withdrawing troops still there.

  In 2015, the Afghan army had to replace about a third of its roughly 170,000 soldiers because of desertions, casualties and low re-enlistment rates, according to figures released by the U.S. military last month. That means a third of the army consists of first-year recruits fresh off a three-month training course.

• HEAVY CASUALTIES

     

  The turnover rate is one of the most serious problems faced by Afghan security forces, according to Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

  "These high turnover issues increase the possibility that when U.S.-led forces leave Afghanistan for good, whenever that is, they will be leaving Afghan forces unable to fend off a still-ferocious insurgency," he said.

  The United States has spent around $65 billion preparing fledgling Afghan security forces, intended to number about 350,000 personnel, for when it leaves.

  U.S. General John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told Congress in October high attrition rates are because of poor leadership and soldiers rarely getting holiday. In some areas, soldiers "have probably been in a consistent fight for three years," he said.

     

  When the Afghan army in 2015 took over almost all combat operations for the first time since the Taliban were ousted, casualties rose 26 percent, according a NATO military officer. About 15,800 soldiers were wounded or killed, or almost one in 10, according to the officer, who asked not to be named.Despite the challenges, the overall size of the Afghan army remains stable. Afghans willing to risk their lives for a basic monthly salary of about $300 a month equal those walking away.

• RECRUITMENT DRIVE

  The army has been running adverts on prime-time television that show inspiring images of resolute soldiers on training exercises, eating in well-stocked mess halls and with good kit.

     

  But on the frontlines, army and police deserters complain of commanders having no answer for deadly ambushes, no broader strategy for prevailing in the war, corruption among their leaders and poor food and equipment.

  "Barely a day passed without gunfire, ambushes, roadside bombs," said Farooq, a police officer from Helmand province, who quit his job three months ago. "We were treated as if we had no value and our job was to get killed."

  Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the interior ministry, said the government was working to improve conditions for security forces and praised their work under difficult circumstances.

  "We are very happy with the commitment of the police and soldiers," he said.

  Since quitting his job, Amanullah said he has been struggling to find work in a nation with one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world. He has decided to reapply for the army.

  "I am hoping to work in a safer region and under better commanders," he said. "I am just waiting for their response."

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• Non-human Democracy: our political vocabulary has no room for animals   

   

   

    December 21, 2015
• Sandra Eterovic
• This is part one of a three-part essay that proposes a way of thinking about democracy that’s seldom, if ever, used. Despite the popularity in other disciplines of inter-species thinking, it’s ignored in democracy research. Why is that? Why can we not conceive of democracy as anything other than uniquely human? “Non-human Democracy” seeks to answer these questions.

• Democracy changes with each of time’s footsteps forward.

    

  Take the following as but one example. It’s 1997. Political scientists David Collier and Steven Levitsky publish a paper they call Democracy with Adjectives. They state that there are hundreds of different ways to describe democracy.

    

  Since then, other prominent thinkers like democracy scholars David Held and Wolfgang Merkel have echoed this point, because it’s an important point to make. It shows democracy is complex – that it’s complicated, has a lot of parts to it, comes from a wide range of histories and is found in surprising places.

    

  But when my colleagues Mark Chou, Selen Ercan, Giovanni Navarria and I went looking for Collier and Levitsky’s list of hundreds, we couldn’t find it. So we took on the task and discovered that democracy has no fewer than 546 different names.

    

  We didn’t expect so many. And there are likely more out there.

• Finding a start in democracy’s complexity

    

  Aside from the work to describe, catalogue and otherwise make sense of this big data, our list offers plenty for critical investigation. If you were to use this dataset you could, for instance, compare and contrast thousands of different combinations of democracy.

    

  Interrogating these many names broadens our understanding of what democracy is, or might be, or should be. There are visions of democracy’s futures in here whose stories go untold.

    

  Evidence from Google’s Ngram on the frequency of word use supports the view that having so many names for democracy is a recent phenomenon. We’ve been using adjectives to precisely define, qualify, describe, adjust and justify what we mean by “democracy” for at least the last century. More names appear in the last 50 years than in the first 50.

    

  It doesn’t look like we’ll stop naming democracy any time soon. That’s good, as we come to ask more of this style of government, this mode of governance, this way of life.

• It’s because of the Ngram evidence, which suggests democracy got most of its names after 1920, that I think democracy changes as time moves forward. Philosopher Jacques Derrida explains: to name something is to give it meaning. It affixes a particular understanding, an idea of practice, or one or more values to it. Naming things changes them. And change happens over time.

    

  Except sometimes it doesn’t when you’d expect it to. Despite more than 2,000 years of drawing metaphors and analogies between the political behaviours of humans and non-humans – think of Machiavelli comparing political leadership to foxes and lions or Aristotle comparing us to bees – no-one has yet given democracy its non-human name.

    

  There is only very seldom talk of the democracies found in other species. This means democracy hasn’t yet been changed in this way.

• Instructive, inspiring, transformative

    

  What talk there is comes almost exclusively from the sciences where scholars like honeybee specialist Thomas Seeley are trying to build bridges to the humanities. Seeley recommends that we should pick up tips to use in our own democratic practices from the ways of doing things, honed by evolution, observable in other species.

    

  Perhaps this is why French sociologist Bruno Latour argues that democrats need to bring science into democracy. Or why Oxford fellow in politics Laurence Whitehead says we need to “enliven the concept of democracy” with metaphors and analogies found only in biology.

    

  It’s common, obvious even, to find researchers in fields like engineering, chemistry and medicine who think about human problems. Less obvious, but still common, is that these researchers look for answers in the lifecycles and lifestyles of non-humans. As Christian List and Adrian Vermeule point out, scholars in these and more than a few other fields seek inspirations, lessons and analogies from non-humans.

• Inspiration is normative. It’s the stuff of wonder. Of arguing how we “should” do things. We see magnificent spectacles in nature, often bordering on the mysterious, that enliven our imagination. These spectacles give us the will to innovate in helpful directions.

    

  Lessons are the opposite. They’re grounded in the concrete, the measurable, the palpable. They’re all about the “how”. Tantamount to masterclasses, lessons are what we learn from closely studying the special techniques that non-humans evolved. They’re instructive.

    

  Analogies, lastly, are a form of translation between the human and non-human. By comparing us and them, we transform ideas by adding or subtracting nuances in this way. Analogies, drawn between species, can help us see matters differently.

• Technology draws on non-human inspirations

    

  Consider the work to make flying robotic drones autonomous. The problem with unmanned drones is that most still require a human piloting them. They’re also limited in how they fly – which is essentially in straight lines and at considerable speed. Both issues limit the functionality of drones.

    

  Bring in the neuroscientists, computational biologists, informatics and robotics engineers, and an answer to this problem takes shape. The Green Brain Project, housed by Sheffield University in the UK, mapped the neurons associated with sight and navigation in a honeybee’s brain. They then programed this information into a flying robot.

    

  Not only can this drone fly without live human control and autonomously avoid obstacles in flight, it also flies like the bee whose brain was modelled for this project. The implications from this study are abundant, the applications of the “adopted” technology to real problems almost limitless.

• The point here is that the Green Brain Project wouldn’t have produced such wondrous visions for drones if it weren’t for the inspirations, lessons and analogies the team behind the project drew from the honeybee itself.

    

  Look at spider’s silk for a further example. It’s famous for having greater tensile strength than steel and efforts are being made to manufacture it synthetically. One potential use is bullet-proof clothing.

    

  Studies of termite mounds in some of the world’s hottest climates look to them for clues about how to make indoor climate control sustainable. Few species can rival the termites’ ability to efficiently maintain a constant, yet presumably comfortable, temperature inside their homes.

    

  Then there’s the glue the humble barnacle produces to stick to things like the hulls of boats and the shells of sea turtles. Scientists are trying to replicate this glue because it not only hardens under water but becomes stronger over time. It could be used, for instance, on surgical implants.

• So why the democratic blindspot?

    

  This all goes to show how helpful it can be to look outside our own species for answers to the problems we face. It’s precisely because of the pragmatism (practicality, functionality, usefulness) in this method that I’m surprised we’re not in the habit of using it for democracy’s sake.

    

  Democracy has problems. Some of them, like how we or our representatives can make faster decisions of better quality, are intractable. They need innovative solutions.

    

  So why not add to our ongoing efforts to solve these problems by studying the ways non-humans collectively overcome problems of their own?

    

  We can develop inspirations for democracy, lessons that are relevant for it and analogies to help us differently understand its issues by using this commonplace way of thinking.

    

  There’s a bounty of exciting, imaginative and practical work to be done in this area.

• Objection: how can other animals be democratic?

    

  A significant question now props itself on an elbow: democracy is only a relatively recent human invention, so why bother with this?

    

  According to this way of thinking, there’s nothing that we can, or should be looking to, learn about democracy from non-humans because they don’t have it. It’s a product of the reflective political decisions and bitterly difficult but also gloriously simple victories that some humans have managed over the last 3500 or so years. Democracy cannot manifest through genetic evolution.

    

  Everything here hinges on what we mean by democracy and, consequently, how we justify our species' exclusive ownership of it. If democracy is undoubtedly human, then my argument is finished. But if there is doubt on this, then a potential giant world, a conceptual Jupiter, becomes relevant.

• This essay offers a recontextualisation of democracy; to pull back a curtain to reveal not a wizard nor a naked emperor but rather to show democracy’s immense and hitherto neglected – or simply unknown – complexity and to ask some questions that jump from it.

    

  In this complexity is where ideas of time, space and species become relevant to democracy. This arises from thinking of democracy not in the span of hundreds or thousands of years, as is normally done, but over millions if not billions of years, as Francis Fukuyama and Christopher Boehm have of late been doing.

    

  And it’s by thinking of democracy over the entire space of this planet, not simply the occidental spaces (Amartya Sen has long made this point), that our understanding of democracy changes once more.

    

  We can think about democracy in terms of its many names, numerous typologies, various shapes, hierarchies of competing qualities, and of the utility in its techniques, like majority voting, used by different forms of life throughout this world. It’s an original take that opens new perspectives, helpful ones, but also a windfall of questions.

    

  I’d like to ask a few of them next.

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• Rockets fall on Kabul as Taliban intensifies onslaught across Afghanistan     

  Published time: 21 Dec, 2015
• Three explosions shook the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, near key ministries, embassies and residences. The attack comes hours after six NATO soldiers were killed near Bagram air base amidst a surge in Taliban violence.  

  Local police told Reuters that one of the missiles hit Massoud Square, adjacent to the well-fortified US embassy, and another landed in Shirpur Square, close to the sprawling presidential complex. A third rocket detonated further away from the heart of the city.

• Authorities have not revealed where the missiles were fired from, or who was behind the attack. The Taliban took responsibility for the December 12 terrorist incursion in which a fighter blew himself up, before three gunmen infiltrated the Spanish embassy compound. Four police officers died fighting the militants.

  Earlier on Monday, a Taliban suicide bomber on a motorcycle detonated a bomb, killing six US troops and wounding six more at Bagram Airfield, north of the Afghan capital.

• "Our heartfelt sympathies go out to the families and friends of those affected in this tragic incident, especially during this holiday season," said Army Brig. Gen William Shoffner, head of public affairs at NATO's Resolute Support, the joint operation set up between the alliance and the government to train up an effective local military force.

  The White House expressed its condolences to the families of those killed by the suicide bomber.

  "Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and their loved ones," the White House said in a statement. 

  While the brazen acts of terrorism in government-controlled areas attract headlines, the most intense battles have taken in the key southwestern province of Helmand, a lucrative producer of opium and an Islamist power base that has exchanged hands multiple times since the Western invasion in 2001.

  Taliban gunmen have been reported to be close to capturing the strategic city of Sangin, where government troops have been forced to hole themselves up in several besieged administrative buildings.
• In a show of public frustration deputy province governor Mohammad Jan Rasulyar took to Facebook to chastise President Ashraf Ghani for failing to provide assistance.

• "We had to take to social media to reach you as Helmand is falling into the hands of the enemy and it requires your immediate attention," wrote Rasulyar.

  On Monday, the defense ministry said it had provided 160 combat and relief flights to the embattled parts of Helmand over 48 hours, but regional officials said that two-thirds of the province remained under Taliban control.

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• Taliban attacks: 3 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan, part of Helmand province seized     

  Published time: 21 Dec, 2015
• The militant group Taliban has launched a major offensive in the Afghan Helmand province and claimed responsibility for a bombing attack, in which three NATO troops were killed.
• The attacks targeting foreign troops happened in a village near the Bagram airbase. A suicide bomber on a motorbike approached a joint US-Afghan patrol and set off the explosive device. Five soldiers were killed and six injured, Bagram Governor Abdul Shukur Qudusi said. 

• The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which coincide with a major insurgency push in Helmand Province. Over 90 security troops have been killed over the past two days as the militants are threatening to take over the volatile southern province, according to deputy governor Mohammad Jan Rasulyar.

  Fighting in Helmand, where Taliban presence is strong, intensified about two months ago. The group took over the entire Sangin district except the police headquarters on Monday, police chief Mohammad Dawood said Monday.

  The situation in Helmand is not unlike the one that led to the Taliban takeover of the northern city of Kunduz in late September. They kept control of the town for several days before government forces with heavy air support from the US managed to retake the city. The fight for Kunduz marked one of the worst blunders for the US Air Force in years, when it mistakenly bombed a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders.
• The Taliban are on the offensive in other parts of Afghanistan. In October, they seized two districts in Badakhshan Province. The successes of the militants have put the US strategy for Afghanistan under scrutiny. Washington withdrew most of its troops and has sought to keep those remaining in training and support roles, trusting national security forces with fighting the insurgents on the ground.

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  U.S. strike on Afghan hospital likely not a mistake, says Doctors Without Borders

   

   

  United States has said the hospital was hit by accident

   

      Thomson Reuters    Posted: Nov 05, 2015
• Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said on Thursday it was hard to believe a U.S. airstrike on an Afghan hospital last month was a mistake, as it had reports of fleeing people being shot from an aircraft.
   
  At least 30 people were killed when the hospital in Kunduz was hit by the strike on Oct. 3 while Afghan government forces were battling to regain control of the northern city from Taliban forces who had seized it days earlier.
   
  The United States has said the hospital was hit by accident and two separate investigations by the U.S. and NATO are underway but the circumstances of the incident, one of the worst of its kind during the 14-year conflict, are still unclear.
• Doctors Without Borders general director Christopher Stokes told reporters the organization was still awaiting an explanation from the U.S. military.
   
  "All the information that we've provided so far shows that a mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage," he said while presenting an internal report on the incident.
   
  The report said many staff described "seeing people being shot, most likely from the plane" as they tried to flee the main hospital building.
   
  "From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war," Stokes said. "There are still many unanswered 
  questions, including who took the final decision, who gave the targeting instructions for the hospital."
   
  Several Afghan officials have suggested Taliban fighters were using the hospital as a base, a claim that Doctors Without Borders firmly rejects. It says the facility was under its control at all times and there were no armed fighters present either before or during the attack.
   
  The hospital was treating wounded combatants from both sides as well as civilians, but the group says it always maintained a strict policy of neutrality between the two sides.
   
  "Treating wounded combatants is not a crime," Stokes said.
• Doctors Without Borders says the site's location had been clearly communicated to both Afghan forces and the Taliban and it was clearly 
  identifiable as a hospital.
   
  "That night, it was one of the few buildings with electrical power, it was fully lit up," Stokes said.
   
  He also said that inspections of the area around the hospital since the Taliban withdrew from Kunduz last month did 
  not reveal signs of heavy fighting.
   
  Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), has revised the original casualty figure upwards and now says 30 people, including 13 staff members and three children were killed during repeated attacks by a powerful U.S. gunship.
   
  The U.S. investigation is headed by a U.S. general and two brigadier generals.
   
  A separate NATO casualty report into the incident, originally expected in October, has been delayed while the 
  investigation continues, U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter announced last month.

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• Tue Oct 20, 2015 12:29pm EDT   

    Related:     World,   Afghanistan   

   

  Taliban threatens southern Afghan city, civilians flee

   

    LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan  |   By Mohammad Stanekzai

• Taliban forces advanced on the capital of the volatile southern Afghan province of Helmand on Tuesday amid fierce fighting with government forces that threatened to cut off a major highway and prompted many families to flee.

  The fighting near the town of Lashkar Gah comes three weeks after the Taliban won its biggest victory in the 14-year war, capturing the northern town of Kunduz and holding the city center for three days before government forces regained control.

• "Helmand's capital appears to be under serious military pressure," a Western official said. "We're hearing reports about civilians fleeing in large numbers."

  Helmand province is one of the world's biggest centers of opium cultivation, with a complex mix of warring tribal groups and Taliban insurgents creating a chronic problem for the Western-backed government.

  Provincial Governor Mirza Khan Rahimi said heavy fighting had been going on for two days in the district of Gereshk to the north of the city. The fighting has threatened Highway One, the main transport artery linking the major southern city of Kandahar with Herat.

  Farhad Dawary, head of the local Civil Societies Union, which represents non-government social organizations, said that after days of fighting, families were both fleeing to Lashkar Gah from outlying areas and trying to escape from the city.

  "There is fear among the people in Lashkar Gah, there are lots of rumors the city might fall," he said.

• Government officials said Lashkar Gah would not fall but one security source said the town of Baba Ji, to the north of the provincial capital had fallen and the Taliban itself said it was making major advances.

  "The fighting is ongoing in full force and we have killed 25 government forces and seized a number of weapons," said spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi.

  KUNDUZ SHOCK

     

  The fall of Kunduz at the end of last month came as a profound shock in Afghanistan, piling pressure on the government of President Ashraf Ghani and raising questions over the capacity of security forces to maintain stability.

  Afghan government forces, which have taken on the bulk of fighting since international troops ended most combat operations last year, have struggled to contain the Taliban, which has stretched the army in a series of operations across the country.

  As the battle continued near Lashkar Gah, there were also reports of heavy fighting in the Ghurian district near the major western city of Herat.

• The Taliban raised their flag in the main district center for a few hours before police reinforcements arrived and cleared them out, Herat police chief, General Abdul Majid Rozi said.

  As the fighting flared, Ghani chaired a meeting of the National Security Council and ordered military forces to step up combat operations against the insurgency.

  Having briefly taken Kunduz at the end of September, the Taliban last week threatened the city of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, cutting off the main route between Kabul and Kandahar for three days.

  Earlier this week, they were also reported to have overrun the district of Ghormach in Faryab province on the northern border with Turkmenistan.

  The deteriorating security situation prompted U.S. President Barack Obama last week to delay plans to pull American forces out of the country next year, with at least 5,500 troops now due to remain after 2017.

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•   Thu Oct 15, 2015 6:27pm EDT   

    Related:     World,   Politics,   Afghanistan   

   

  Military families on edge as U.S. delays Afghanistan troop withdrawal

   

    By Joseph Ax

• Lauren Alaquinez will soon say goodbye to her husband for the fifth time in three years, when he deploys once again to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army Special Forces.

  As a military family, Alaquinez and her four children know what they've signed up for. But that made it no easier to hear the news that President Obama would delay the withdrawal of 9,800 U.S. troops stationed in the war-torn Central Asian country.

  "Of course, it naturally makes me so angry," said the 30-year-old Florida resident. "He spends more of his time in that country than he does at home."

• But Alaquinez said she also understands the troops are necessary to ensure a stable Afghanistan.

  "They need to go and fight this war," she said. "We are too far invested in this."

  Across the country, military families echoed that stoicism with a mixture of frustration, acceptance and resignation at the news that the 14-year conflict would be prolonged.

  Libby Jamison, a 34-year-old Rhode Island attorney whose husband is a Navy helicopter pilot, said the news was unsurprising but difficult to hear. She expects her husband will eventually return to Afghanistan.

  "The sooner we can say (the war) is over, the better, in my mind," she said.

     

  The Obama administration said it would leave it to commanders to determine which units might redeploy to Afghanistan. But it did not rule out the possibility that some forces already there may see their tours extended.

• Members of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum in New York, and the 7th Infantry Division, based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, are among those most recently deployed to Afghanistan. Public affairs officers for those units could not immediately be reached for comment.

  Representatives for several U.S. Army installations declined to comment on how Obama's announcement might affect their troops.

  In explaining his decision, Obama spoke directly to members of the U.S. military, saying he was convinced the mission is vital to national security.

     

  "I do not send you into harm’s way lightly,” he said.

  That was little comfort to Larry Severson of Richmond, Virginia, whose four sons all served in the military, including two who remain on active duty with the Army.

  "It's never-ending," said Severson, a member of Military Families Speak Out, which opposes both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "I feel very betrayed."

• Severson expressed concern that the next president would find it easier to maintain, or even expand, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as long as troops remain on the ground. His youngest son, Bryce, a staff sergeant, has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder following three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

     

  "I’m just disgusted that he's keeping troops there," Severson said.

  But Jillian McCarthy, whose husband is stationed at the Army's Fort Bragg in North Carolina and has been deployed to the region six times, said she supported the move.

  "Given the trouble that is occurring in the Middle East, President Obama is making the right decision," she said. "I hate it, but it's the correct move."

  For Tracey Frink, whose husband is stationed at Fort Bragg after multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, the long-term effects of multiple deployments on families weighs on her most.

  "War affects us all," said the 51-year-old mental health therapist. "We are going to be living with this for a really long time."

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• Obama reverses pledge to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan Add to ... 

   

   

   Paul Koring 

   

   WASHINGTON — The Globe and Mail

   

   

  Published Thursday, Oct. 15, 2015

• Reversing his promise to bring all but a handful of U.S. troops home from Afghanistan this year, President Barack Obama said Thursday that thousands will remain when his successor is sworn in as commander-in-chief in early 2017.

  And he hinted that the next president – the third to cope with ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – may need to further extend those commitments.

• “I suspect that we will continue to evaluate this going forward, as will the next president,” Mr. Obama said in a short speech from the White House.

  The President’s detractors claim he has been too timid, too willing to lead from behind and partially responsible for the rise of Islamic State because he insisted on pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011 to fulfill a campaign promise. The critics offered only tepid endorsement of Mr. Obama’s change of policy in Afghanistan.

  “It would have been far better to halt all further troop withdrawals and allow President Obama’s successor to determine what is warranted based on conditions on the ground,” said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican defeated by Mr. Obama in 2008.

• Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican and Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, offered faint praise. “This announcement demonstrates that President Obama doesn’t want to repeat his mistakes in Iraq by withdrawing prematurely and leaving a power vacuum open to extremists.”

  At least some Democrats were equally dismayed, albeit for different reasons. “Today, the longest war in American history just got longer, said Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts. “I am disappointed that after 14 years of war, we are talking about continuing our military presence there instead of finding the political solution that is so desperately needed.”

  Mr. Obama admitted his plan to bring all U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by the end of this year was no longer viable. “I know many of you have grown weary of this conflict,” he told Americans.

  Still, he maintained, the weakness of Afghan security forces and recent Taliban battlefield gains required that the nearly 10,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan remain at least through the 2016 summer fighting season. Mr. Obama said he hopes to cut that force in half by the end of next year, leaving roughly 5,000 troops in Aghanistan for the next president.

• “The bottom line is the security situation is still very fragile,” Mr. Obama said. Afghan forces “are still not as strong as they need to be,” he added.

  Last year, amid much fanfare, Mr. Obama announced all 10,000 U.S. troops would be home by the end of 2015, leaving only a small force to guard the embassy in Kabul and putting security of Afghanistan in the hands of its own security forces.

  “The bottom line is, it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said in May, 2014.

  Since then, Mr. Obama has sent thousands of troops back to Iraq and launched an air war against Islamic State. With Thursday’s announcement, he made clear that his successor will deal with U.S. forces engaged in at least two hot wars.

  Senior U.S. commanders have been warning for months that a complete pullout from Afghanistan was risky until Afghan forces have proven themselves capable of defeating the Taliban.

• Despite spending more than $60-billion (U.S.) and more than a decade training and equipping the Afghan forces, recent Taliban battlefield victories have dramatically shown Kabul’s army cannot yet defend the nation.

  Last month, the Taliban routed Afghan forces in Kunduz. It was the first time the Taliban had seized a major Afghan city since being defeated by the United States in 2001, after then-president George W. Bush launched a war in the wake of the Sept. 11 al-Qaeda attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon.

  In Kunduz, it took massive reinforcements of Kabul’s best troops to retake the city, along with U.S. Special Forces and repeated U.S. air strikes, one of which killed scores in a clearly identified hospital.

  At the same time, Taliban advances have repeatedly cut the main highway linking Kabul and Kandahar, forcing thousands to flee and proving – again – the inadequacy of Afghanistan’s army, which has a nominal strength of 200,000.

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• APNewsBreak: US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital

     

     

   

  By KEN DILANIAN

   

    Oct. 15, 2015

• WASHINGTON (AP) — American special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on an Afghan hospital days before it was destroyed by a U.S. military attack because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity, The Associated Press has learned.

   

  It's unclear whether commanders who unleashed the AC-130 gunship on the hospital — killing at least 22 patients and hospital staff — were aware that the site was a hospital or knew about the allegations of possible enemy activity. The Pentagon initially said the attack was to protect U.S. troops engaged in a firefight and has since said it was a mistake.

• The special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site. The intelligence suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and may have housed heavy weapons.

   

  After the attack — which came amidst a battle to retake the northern Afghan city of Kunduz from the Taliban — some U.S. analysts assessed that the strike had been justified, the former officer says. They concluded that the Pakistani, believed to have been working for his country's Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, had been killed.

• No evidence has surfaced publicly suggesting a Pakistani died in the attack, and Doctors without Borders, the international organization that ran the hospital, says none of its staff was Pakistani. The former intelligence official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

   

  The top U.S. officer in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, has said the strike was a mistake, but he has not explained exactly how it happened or who granted final approval. He also told Congress he was ordering all personnel in Afghanistan to be retrained on the rules governing the circumstances under which strikes are acceptable.

• The new details about the military's suspicions that the hospital was being misused complicate an already murky picture and add to the unanswered questions about one of the worst civilian casualty incidents of the Afghan war. They also raise the possibility of a breakdown in intelligence sharing and communication across the military chain of command.

   

  White House spokesman Josh Earnest said questions about what the Defense Department knew about the clinic and whether it was communicated to personnel operating the gunship would be part of the Pentagon's investigation. He said President Barack Obama was expecting a "full accounting."

• "As Gen. Campbell has said, we would never intentionally target a protected medical facility," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. "We have confidence that the ongoing investigations into this tragic incident will uncover exactly what happened and why this hospital was mistakenly struck."

   

  Doctors without Borders has condemned the bombing as a war crime. The organization says the strike killed 12 hospital staff and 10 patients, and that death toll may rise. It insists that no gunmen, weapons or ammunition were in the building. The U.S. and Afghan governments have launched three separate investigations. President Barack Obama has apologized, but Doctors without Borders is calling for an international probe.

• Doctors without Borders officials say the U.S. airplane made five separate strafing runs over an hour, directing heavy fire on the main hospital building, which contained the emergency room and intensive care unit. Surrounding buildings were not struck, they said.

   

  Typically, pilots flying air support missions would have maps showing protected sites such as hospitals and mosques. If commanders concluded that enemies were operating from a protected site, they would follow procedures designed to minimize civilian casualties. That would generally mean surrounding a building with troops, not blowing it to bits from the air.
• What the new details suggest "is that the hospital was intentionally targeted, killing at least 22 patients and MSF staff," said Meinie Nicolai, president of the operational directorate of Doctors without Borders, which is also known by its French initials MSF. "This would amount to a premeditated massacre. ... Reports like this underscore how critical it is for the Obama administration to immediately give consent to an independent and impartial investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to find out how and why U.S. forces attacked our hospital."

• By one U.S. account from the scene, American and Afghan troops were under fire in the area.

   

  Nicolai said in an email exchange that the group's staff "reported a calm night and that there were no armed combatants, nor active fighting in or from the compound prior to the airstrikes."

   

  Doctors without Borders has acknowledged that it treated wounded Taliban fighters at the Kunduz hospital, but it insists no weapons were allowed in. Afghans who worked at the hospital have told the AP that no one was firing from within.

• The airstrike came as U.S. advisers were helping Afghan forces take Kunduz back from the Taliban, which had seized the city.

   

  The U.S. military's cursory description of what transpired has changed over time.

   

  Initially, the military portrayed the incident as an accident stemming from the fog of war. American forces in the vicinity were under attack, a U.S. military spokesperson in Afghanistan said in a statement, and called in an air strike "against individuals threatening the force. The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility."

   

  Two days later, Campbell told reporters that "Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces."

• He added, "An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck."

   

  The following day, however, Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "To be clear, the decision ... was a U.S. decision made within the U.S. chain of command. A hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility."

   

  Asked about the location of any U.S. troops on the ground, Campbell said, "We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires."

• His remark did not make clear whether any American on the ground had a direct view of the hospital. Military officials declined to answer questions, citing the investigation.

   

  According to the former intelligence officer, the commander on the ground has told superiors he was in the worst firefight of his career while taking fire from the building, which he said he did not know was a hospital. He requested the gunship strike. In that scenario, it's not readily apparent why his unit couldn't have retreated. The hospital is within a compound surrounded by a 12-foot wall that could have offered cover from fire emanating from one building.

• The intelligence analysts who were gathering information about suspected Taliban activity at the hospital were located in various bases around Afghanistan, and were exchanging information over classified military intelligence systems. Typically, a decision to order a strike in a populated area would require many layers of approval and intelligence analysis of the potential impacts and civilian casualties.

   

  It would be significant if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Pakistani spies were continuing to play an active role helping the Taliban. The U.S. and Afghan governments have long accused Pakistan of aiding the Taliban, but U.S. rhetoric on the issue has cooled over the past year as American-Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation has improved.

• Yet it's theoretically possible that a staffer at a hospital in Afghanistan was working for Pakistan's intelligence service. Two days before the strike, Afghan defense officials accused Pakistan's intelligence service of playing a key role in the Taliban's seizure of Kunduz.

   

  Nicolai said, "There were only Afghan staff and nine international staff, none of whom were from Pakistan, working in the hospital. There was absolutely nothing that indicated at any level, including at senior management, that any of our staff was working for Pakistani intelligence."

   

  Disputes within the U.S. government about airstrikes have played out before. In December 2013, the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command bombed a group of people it considered militants, but whom outside groups claimed were civilians attending a wedding. Even after the CIA assessed that some civilians were killed in the strike, Pentagon officials continued to insist that all those hit were combatants.

   

  The incident added an argument for some members of Congress who were resisting Obama's proposal to shift the CIA's drone killing program to the military.

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• US forces in Afghanistan knew Kunduz site was hospital - report     

  Published time: 15 Oct, 2015
• New information suggests the US deliberately targeted the Kunduz hospital, killing 22 patients and staff, despite knowing it was a protected medical site.  

  US special operations analysts investigated the hospital for days prior to the deadly October 3 attack, describing the hospital as a base of operations for a Pakistani agent coordinating Taliban activities, AP has learned from a former intelligence official familiar with the documents.

  The site, operated by Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF), was attacked five times in the span of an hour by a C-130 gunship, despite repeated pleas by the MSF to US forces. MSF officials described repeated strafing runs against the main hospital building, which housed the emergency room and the intensive care unit. No surrounding buildings were hit, they say.

  The new details suggest "that the hospital was intentionally targeted,” Meinie Nicolai of MSF told the AP by email. “This would amount to a premeditated massacre,” she added.

  According to AP's source, intelligence reports suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and a repository for heavy weapons. MSF insists that no weapons were allowed in the hospital. While the US military has claimed that US and Afghan forces came under fire from the hospital, Afghan hospital employees told AP that no one had fired from the building

• MSF staff "reported a calm night and that there were no armed combatants, nor active fighting in or from the compound prior to the airstrikes," Nicolai told AP.

  The US military initially reported the air strike was conducted “in the vicinity” of the MSF medical facility, targeting the Taliban who were fighting US and Afghan forces, and that the strike “may have resulted in collateral damage “ to the hospital.
  
  Two days later, General John F. Campbell, commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, said the Afghan forces had requested air support because “they were taking fire from enemy positions” and said that “several civilians were accidentally struck” in the air strike.

• Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee the following day, however, Campbell described the strike as a decision by US officers, adding there was a special operations unit in the area that was in contact with the gunship. “A hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility," he said.

  READ MORE: Kunduz hospital bombed despite US knowing its exact location – Moscow 

  US forces in Afghanistan have been authorized to make “condolence payments” to the victims' families and payments to MSF in order to repair the hospital, the Pentagon said on October 11. The US and Afghan governments have also launched internal investigations into the deadly attack. However, MSF insists on an independent investigation, and has described the hospital bombing as a war crime.
  Pentagon officials declined to comment on the AP report.

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