Take one reading of advice from the inimitable "(Ret.) Maj. Butt" to young aspiring Pakistani strategic analysts and call me in the morning. One reading -- two readings might keep you up all night laughing, then you'd be cussing me tomorrow.
How to Become A Strategic Analyst Like Yours Sachly
Thanks, Major, for restoring my sense of humor, which I lost somewhere along the way this past week while reviewing how Operation Enduring Freedom became Operation Hodgepodge.
Monday, March 26
Wednesday, March 21
If Gen. Allen and Amb. Crocker lose their jobs they can always find work as bouncers
"Yo Mama" event at highest level of Karzai's regime between pro- and anti-American staff; Allen and Crocker leap in to prevent fisticuffs. [wiping tears of laughter] This is what a highly decorated career diplomat came out of a happy and well-deserved retirement for and how a four-star Marine general has to spend his time.
I grudgingly admit Al Jazeera English bats it out of the park with their gossipy and very informative report. Because this is AJ, after all, the reporters, one based in Qatar, slip in a few snarky comments toward the end. A mere quibble, in light of the fact that they provide Americans with their first clear picture of what's really going on inside Afghanistan's government.
As long as I'm dishing out compliments, thanks to e-Ariana for spotting the AJ report. An Afghan War version of the late, great Iraq Slogger they ain't, but they try hard within their means to find reports that give insight into the dizzying array of issues critical to what may be the craziest war ever fought.
"It has been one and half years that the palace has been fractured into two groups."
Karzai's team clash over relations with US
By Qais Azimy and Mujib Mashal
Al Jazeera English
March 21, 2012
[See the report at the AJ website for a photograph of Messrs. Ludin and Khurram in a calmer moment inside the palace.]
Kabul - The increasing influence of a conservative circle within President Hamid Karzai's palace has impeded progress in signing a crucial strategic agreement with the US to chart the relationship beyond 2014, officials and analysts have said.
Their outspoken anti-US views have frustrated Karzai's diplomats negotiating with US officials, often resulting in messy clashes.
On March 8, a day before Afghanistan and the United States signed an agreement to gradually transfer control of prisons to the Afghan government, Jawid Ludin, the deputy foreign minister, and Karim Khurram, Karzai's chief of staff, were summoned to brief Karzai ahead of a video conference with US President Barack Obama. Also in the room were General John Allen, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Kabul.
Just minutes before the call between the two leaders, Karzai left the room for a break, according to three separate sources inside the palace. In the following few minutes, in a confrontation that reportedly verged on physical violence, Khurram and Ludin accused each other of spying - one for Pakistan, the other for the United States. They were split up by the NATO commander and the US ambassador.
Accusations
It all began with a complaint from General Allen, the palace sources said. The US embassy and NATO declined to comment for this article.
General Allen reportedly stated that the prison would be gradually handed over, one of Karzai's pre-conditions to signing a long-term strategic agreement on wider issues. But the Afghan government's media wing must tone down its anti-US rhetoric, Allen insisted.
The Government Media and Information Center (GMIC) falls directly under the authority of Khurram, Karzai's chief of staff.
Ludin, one of Karzai's chief negotiators, turned to Khurram and reiterated the General's point - that such comments hindered negotiations with the US.
Khuram, according to the palace sources, said GMIC was only defending Afghanistan's interests - which Ludin took as an insult.
What Khurram insinuated, an official close to Ludin said, was that the foreign ministry was betraying Afghanistan in negotiations with the US.
Ludin said he would take it upon himself to stop GMIC from making such statements, to which Khurram reportedly responded: "Not even your father can do that."
"You are a spy for the Americans, you do whatever they tell you," Khurram told Ludin at the meeting, according to one official.
Ludin, in return, accused Khurram of spying for Pakistan. At that point, General Allen and Ambassador Crocker are said to have stepped in to prevent a physical confrontation.
Ludin declined to comment for this article. Khurram, after hearing about the premise in person, promised an interview, but then refused to answer his phone.
"Diplomacy was set aside," one senior government official told Al Jazeera about the meeting. "They turned to the Afghan way of arguing."
When Karzai returned to the room, the video-conference went ahead. The prison deal, gradually transferring control to the Afghan government over six months, was signed before the cameras of the world's media the next day, as planned. But the reported confrontation underlines how divided President Karzai's inner court is, with regard to the nature of the long-term relationship with the United States.
Divided palace
"It has been one and half years that the palace has been fractured into two groups," said analyst Abdul Waheed Wafa, the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
"On the one side, you have people who say: 'We have not achieved what we want, but we need to stick with the internationals because the alternative is chaos.' Then the other elements - they are against night raids, and against a long-term US and international presence."
The strategic agreement is supposed to provide Afghanistan - a poor country that requires foreign donations for roughly 90 per cent of its annual budget - some assurance to continue its new beginning after decades of war. More importantly, the support of the US would bolster Afghan standing in a volatile region, where the country's neighbours have long been accused of interfering in its internal affairs. For the US, a longer presence in Afghanistan would ensure that it could operate against "threats to US national security", by being able to go after the sanctuaries of those who it believes would use violence against US interests.
But the increasing influence of the conservative chief of staff, and his clashes with what he sees as pro-US elements within Karzai's circle and beyond, has hindered progress to such a point that, in recent weeks, the US announced "it is more important to get the right agreement than to get an agreement". Some interpreted that as the US expressing a decreasing interest in the commitment.
Wafa said the announcement was a bluff that put pressure on the Afghan negotiators, who then compromised, tabling certain preconditions for separate discussions.
"The change of tone in the US was partly to pressure Afghans," said Wafa. "But some Afghans believe it is true - that these people [US officials] are fully frustrated, the US public opinion is against the war, even some senators who were staunch supporters of the war are now saying it is hopeless. That those who wanted an exit got an excuse - that look, the Afghans don't want us, they don't want to sign a long term commitment."
Three issues have been of contention in the negotiating process: US control over Afghan detainees, night raids, and permanent military bases. The two sides agreed to remove the issues of prison transfer and night raids from the strategic agreement, allowing them to be discussed separately.
The prison transfer was signed on March 9, while the memorandum over night raids is being finalised this week, according to an official at the national security council. But the contentious issue of military bases still looms large.
Divisive figure
The argument on March 8 was not just a spur of the moment event. Those views were repeated in subsequent interviews.
"Khurram clearly has an agenda - and he wants to disturb any progress in the relations with the US," an official close to Ludin insisted days after the incident. The other side was no different.
"Absolutely, there are circles that see their sustenance in the West's benefits, and they don't think about the nation," said analyst Ghulam Gilani Zwak, the director of Kabul's Afghan Research and Consulting Center. "They insist on not negotiating and bargaining, and their actions are slave-like.
"But there are others who have the interest of the nation in mind, who don't want the repeat of what Dr Abdullah Abdullah and Younus Qanooni signed with the US in December 2001, bringing our independence under question."
Zwak was referring to an alleged status of force agreement signed between the US government and representatives of the northern alliance, then a minority group holed up in the north, which helped the US topple the Taliban.
The foreign ministry's dysfunction is much spoken about in Afghanistan. Zalmai Rasul, an aging foreign minister, has been called a passive operator without much foreign policy experience. Ludin, a former spokesman and chief of staff to Karzai, shoulders most of the responsibility in the foreign ministry, where many appointments are allegedly based on kinship.
"Our foreign policy weakness is that we haven't had a stable foreign policy, a clear vision. It's all been reactionary, ad-hoc," said Wafa.
Ahmad Shuja, a Washington-based Afghan analyst, believes the palace repeatedly steps on the toes of the diplomats, making it difficult for them to do their job.
"Karzai's statement, his dynamism, eclipses the efforts of the foreign ministry to set policy. It is diplomacy 'Afghanistan style' - not policy in the conventional sense."
And Khurram's tight grip over the president in the past year has made the job much more difficult for diplomats like Ludin, said analysts.
Frustrations
A controversial former minister of culture, Khurram took over the post of Karzai's chief of staff in early 2011 - a position that has held increasingly more power in the country, particularly under Khurram's predecessor, Omar Dawoodzai.
During his stint as culture minister, Khurram was known as a strict censor of television programmes.
Shuja believes Khurram's seemingly anti-US views stem from two sources.
"His political ideology is shaped by his alignment with Hizb-e-Islami, and that seems to figure in his calculations," he said. Led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Hizb e Islami began as a political party that fought the Soviets. It played a major role in Afghanistan's bloody civil war in the 1990s, and now is considered the third (and weakest) faction of the anti-US insurgency.
"But also, let's not forget that they have been trying to reach out to the insurgency. Delaying the signing of a strategic pact will help them in appeasing the Taliban," added Shuja.
In purging the GMIC, which is largely funded by the US embassy, the new chief of staff announced his intention to control the government's message. Frustrated with Khurram's control, the US embassy cancelled funding for a brief period and withdrew its advisers from the media group.
Khurram also issued a warning to the president's press staff, ordering them not to allow US advisers in press conferences, one palace official tols Al Jazeera.
The US embassy declined to comment for this story. But a US official based in Kabul confirmed the frustrations with the palace.
"For the embassy, it is hard to get any access inside the palace since the chief of staff changed," the official said.
Khurram has at least three private newspapers, a television channel and a radio station under his control, directly or indirectly, one official - who formerly worked for him - said.
"The message is not just an anti-American one, but also divisive internally," said Khurram's former colleague. "His brand of conservative Pashtunism strengthens the notion that all Pashtuns are unilateralist and conservative by nature.
"The president's non-Pashtun allies have been increasingly isolated. The damage that Khurram has inflicted on President Karzai's image in one year - his enemies could not have done the same."
Reporting by Qais Azimy in Kabul, Afghanistan and Mujib Mashal in Doha, Qatar.
I grudgingly admit Al Jazeera English bats it out of the park with their gossipy and very informative report. Because this is AJ, after all, the reporters, one based in Qatar, slip in a few snarky comments toward the end. A mere quibble, in light of the fact that they provide Americans with their first clear picture of what's really going on inside Afghanistan's government.
As long as I'm dishing out compliments, thanks to e-Ariana for spotting the AJ report. An Afghan War version of the late, great Iraq Slogger they ain't, but they try hard within their means to find reports that give insight into the dizzying array of issues critical to what may be the craziest war ever fought.
"It has been one and half years that the palace has been fractured into two groups."
Karzai's team clash over relations with US
By Qais Azimy and Mujib Mashal
Al Jazeera English
March 21, 2012
[See the report at the AJ website for a photograph of Messrs. Ludin and Khurram in a calmer moment inside the palace.]
Kabul - The increasing influence of a conservative circle within President Hamid Karzai's palace has impeded progress in signing a crucial strategic agreement with the US to chart the relationship beyond 2014, officials and analysts have said.
Their outspoken anti-US views have frustrated Karzai's diplomats negotiating with US officials, often resulting in messy clashes.
On March 8, a day before Afghanistan and the United States signed an agreement to gradually transfer control of prisons to the Afghan government, Jawid Ludin, the deputy foreign minister, and Karim Khurram, Karzai's chief of staff, were summoned to brief Karzai ahead of a video conference with US President Barack Obama. Also in the room were General John Allen, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Kabul.
Just minutes before the call between the two leaders, Karzai left the room for a break, according to three separate sources inside the palace. In the following few minutes, in a confrontation that reportedly verged on physical violence, Khurram and Ludin accused each other of spying - one for Pakistan, the other for the United States. They were split up by the NATO commander and the US ambassador.
Accusations
It all began with a complaint from General Allen, the palace sources said. The US embassy and NATO declined to comment for this article.
General Allen reportedly stated that the prison would be gradually handed over, one of Karzai's pre-conditions to signing a long-term strategic agreement on wider issues. But the Afghan government's media wing must tone down its anti-US rhetoric, Allen insisted.
The Government Media and Information Center (GMIC) falls directly under the authority of Khurram, Karzai's chief of staff.
Ludin, one of Karzai's chief negotiators, turned to Khurram and reiterated the General's point - that such comments hindered negotiations with the US.
Khuram, according to the palace sources, said GMIC was only defending Afghanistan's interests - which Ludin took as an insult.
What Khurram insinuated, an official close to Ludin said, was that the foreign ministry was betraying Afghanistan in negotiations with the US.
Ludin said he would take it upon himself to stop GMIC from making such statements, to which Khurram reportedly responded: "Not even your father can do that."
"You are a spy for the Americans, you do whatever they tell you," Khurram told Ludin at the meeting, according to one official.
Ludin, in return, accused Khurram of spying for Pakistan. At that point, General Allen and Ambassador Crocker are said to have stepped in to prevent a physical confrontation.
Ludin declined to comment for this article. Khurram, after hearing about the premise in person, promised an interview, but then refused to answer his phone.
"Diplomacy was set aside," one senior government official told Al Jazeera about the meeting. "They turned to the Afghan way of arguing."
When Karzai returned to the room, the video-conference went ahead. The prison deal, gradually transferring control to the Afghan government over six months, was signed before the cameras of the world's media the next day, as planned. But the reported confrontation underlines how divided President Karzai's inner court is, with regard to the nature of the long-term relationship with the United States.
Divided palace
"It has been one and half years that the palace has been fractured into two groups," said analyst Abdul Waheed Wafa, the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
"On the one side, you have people who say: 'We have not achieved what we want, but we need to stick with the internationals because the alternative is chaos.' Then the other elements - they are against night raids, and against a long-term US and international presence."
The strategic agreement is supposed to provide Afghanistan - a poor country that requires foreign donations for roughly 90 per cent of its annual budget - some assurance to continue its new beginning after decades of war. More importantly, the support of the US would bolster Afghan standing in a volatile region, where the country's neighbours have long been accused of interfering in its internal affairs. For the US, a longer presence in Afghanistan would ensure that it could operate against "threats to US national security", by being able to go after the sanctuaries of those who it believes would use violence against US interests.
But the increasing influence of the conservative chief of staff, and his clashes with what he sees as pro-US elements within Karzai's circle and beyond, has hindered progress to such a point that, in recent weeks, the US announced "it is more important to get the right agreement than to get an agreement". Some interpreted that as the US expressing a decreasing interest in the commitment.
Wafa said the announcement was a bluff that put pressure on the Afghan negotiators, who then compromised, tabling certain preconditions for separate discussions.
"The change of tone in the US was partly to pressure Afghans," said Wafa. "But some Afghans believe it is true - that these people [US officials] are fully frustrated, the US public opinion is against the war, even some senators who were staunch supporters of the war are now saying it is hopeless. That those who wanted an exit got an excuse - that look, the Afghans don't want us, they don't want to sign a long term commitment."
Three issues have been of contention in the negotiating process: US control over Afghan detainees, night raids, and permanent military bases. The two sides agreed to remove the issues of prison transfer and night raids from the strategic agreement, allowing them to be discussed separately.
The prison transfer was signed on March 9, while the memorandum over night raids is being finalised this week, according to an official at the national security council. But the contentious issue of military bases still looms large.
Divisive figure
The argument on March 8 was not just a spur of the moment event. Those views were repeated in subsequent interviews.
"Khurram clearly has an agenda - and he wants to disturb any progress in the relations with the US," an official close to Ludin insisted days after the incident. The other side was no different.
"Absolutely, there are circles that see their sustenance in the West's benefits, and they don't think about the nation," said analyst Ghulam Gilani Zwak, the director of Kabul's Afghan Research and Consulting Center. "They insist on not negotiating and bargaining, and their actions are slave-like.
"But there are others who have the interest of the nation in mind, who don't want the repeat of what Dr Abdullah Abdullah and Younus Qanooni signed with the US in December 2001, bringing our independence under question."
Zwak was referring to an alleged status of force agreement signed between the US government and representatives of the northern alliance, then a minority group holed up in the north, which helped the US topple the Taliban.
The foreign ministry's dysfunction is much spoken about in Afghanistan. Zalmai Rasul, an aging foreign minister, has been called a passive operator without much foreign policy experience. Ludin, a former spokesman and chief of staff to Karzai, shoulders most of the responsibility in the foreign ministry, where many appointments are allegedly based on kinship.
"Our foreign policy weakness is that we haven't had a stable foreign policy, a clear vision. It's all been reactionary, ad-hoc," said Wafa.
Ahmad Shuja, a Washington-based Afghan analyst, believes the palace repeatedly steps on the toes of the diplomats, making it difficult for them to do their job.
"Karzai's statement, his dynamism, eclipses the efforts of the foreign ministry to set policy. It is diplomacy 'Afghanistan style' - not policy in the conventional sense."
And Khurram's tight grip over the president in the past year has made the job much more difficult for diplomats like Ludin, said analysts.
Frustrations
A controversial former minister of culture, Khurram took over the post of Karzai's chief of staff in early 2011 - a position that has held increasingly more power in the country, particularly under Khurram's predecessor, Omar Dawoodzai.
During his stint as culture minister, Khurram was known as a strict censor of television programmes.
Shuja believes Khurram's seemingly anti-US views stem from two sources.
"His political ideology is shaped by his alignment with Hizb-e-Islami, and that seems to figure in his calculations," he said. Led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Hizb e Islami began as a political party that fought the Soviets. It played a major role in Afghanistan's bloody civil war in the 1990s, and now is considered the third (and weakest) faction of the anti-US insurgency.
"But also, let's not forget that they have been trying to reach out to the insurgency. Delaying the signing of a strategic pact will help them in appeasing the Taliban," added Shuja.
In purging the GMIC, which is largely funded by the US embassy, the new chief of staff announced his intention to control the government's message. Frustrated with Khurram's control, the US embassy cancelled funding for a brief period and withdrew its advisers from the media group.
Khurram also issued a warning to the president's press staff, ordering them not to allow US advisers in press conferences, one palace official tols Al Jazeera.
The US embassy declined to comment for this story. But a US official based in Kabul confirmed the frustrations with the palace.
"For the embassy, it is hard to get any access inside the palace since the chief of staff changed," the official said.
Khurram has at least three private newspapers, a television channel and a radio station under his control, directly or indirectly, one official - who formerly worked for him - said.
"The message is not just an anti-American one, but also divisive internally," said Khurram's former colleague. "His brand of conservative Pashtunism strengthens the notion that all Pashtuns are unilateralist and conservative by nature.
"The president's non-Pashtun allies have been increasingly isolated. The damage that Khurram has inflicted on President Karzai's image in one year - his enemies could not have done the same."
Reporting by Qais Azimy in Kabul, Afghanistan and Mujib Mashal in Doha, Qatar.
Friday, March 16
BREAKING NEWS: Pundita finds the bunny
March 15, The New York Times:
But let us return to the news from Helmand; to continue with the report from the Scotsman:
As to where I found the bunny -- oh, the same place I always find him.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Prospects for an orderly withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan suffered two blows on Thursday as President Hamid Karzai demanded that the United States confine troops to major bases by next year, and the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans.March 16, the Scotsman:
A two-month operation to clear poppy fields in Helmand province -- the world’s largest opium-producing region -- has begun.Now just see what patiently hunkering down in the duck blind can net you while editorialists, salaried opinion experts, members of Congress and national leaders hold forth on the meaning of the latest two-step from Karzai and Taliban.
But let us return to the news from Helmand; to continue with the report from the Scotsman:
Afghan enforcement teams have a 60-day window between early March and late April, dictated by growing patterns, in which to take action to eradicate crops in the war-torn province of Afghanistan.Any questions about Karzai's recent spate of seemingly irrational demands and Taliban's latest hissy fit?
The aim is to eliminate harvesting of the illegal crop from at least 2,000 hectares in the food zone around the Helmand valley.
The drive is being led by the province’s governor Gulab Mangal, aided by the work of Afghan security forces following years of fighting by coalition troops to secure swathes of land.
Major Ross Brown, head of eradication for the Provincial Reconstruction Team’s (PRT) counter-narcotics department, said Afghan teams from each district would use tractors and ploughs, provided by international funding, to target farms ranging from small holdings to large, organised crime operations.
They will face constant danger as many poppy producers use improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - more commonly associated with the insurgency - to protect their crops.
Maj Brown said a carrot and stick approach was being used - almost literally.
Farmers who have been offered the opportunity and support to switch to growing carrots and wheat, but who have refused to take up the offer, will be targeted first.
Maj Brown said: “The long-term aim is to create a secure and stable food zone in the heart of Helmand.”
As to where I found the bunny -- oh, the same place I always find him.
Wednesday, March 7
Barack Obama throws an entire nation under the bus, and Lindsey Graham ignores Hamid Karzai's major point about the strategic pact
President Barack Obama chose the first White House press conference of 2012 to throw Afghanistan under the bus. He did this by saying that the time had come for the United States to "transition" out of Afghanistan because the violence aimed at Americans in response to the Burned Korans incident was "unacceptable."
He added that this didn't mean a change in the plan to end all U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But his remark added fuel to rumors flying around Washington since last week that he would use the NATO summit in May to move up the deadline date.
It's possible Obama's remark was at least partly intended as a counter-move to President Hamid Karzai's ongoing refusal to budge on two issues that have been holding up signing of the U.S.-Afghanistan strategic partnership agreement, which is crafted to govern the U.S. role in Afghanistan after 2014.
Yet if I were an Afghan who fears a precipitous U.S. exit from Afghanistan would unleash large-scale massacres, I wouldn't pin my hopes on the idea that Obama is just bluffing. Among people who've studied Obama's political career, he is infamous for betraying people, even those people who've been instrumental to his rise in power, and doing so even so for a small political gain.
In fact the slang term for such betrayal -- throwing someone "under the bus" -- gained popularity in the USA because of Obama's ruthlessness with those who least deserve the treatment.
He even threw his own grandmother under the bus by portraying her as someone prejudiced against blacks. He did this to burnish his 'black' credentials with a radio audience of black Americans in Philadelphia. His grandmother, who was still alive at the time if my memory serves, was white. She was the person who took on the responsibility of raising him after his mother abandoned him.
That's our President and Commander-in-Chief, who has all the instincts of a long-lived satrap.
Whether or not he was bluffing, Obama knew his remark about Afghanistan would give additional impetus to calls within his Democratic party base that the USA immediately quit Afghanistan. He'll need every vote he can get from the base if the U.S. economy is still in the doldrums on election day. Throwing Afghanistan under the bus is a negligible price to pay, in Obama's political calculus, if that would help lock in more of his voter base.
Although it would be a small detail to Obama, by hooking up the threat of immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Koran burning incident, he was also putting General John Allen, Commander of ISAF, in a bad position. In the immediate wake of the revenge murders of American soldiers that were ostensibly connected with the Koran burnings, Allen passionately urged the American troops under his command not to retaliate for the murders and to 'stay the course' for the sake of the 50-nation NATO mission in Afghanistan.
Allen's words now ring hollow in light of the rationale Obama proffered for the U.S. to "transition" out of Afghanistan.
Another American politician who's now intimating that the U.S. should quit Afghanistan earlier than agreed is Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Senator Graham has always been a staunch supporter of the U.S. staying the course in Afghanistan, but he lost his temper with Hamid Karzai over the issue of the stalled strategic pact. Graham is studiously overlooking something, but I'll let him blow off steam before I mention what that something is. From his remarks on March 6, reported by Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin:
So from Karzai's point of view, what does it accomplish to keep harassing Afghans with night raids and jailing an endless parade of proxies, if NATO won't deal forcefully with the locus of the 'Taliban insurgency' in Afghanistan?
I wouldn't call that point of view irrational. I'd call Lindsey Graham the irrational one for expecting that NATO and Afghan security forces can somehow prevail by emptying the ocean with a sieve.
I'd also call Graham a fool for failing to recognize that American troops are unwittingly helping Pakistan's regime carry out population control, Pakistani-style.
What does he think is happening, when Pakistan's military/ISI train the country's 'undesirables' -- the low castes, the least educated, the mentally ill, the Afghans living in refugee camps -- to set IEDs, then hand them an AK-47 and send them across the border to die by the hundreds of thousands at the hands of NATO troops?
However, here in the United States we have another term for that kind of population control. It's called democide.
He added that this didn't mean a change in the plan to end all U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But his remark added fuel to rumors flying around Washington since last week that he would use the NATO summit in May to move up the deadline date.
It's possible Obama's remark was at least partly intended as a counter-move to President Hamid Karzai's ongoing refusal to budge on two issues that have been holding up signing of the U.S.-Afghanistan strategic partnership agreement, which is crafted to govern the U.S. role in Afghanistan after 2014.
Yet if I were an Afghan who fears a precipitous U.S. exit from Afghanistan would unleash large-scale massacres, I wouldn't pin my hopes on the idea that Obama is just bluffing. Among people who've studied Obama's political career, he is infamous for betraying people, even those people who've been instrumental to his rise in power, and doing so even so for a small political gain.
In fact the slang term for such betrayal -- throwing someone "under the bus" -- gained popularity in the USA because of Obama's ruthlessness with those who least deserve the treatment.
He even threw his own grandmother under the bus by portraying her as someone prejudiced against blacks. He did this to burnish his 'black' credentials with a radio audience of black Americans in Philadelphia. His grandmother, who was still alive at the time if my memory serves, was white. She was the person who took on the responsibility of raising him after his mother abandoned him.
That's our President and Commander-in-Chief, who has all the instincts of a long-lived satrap.
Whether or not he was bluffing, Obama knew his remark about Afghanistan would give additional impetus to calls within his Democratic party base that the USA immediately quit Afghanistan. He'll need every vote he can get from the base if the U.S. economy is still in the doldrums on election day. Throwing Afghanistan under the bus is a negligible price to pay, in Obama's political calculus, if that would help lock in more of his voter base.
Although it would be a small detail to Obama, by hooking up the threat of immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Koran burning incident, he was also putting General John Allen, Commander of ISAF, in a bad position. In the immediate wake of the revenge murders of American soldiers that were ostensibly connected with the Koran burnings, Allen passionately urged the American troops under his command not to retaliate for the murders and to 'stay the course' for the sake of the 50-nation NATO mission in Afghanistan.
Allen's words now ring hollow in light of the rationale Obama proffered for the U.S. to "transition" out of Afghanistan.
Another American politician who's now intimating that the U.S. should quit Afghanistan earlier than agreed is Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Senator Graham has always been a staunch supporter of the U.S. staying the course in Afghanistan, but he lost his temper with Hamid Karzai over the issue of the stalled strategic pact. Graham is studiously overlooking something, but I'll let him blow off steam before I mention what that something is. From his remarks on March 6, reported by Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin:
If Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai doesn't change his tune fast on two key U.S. demands, the U.S. military should just pack up and go home and leave Afghanistan for good, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said today.The senator is ignoring one singular fact. Over the years Hamid Karzai's most consistent and adamant demand has been the U.S. government recognize that the vast majority of people killing the sons of American mothers and preying on innocent Afghan villagers are doing so with support from Pakistan's military.
Graham, who has been one of the strongest congressional supporters for continuing the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan beyond 2014, said today that unless Karzai relents on his demands that the United States immediately hand over control of Afghan prisoners and end night raids against insurgents, there is no way the U.S. can achieve its objectives in Afghanistan and therefore should just end its involvement there.
"If the president of the country can't understand how irrational it is to expect us to turn over prisoners and if he doesn't understand that the night raids have been the biggest blow to the Taliban ... then there is no hope of winning. None," Graham said in the hallways of the Capitol Building just before entering the GOP caucus lunch.
"So if he insists that all the prisoners have to be turned over by March 9 and that we have to stop night raids, that means we will fail in Afghanistan and that means Lindsey Graham pulls the plug. It means that I no longer believe we can win and we might as well get out of there sooner rather than later."
Graham acknowledged that those two issues were crucial in ongoing negotiations over a U.S.-Afghanistan Status of Forces Agreement, which would provide the legal basis for the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014, the deadline President Barack Obama has set for transferring full control of the country back to the Afghans.
"I am going to pull the plug on Afghanistan from a personal point of view if we don't get this strategic partnership signed," Graham said.
"Karzai's insistence that all detainees we have in our custody be turned over by Friday to an Afghan system that will let guys walk right out the door and start killing Americans again is a non-starter."
Graham, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations' State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, visited Kabul and met with Karzai late last month.
Today he said he supports a U.S.-Afghanistan agreement for a post-2014 presence of about 20,000 U.S. troops, with three or four U.S. airbases and coordination in the military, political, and economic spheres.
"But I'm not going to support signing that agreement if Karzai insists that we end night raids, which are the biggest blow available to our forces against the enemy," he said. "If he requires that we end night raids, we'll have no hope of being successful."
Regarding the prisoners, Graham said that any follow-on U.S. force would be put at risk if U.S.-held prisoners, currently numbering over 3,000, were placed under Afghan control.
"I cannot go back home to South Carolina and tell a mother, ‘I'm sorry your son or daughter was killed today by a guy we had in custody but let go for no good reason.' We want Afghan sovereignty over prisoners but they're not there yet," he said.
"That's not good governance. That hurts the Afghan villagers that have been preyed on by these people and it sure as hell puts our people at risk. I want an agreement but not at all costs."
So from Karzai's point of view, what does it accomplish to keep harassing Afghans with night raids and jailing an endless parade of proxies, if NATO won't deal forcefully with the locus of the 'Taliban insurgency' in Afghanistan?
I wouldn't call that point of view irrational. I'd call Lindsey Graham the irrational one for expecting that NATO and Afghan security forces can somehow prevail by emptying the ocean with a sieve.
I'd also call Graham a fool for failing to recognize that American troops are unwittingly helping Pakistan's regime carry out population control, Pakistani-style.
What does he think is happening, when Pakistan's military/ISI train the country's 'undesirables' -- the low castes, the least educated, the mentally ill, the Afghans living in refugee camps -- to set IEDs, then hand them an AK-47 and send them across the border to die by the hundreds of thousands at the hands of NATO troops?
However, here in the United States we have another term for that kind of population control. It's called democide.
Tuesday, March 6
Berlin Mandate: With Obama out to lunch, some members of Congress come up with their own plan for Afghanistan
Jumpin' Jehosaphat, gentlemen, couldn't you have come up with an easier plan? Like trying to impeach Obama or raising Patton from the dead?
March 3, Washington, DC, al Jazeera:
Speaking of Pakistan's military, they're already a few steps ahead of the congressmen. They got Hamid Karzai to agree to shut down Baloch nationalist training camps in Afghanistan; the Afghan Minister announced that just this past Sunday.
Not only that, the Pakistani military has launched a charm offensive to head off international outcries about ethnic cleansing in Balochistan. One result, according to the report I link to above, is that Balochistan's Chief Minister has suddenly discovered that only 800 activists are missing, not the 6,000 they'd originally estimated.
And looking through the al Jazeera report, written by Eddie Walsh, "a senior foreign correspondent who covers Africa and Asia-Pacific" who also serves as a nonresident fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS, I see that the congressmen think they can outfox Pakistan's military by depriving them of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan. They're a little behind the times. Why, just the other day the Dragon Lady aka Pakistan's Foreign Minister cooed that it was time for Pakistan to get over its "strategic depth hangover." Not only that:
And while I don't like playing wet blanket, there are a few problems with the congressmen's plan as described by Mr Walsh. One problem, from geologic maps I've seen, is that Afghanistan's fabulous but largely untapped natural resources are not exclusive to the region the congressman see as becoming independent; the resources, different types, are distributed throughout the country.
The bigger problem is that balkanizing Afghanistan won't stop international terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba from continuing their expansion in areas in Afghanistan not controlled by a 'Northern Alliance.' Nor will it prevent the Arabization or to be more precise Saudification of such areas.
Another problem is found in the congressmen themselves, or at least in Dana Rohrabacher's terming of criticism about one part of the plan as, "a bunch of leftist garbage from liberal professors," as Walsh reported. If they're going to get past square one with their plan the congressmen need all the friends they can get, so go light on the insults. I think there are plenty of genuine liberals here and abroad and right next door in Canada who would support the basic plan -- and there could be many more supporters by the time liberals absorb this news from Afghanistan, datelined yesterday:
I see a few additional problems with the plan, but for now I'll return to Eddie Walsh's report:
March 3, Washington, DC, al Jazeera:
Over the last few months, a small faction of congressmen, minority Afghan groups, Baloch nationalists, and their supporters have laid out the framework for an alternative US policy approach for Southwest Asia. This alternative policy centres on backing remnants of the Northern Alliance and Baloch insurgents, who seek to carve out semi-autonomous territories or independent states from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.Regarding the summary of Obama's current policy -- true, true, all true, but that's one whale of a complex plan the congressmen have in mind. Granted, if their actions prompted Obama and the U.S. military command to feel their way to the concept of war that could redeem the American people, and boy do we need redeeming. I mean, how many people in history have paid another military to murder their own troops? Come to think of it, that would be all the people who pay for the NATO enterprise in Afghanistan and who saw their soldiers killed by proxies for Pakistan's military.
While supporters of this new approach are motivated by a variety of interests, they appear unified in their rejection of what they see as three cornerstones of the Obama administration's current regional policy approach:
1) Normalising relations with Pakistan's government and military;
2) Incorporating the Taliban into the current Afghan political system;
3) Overly accommodating an emerging Iran.
In one broad stroke, this new approach would attempt to advance US national interests by redrawing the political borders of Southwest Asia - contrary to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of three existing states.
[...]
Speaking of Pakistan's military, they're already a few steps ahead of the congressmen. They got Hamid Karzai to agree to shut down Baloch nationalist training camps in Afghanistan; the Afghan Minister announced that just this past Sunday.
Not only that, the Pakistani military has launched a charm offensive to head off international outcries about ethnic cleansing in Balochistan. One result, according to the report I link to above, is that Balochistan's Chief Minister has suddenly discovered that only 800 activists are missing, not the 6,000 they'd originally estimated.
And looking through the al Jazeera report, written by Eddie Walsh, "a senior foreign correspondent who covers Africa and Asia-Pacific" who also serves as a nonresident fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS, I see that the congressmen think they can outfox Pakistan's military by depriving them of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan. They're a little behind the times. Why, just the other day the Dragon Lady aka Pakistan's Foreign Minister cooed that it was time for Pakistan to get over its "strategic depth hangover." Not only that:
Hina Rabbani Khar has said she hopes for a relationship with Afghanistan based on trust and called for leaving behind the past associated with interference in that country and support for Taliban.Yes indeed; Pakistan's military is launching charm offensives on all fronts. Even on the Indian front.
And while I don't like playing wet blanket, there are a few problems with the congressmen's plan as described by Mr Walsh. One problem, from geologic maps I've seen, is that Afghanistan's fabulous but largely untapped natural resources are not exclusive to the region the congressman see as becoming independent; the resources, different types, are distributed throughout the country.
The bigger problem is that balkanizing Afghanistan won't stop international terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba from continuing their expansion in areas in Afghanistan not controlled by a 'Northern Alliance.' Nor will it prevent the Arabization or to be more precise Saudification of such areas.
Another problem is found in the congressmen themselves, or at least in Dana Rohrabacher's terming of criticism about one part of the plan as, "a bunch of leftist garbage from liberal professors," as Walsh reported. If they're going to get past square one with their plan the congressmen need all the friends they can get, so go light on the insults. I think there are plenty of genuine liberals here and abroad and right next door in Canada who would support the basic plan -- and there could be many more supporters by the time liberals absorb this news from Afghanistan, datelined yesterday:
Afghan clerics' guidelines 'a green light for Talibanisation'So. The plight of Afghanistan's more fair-minded citizens is a big-tent situation; it attracts interest from all parts of the Western political spectrum.
By Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
The Guardian
Edicts released by Hamid Karzai issue repressive rules for women who, they declare, are subordinate to men
Women are subordinate to men, should not mix in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel, according to new guidelines from Afghanistan's top clerics which critics say are dangerously reminiscent of the Taliban era.
The edicts appeared in a statement that also encouraged insurgents to join peace talks, fuelling fears that efforts to negotiate an end to a decade of war, now gathering pace after years of false starts and dead ends, will come at a high cost to women.
"There is a link with what is happening all over the country with peace talks and the restrictions they want to put on women's rights," said Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi, who warned that the new rules were a "green light for Talibanisation".
The points agreed at a regular meeting of the Ulema Council of top clerics are not legally binding. But the statement detailing them was published by the president's office with no further comment, a move that has been taken as a tacit seal of approval.
"Ultimately, I don't see a way you can read it as not coming from (Hamid) Karzai," said Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It's probably not an extreme position for the Ulema Council, but it's an extreme position for Karzai, and not compatible with the constitution, or Afghanistan's obligations under international law."
The clerics renounced the equality of men and women enshrined in the Afghan constitution, suggesting they consider the document that forms the basis of the Afghan state to be flawed from a religious perspective.
"Men are fundamental and women are secondary," the statement says, according to a translation by Afghan analyst Ahmad Shuja. "Also, lineage is derived from the man. Therefore, the use of words and expressions that contradict the sacred verses must be strictly avoided."
The statement drew criticism in parliament, where some politicians took it as a direct assault on the constitution and the wider government. If a ban on men and women working and studying together were implemented, it would in effect dissolve the legislature.
"The statement is against the constitution, against human rights and against women's rights," said Ahmad Shah Behzad, a member of parliament from western Herat province, who warned that Karzai risked being in dereliction of his duty to protect the constitution.
The clerics also appeared to condone violence against women in some circumstances.[...]
I see a few additional problems with the plan, but for now I'll return to Eddie Walsh's report:
[...] While its advocates clearly do not yet have broad support for their initiative, the campaign for an alternative Southwest Asian policy approach is maturing and garnering increased attention in Congress and beyond, especially as a result of three recent high-profile events: a Balochistan National Front strategy session in Berlin, a US congressional hearing on Balochistan, and the introduction of a Baloch self-determination bill before the US Congress.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, it's nevertheless critical to understand how this alternative policy approach framework has evolved over the past few months.
The 'Berlin Mandate' as a loose framework
In early January, a bipartisan congressional delegation, led by Representative Dana Rohrabacher (Republican-California), held a "strategy session" in Berlin with Afghan opposition leaders, including the country's former intelligence chief. The meeting addressed constitutional reforms that would make Afghanistan a federal system.
Meeting participants argued that vesting political and economic power in the provinces, instead of centralising power in Kabul, would protect the US' Northern Alliance allies from retribution at the hands of Pashtuns once the Taliban is fully reincorporated into the Afghan political system.
By advancing these policies, the attendees portrayed the Taliban's incorporation into Afghanistan's political system as a greater risk than the threat posed to Afghanistan's territorial integrity by their alternative - which would risk the partition of "Afghanistan between the minority-dominated north and the Pashtun south". This clearly runs counter to the the interests of Hamid Karzai's government.
A few weeks later, Representative Louie Gohmert (Republican-Texas), a Berlin meeting attendee, added fuel to the fire by arguing in a video interview that the US should not just push for a new political system in Afghanistan but go further by rearming the Northern Alliance.
In the same breath, Gohmert provided one of the first definitive links between support for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and Baloch nationalists in Pakistan: "Let's talk about creating a Balochistan in the southern part of Pakistan. They'll stop the IEDs and all of the weaponry coming into Afghanistan, and we got a shot to win over there."
With these remarks, the two pillars of an alternative Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) policy approach were now set: To advance its interests, the US should support the carving out of an independent Baloch state and semi-autonomous Afghan territories - even if it undermined existing US partnerships with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In early February, Rohrabacher convened a public congressional hearing on Balochistan. While human rights violations in Pakistan's Balochistan province were discussed (per the agenda), the hearing also provided a forum to start a larger (and arguably off-topic) national dialogue on the viability of Southwest Asia's state borders.
As a result of the hearing, witnesses - including Ralph Peters and M Hossein Bor - were able to argue that the dismemberment of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan would serve the United States' long-term strategic interests. But, even more importantly, the hearing allowed the witnesses to inject their views into the larger debate on US foreign policy in Southwest Asia. This included Bor's controversial assertion (which was later censored in Pakistan) that supporting an independent Balochistan stretching from "the Strait of Hormuz to Karachi" would be a better policy approach than ongoing US efforts to counter the Iranian and Pakistani regimes.
Rohrabacher, Gohmert, and Representative Steve King (Republican-Iowa) followed up the hearing by introducing a new bill in Congress stating that the Baloch nation has a historic right to self-determination. With this action, the congressmen went from "familiarising themselves" with Balochistan to calling for Congress to recognise the Baloch nation's right to sovereign independence in roughly a week.
In many ways, this brought the "Berlin Mandate" full circle. In less than two months, a small group of congressmen, minority Afghan groups, Baloch nationalists, and their supporters had gone from voicing displeasure with the current Obama Administration's Af-Pak policy approach to advancing a revolutionary alternative policy approach that called for supporting the minority interests of the Northern Alliance and Baloch against the sovereign interests of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.
Reflecting upon this effort a few days after the bill was introduced, Rohrabacher confided to me in an on-the-record interview:
"There is a natural extension from the Berlin meeting with the Northern Alliance to the Balochistan bill. I have always stood for self-determination, but there are certain things that activate me to start pushing more on that philosophy. Clearly, the whole issue of the Taliban being reintegrated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing safe haven to terrorists like Bin Laden, are major factors.
"There is also my support for immediately withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. To do so, we need to have a major policy dialogue on what our policy is in Southwest Asia, how we properly transition out of Afghanistan, and what will be our ongoing relationship with Pakistan. Balochistan is clearly part of that debate."
Cross-linking with other congressional causes
While the introduction of the Baloch self-determination bill marks an important milestone for their cause, it is important to point out that there has been an equally big change in how "Berlin Mandate" supporters have advocated their cause. Over the last month, these supporters - particularly Baloch nationalists in the US diaspora - have increasingly sought to extend their cause beyond US foreign policy in the Af-Pak region. They appear to recognise the need to latch onto larger foreign policy issues as part of their efforts to garner mainstream support for their cause. Four of the most important include:
I. Punishing Pakistan for supporting terrorism and nuclear proliferation
Rohrabacher, Gohmert, and other key supporters of the alternative policy approach for Southwest Asia have been unabashed in overtly linking the need for policy alternatives to Pakistan's "betrayal of America's trust". It is even alleged that the Balochistan hearing was called specifically to "stick it to the Pakistanis" for their arrest of a reported key informant in the bin Laden operation. Even after widespread criticism for his past remarks against Pakistan, Rohrabacher does not shy away from his criticism: "Quite frankly, the Pakistani military and leaders that give safe haven to the mass murderer of Americans should not expect to be treated with respect."
Such rhetoric almost certainly will find a receptive audience in Congress - even among the many members who have never heard of Balochistan or know little about the Northern Alliance's struggles over the last year. For this reason, Peters pointed out to me recently as part of a yet unpublished post-hearing interview that the current high levels of anti-Pakistani sentiment in Congress probably provide the best opportunity that the Baloch may see to advance their cause.
II. Containing a rising China and an emerging Iran, and preventing Pakistan from achieving strategic depth
According to supporters, an independent Balochistan, "extending from Karachi to the Strait of Hormuz", would help to contain a rising China and an emerging Iran, provide a long-term security guarantee against China, Iran, and Pakistan emerging as maritime powers, and undermine the strengthening of strategic relationships between these three potential adversaries.
In an interview after the congressional hearing, Bor made this case:
"There are many interrelated issues at play. When one discusses Balochistan, you are discussing a way to contain China. You are also discussing economic relationships between Iran and Pakistan If (the Chinese) build their port in Gwadar, they will have a land route from Western China to the Indian Ocean.
This is of strategic interest to the United States because Chinese ships would have a direct route to China and no longer have to transit past the Indian and American navies. It therefore is logical that Balochistan should be concerned as part of the larger shift to the Pacific announced by the Obama Administration. (Separately,) Iran is an empire and they are using Baloch lands to try to become the dominant regional player. The Iranians are using the Strait of Hormuz as a choke-point for a huge percentage of the world's oil. They also are building a pipeline to Pakistan which violates UN sanctions. Such growing Iran-Pakistan cooperation is a major concern."
Other supporters have advanced similar arguments with respect to Afghan minority groups against the Pashtun-dominated central government. They assert that support for the autonomy or independence of the Northern Alliance serves as an insurance policy against Pakistan's military achieving strategic depth once the Taliban is fully integrated into Afghanistan's political system.
III. Providing the West with an opportunity to profit from Southwest Asia's natural resources
Recognising "the tremendous deposits of oil, gas, and minerals" found within or made accessible through the Baloch and Northern Alliance territories, some supporters have argued that the West should advance the "Berlin Mandate" if for no other reason than self-serving economic interests.
They have asserted that an independent Balochistan and autonomous Northern Alliance territories would provide Western companies with valuable new economic opportunities, which could help offset the costs of two failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and spur economic growth following the global economic downturn. They have also said that the West should do so to prevent potential strategic adversaries, including China, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia, from profiting off the natural resources of Central and Southwest Asia at their expense.
While Rohrabacher has called this "a bunch of leftist garbage from liberal professors", it must be said that his committee purposely selected a witness whose expertise lies in forging such partnerships in the Middle East region and who remains a vocal advocate for their consideration in the context of an independent Balochistan. Baloch nationalists clearly have started to reach out more aggressively to Western commercial interests on these grounds in recent months as well.
IV. Preventing gross human rights violations and providing post-colonial nations their right to self-determination
While members of Congress have long condemned the Taliban and the Pakistani government for human rights violations, supporters - particularly Baloch nationalists - have used novel approaches in recent months to win over members of Congress. They have increasingly restrained themselves from leading with the genocide argument. Recognising that this argument has failed to win over Congress in the past, they have instead turned to a more complex argument: that the Baloch, like the South Sudanese and numerous minority groups in the former Yugoslavia, have won their right to self-determination because Pakistan and Iran have failed to provide basic human rights protections. Pakistan and Iran have, they argue, thereby forgone their sovereignty over Baloch territories - regardless of historical precedent.
While few in Congress will support their cause on these grounds alone, Baloch nationalists acknowledge the moral power of the argument for members of Congress who may be seeking to justify their support for an oppressed group on other grounds. This argument could become a powerful advocacy tool for Baloch and Afghan minority interest supporters, especially when reaching out to congressmen serving on other minority group interest caucuses with their own claims to self-determination.
Saturday, March 3
Afghan Koran Burning incident: Here ye! Here ye! Kangaroo courts now in session!
Afghan-US military inquiry may lead to review of at least five personnel despite concluding burning of texts unintentional ... But a different panel appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to investigate the incident, has concluded that the burning of the holy books was deliberate. ... "What the Afghan president has requested from US officials and the US military is a trial and punishment."
The NATO panel is still investigating.
US troops could face disciplinary action over Qur'an burning in Afghanistan
March 3, 2012
The Guardian (U.K.)
Staff and agencies
At least five US military personnel could face a disciplinary review following the burning of copies of the Qur'an by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
A joint investigation by senior Afghan and US military officials has concluded that although mistakes were made when troops at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, had burned copies of the Qur'an and other religious literature along with piles of waste paper, there was no intent to desecrate the Islamic religious texts.
A western official said the investigation could lead to a disciplinary review of at least five US military personnel involved.
But a different panel appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to investigate the incident, has concluded that the burning of the holy books was deliberate.
Maulvi Khaliq Dad, a senior Afghan religious leader on the panel, said US troops told Afghans at the base that the religious materials pulled from a detention centre library were to be stored, but were then sent for incineration.
"They are claiming that it was not intentional. Our investigative team says it was intentional," Dad said.
After the panel presented its findings, Afghanistan's top religious leaders demanded on Friday that those involved be put on public trial and be punished, a position that Karzai backs.
Barack Obama and other US officials have apologised for the incident on 20 February, which triggered six days of riots across Afghanistan. The apologies, which described the incineration as accident, have failed to quell the anger in the country, although the violent protests that killed more than 30 Afghans and six US troops have subsided.
Karzai's office said on Saturday it had only seen the report drafted by the religious leaders and had not yet been given the joint report, so could not comment on it.
"We are waiting for the result of the investigation by Nato, which will probably show who is involved in this and how many people are involved. After studying it we will announce our stance," said a presidential spokesman, Aimal Faizi. "What the Afghan president has requested from US officials and the US military is a trial and punishment."
The NATO panel is still investigating.
US troops could face disciplinary action over Qur'an burning in Afghanistan
March 3, 2012
The Guardian (U.K.)
Staff and agencies
At least five US military personnel could face a disciplinary review following the burning of copies of the Qur'an by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
A joint investigation by senior Afghan and US military officials has concluded that although mistakes were made when troops at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, had burned copies of the Qur'an and other religious literature along with piles of waste paper, there was no intent to desecrate the Islamic religious texts.
A western official said the investigation could lead to a disciplinary review of at least five US military personnel involved.
But a different panel appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to investigate the incident, has concluded that the burning of the holy books was deliberate.
Maulvi Khaliq Dad, a senior Afghan religious leader on the panel, said US troops told Afghans at the base that the religious materials pulled from a detention centre library were to be stored, but were then sent for incineration.
"They are claiming that it was not intentional. Our investigative team says it was intentional," Dad said.
After the panel presented its findings, Afghanistan's top religious leaders demanded on Friday that those involved be put on public trial and be punished, a position that Karzai backs.
Barack Obama and other US officials have apologised for the incident on 20 February, which triggered six days of riots across Afghanistan. The apologies, which described the incineration as accident, have failed to quell the anger in the country, although the violent protests that killed more than 30 Afghans and six US troops have subsided.
Karzai's office said on Saturday it had only seen the report drafted by the religious leaders and had not yet been given the joint report, so could not comment on it.
"We are waiting for the result of the investigation by Nato, which will probably show who is involved in this and how many people are involved. After studying it we will announce our stance," said a presidential spokesman, Aimal Faizi. "What the Afghan president has requested from US officials and the US military is a trial and punishment."
Friday, March 2
What's the biggest reason for the spike in fratricidal Afghan attacks on ISAF troops?
Take special note of the dates of the following two reports. (The Wall Street Journal one was probably filed just hours before the Koran burning incident, and in any event before the rioting that broke out in response to the incident.)
February 21, 2012:
So why was the plan re-announced as new, little more than a week ago? From the wording of the rest of the 2011 report, there were 'turf' battles going on between agencies and also within agencies. And the army and police forces were waiting on equipment, including computers, before the plan could become fully operational.
And although the report doesn't mention this, once all the equipment was in place, the soldiers and police would have to be trained in the proper use of equipment for processing biometric data, proper methods for questioning new recruits and profiling them, and so on. But from the following two reports it seems the agencies are finally getting all their ducks in a row:
February 23, 2012:
February 28, 2012:
Imagine something like that happening at the CIA -- the best at the agency standing up and saying in one voice, "Bye." No one is indispensable but it takes time, particularly for a spy agency, to recover from such a blow.
But I digress. The point is that the large increase in attacks on NATO soldiers by ANSF personnel began in 2010.
In addition to the walkout at the NDS there were three other pivotal events in June 2010 that feed into the present crisis in Afghanisan, and which together signaled a new phase in the war. I'll pick up on that discussion on Monday.
I'll close with some observations for readers who've interpreted every fratricidal killing of six U.S. soldiers in little more than a week as a direct consequence of the Koran burning incident, and who believe that ISAF is now hamstrung because of fallout from the incident.
There's not enough publicly available information at this early stage to nail down every motive in the killings. But in light of the reports I've featured in this post, I'd leave room for the speculation that the fratricidal attacks (one of which, the one yesterday, was also aimed at ANA soldiers) were to take advantage of the rioting, in an all-out attempt to sway public opinion before the NDS/ANSF coordinated onslaught on infiltrators got up to full speed.
One thing Amrullah Saleh was never able to accomplish in his years at the NDS was getting the military and police forces on the same page with the NDS. Turf battles. (Read the entire 2011 report.) Now, clearly, the agencies at least understand the urgent necessity of working together. So now all the players that have been having a walk in the park at the expense of the ANSF and NATO know the game is going to get a lot harder for them.
In an uncertain world, you can be certain the players haven't taken the knowledge in the spirit of fair play -- particularly since they learned that the centerpiece of the new ISAF war strategy is to 'surge' U.S. military trainers to Afghanistan to train and support Afghan soldiers and police.
As to when the U.S. military announced the centerpiece -- on February 15. A week later came the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield.
February 21, 2012:
Afghanistan to Spy on Its SoldiersMay 24, 2011:
by Dion Nissenbaum
The Wall Street Journal
Effort Seeks to Curtail Attacks by Local Uniformed Troops on Coalition Forces, Say Afghan and U.S. Military Leaders
WSJ's Dion Nissenbaum has exclusive details of a plan by Afghanistan to spy on its own soldiers in the aftermath of more than 70 coalition troops killed by Afghan soldiers since 2007.
KABUL - Afghanistan is rolling out an ambitious plan to spy on its own soldiers, the most serious attempt so far to halt a string of attacks by Afghan troops on their Western comrades-in-arms, according to Afghan and American military leaders.
As part of the effort, agents of the National Directorate of Security, the country's spy agency, will be deployed to army units across the country to monitor Afghan soldiers at every step, from recruitment and training to deployment and home leave, these people said.
The intent is to identify and weed out any potential troublemakers before problems turn deadly, Afghan Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak said in an interview. "Every soldier has to become an informer," he said.
So-called green-on-blue attacks by Afghan servicemen on coalition personnel claimed at least 77 lives in the past five years, with three-quarters occurring since early 2010. Last year, an analyst for the U.S. military warned that the attacks were turning into a "growing systemic threat" to the mission, in a study that has since become classified.
[...]
Afghan Secret Police to Weed Out Insurgents From MilitarySo, almost a year before Nissenbaum's report with "exclusive" details on a new plan to seed the ANSF with NDS spies, the plan had been announced.
Institute for War and Peace Reporting via UNHCR
Worried about Afghan soldiers and police who turn their guns on their own side, Kabul has assigned the intelligence service to keep a close eye on the armed forces.
The government ascribes a spate of attacks on NATO troops and Afghan officials to the Taleban infiltrating the Afghan National Army, ANA, and Afghan National Police, ANP, or masquerading as members by obtaining uniforms. Analysts say this has been going on for some years, but a spate of high profile deadly attacks has prodded the government into action.
Lotfullah Mashal, spokesman for the National Directorate of Security, NDS, said the agency would for the first time place units within recruitment centres and other facilities of both the defence and interior ministries, which control the ANA and ANP, respectively.
“Recent incidents have forced the NDS to work in close coordination with the defence ministry and the interior ministry,” he said, without detailing how this scrutiny would work.
[...]
So why was the plan re-announced as new, little more than a week ago? From the wording of the rest of the 2011 report, there were 'turf' battles going on between agencies and also within agencies. And the army and police forces were waiting on equipment, including computers, before the plan could become fully operational.
And although the report doesn't mention this, once all the equipment was in place, the soldiers and police would have to be trained in the proper use of equipment for processing biometric data, proper methods for questioning new recruits and profiling them, and so on. But from the following two reports it seems the agencies are finally getting all their ducks in a row:
February 23, 2012:
Attacks on US embassy, palace thwarted, Afghan spy agency saysRegarding the second report, note that while it was filed just a few days ago, the arrests it refers to occurred in January of this year.
Deutsche Presse Agentur
Kabul - Afghanistan's intelligence agency on Thursday said it has thwarted planned attacks on the presidential palace and US facilities in Kabul.
Officers with the National Directorate of Security (NDS) arrested three people in Kabul who had been trained in Pakistan's tribal areas, spokesman Lutfullah Mashal told reporters in Kabul.
"They intended to carry out suicide bombing and terrorist attacks against the US embassy in Kabul, the presidential palace and Ariana Hotel but the NDS arrested them" before they could carry out their attacks, Mashal said.
The Ariana Hotel is believed to be occupied by the US Central Intelligence Agency. US officials have told DPA that it has been converted into one of their facilities, without providing details.
The building is next to the president's office and the US embassy.
[...]
February 28, 2012:
Four Afghan Officials Arrested On Spying ChargesThe NDS was hit with a double whammy in June 2010 when Amrullah Saleh, under pressure from President Hamid Karzai, resigned as head of the agency; that's because the cream of the agency walked out in solidarity with him. I can't recall offhand how many left -- maybe 12 or 18, something in that range -- but it wasn't only a couple people and they didn't resign over a period of weeks or months; they all left at once.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL - Information has emerged about the arrests of four Afghan officials for allegedly spying on behalf of neighboring Iran and Pakistan.
A spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Lutfullah Mashal, said the arrests had been made on the basis of "concrete evidence."
He declined to provide further details.
Sources at the Afghan spy agency told reporters on condition of anonymity that a high-ranking diplomat at the Foreign Ministry's Asia section has been accused of providing information to Pakistan's military intelligence agency.
The three other suspects are described as government employees in the eastern Nangarhar, western Farah, and Herat provinces.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry has not yet commented about the arrests, which were reportedly made one month ago.
Imagine something like that happening at the CIA -- the best at the agency standing up and saying in one voice, "Bye." No one is indispensable but it takes time, particularly for a spy agency, to recover from such a blow.
But I digress. The point is that the large increase in attacks on NATO soldiers by ANSF personnel began in 2010.
In addition to the walkout at the NDS there were three other pivotal events in June 2010 that feed into the present crisis in Afghanisan, and which together signaled a new phase in the war. I'll pick up on that discussion on Monday.
I'll close with some observations for readers who've interpreted every fratricidal killing of six U.S. soldiers in little more than a week as a direct consequence of the Koran burning incident, and who believe that ISAF is now hamstrung because of fallout from the incident.
There's not enough publicly available information at this early stage to nail down every motive in the killings. But in light of the reports I've featured in this post, I'd leave room for the speculation that the fratricidal attacks (one of which, the one yesterday, was also aimed at ANA soldiers) were to take advantage of the rioting, in an all-out attempt to sway public opinion before the NDS/ANSF coordinated onslaught on infiltrators got up to full speed.
One thing Amrullah Saleh was never able to accomplish in his years at the NDS was getting the military and police forces on the same page with the NDS. Turf battles. (Read the entire 2011 report.) Now, clearly, the agencies at least understand the urgent necessity of working together. So now all the players that have been having a walk in the park at the expense of the ANSF and NATO know the game is going to get a lot harder for them.
In an uncertain world, you can be certain the players haven't taken the knowledge in the spirit of fair play -- particularly since they learned that the centerpiece of the new ISAF war strategy is to 'surge' U.S. military trainers to Afghanistan to train and support Afghan soldiers and police.
As to when the U.S. military announced the centerpiece -- on February 15. A week later came the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield.
Thursday, March 1
David Ignatius auditions for the role of Baghdad Bob
February 27, 2012:
Negotiations with the Taliban find some momentumFebruary 18, 2012:
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
U.S. diplomats have noted with interest that a prominent Taliban spokesman, when asked by a Saudi newspaper whether it would host al-Qaeda once more if it regained power, answered that the leaders of al-Qaeda “are no longer interested in Afghanistan.” That appears to some officials to signal acceptance of one key U.S. and Saudi goal in peace talks in Afghanistan.
The comments by Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of the Taliban’s top spokesmen, were made last Saturday to Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper in London.
[...]
These slight concessions ... will not do much to reassure non-Taliban Afghans, many of whom fear that in its eagerness to withdraw forces from the country, the United States will sanction the return of a Taliban leadership that is unpopular in most parts of the country.
But the Ahmadi interview is the clearest sign yet that the process of negotiation led by State Department representative Marc Grossman is beginning to gather momentum -- even as the broader U.S. position in the country deteriorates.
Al Qaeda 'operates in Afghanistan under the flag of the Islamic Emirate': Taliban spokesman
By Bill Roggio
The Long War Journal
A Taliban spokesman who identified himself as an "Authorized Correspondent by the Media Committee of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" said that the Taliban will not renounce al Qaeda and that the terror group operates under the command of the "Military Command of the Islamic Emirate."
The Taliban official, Abdullah al Wazir, made the statement yesterday in response to a posting at Shumukh al Islam, a jihadist Internet forum linked to al Qaeda. Wazir was replying to a question from a forum member who thought "that by agreeing to negotiations with the United States, the Afghan Taliban has taken the 'first step' to abandon al Qaeda," said the SITE Intelligence Group, which translated the statement.
"They [al Qaeda] are among the first groups and banners that pledged allegiance to the Emir of the Believers [Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban], and they operate in Afghanistan under the flag of the Islamic Emirate," Wazir said.
"They are an example of discipline and accuracy in the execution of missions and operations entrusted to them by the Military Command of the Islamic Emirate," Wazir continued, calling al Qaeda "lions in war."
Wazir said he was an "Authorized Correspondent by the Media Committee of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan." SITE described Wazir as the "Afghan Taliban's correspondent on jihadist forums."
A US intelligence official who follows the Taliban said that Wazir is a member of the Haqqani Network, the powerful Taliban sub-group that operates in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan's tribal areas.
The Haqqanis are closely tied to al Qaeda; Siraj Haqqani, the network's operational commander, has a seat on al Qaeda's council, and he and five other members of the network have been added to the US's list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists for their close ties to al Qaeda.
The Haqqanis routinely conduct join operations with al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan, and provide shelter, support, and training facilities to leaders and operatives in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan.
[...]
Mystery of the Burned Bagram Korans, Part 2: The riots
Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.
Terry Glavin tries to see behind the dust kicked up by the Koran burning riots in Afghanistan, and with help from Amrullah Saleh spies a pattern that first manifested clearly in the deadly Mazar-i-Sharif riots last year:
An Equal Opportunity Butcher Returns to Afghanistan
by Terry Glavin
The National Post [Canada]
February 27, 2012
In a column in the Ottawa Citizen I examined the shadowy and overlooked forces at work behind the latest bloodcurdling eruptions of what we’re all expected to believe are the offended religious sensibilities of those inscrutable Afghans. I relied mainly on some key observations the legendary Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh shared with me during a telephone conversation in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The script that’s playing out in the latest riots in Afghanistan is an almost play-by-play reenactment of last April’s berserking, which everyone was also expected to apprehend as eruptions of religious outrage, but which was also no such thing. For an elaboration of what was really going on last April, you can look it up in an essay I wrote for Dissent while the ashes in Mazar were still smouldering.
In my column, there is mention of the psychopathic mass-murderer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency also gets honourable mention, and I am not hesitant to reiterate here that no adequate remedy for the ISI may exist except to get rid of everyone above the rank of major.
To appreciate what follows, you’ll want to know straight away that Hekmatyar heads up the original faction of Hezb-e-Islami, an offshoot of which is well represented in Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, and even in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, in the person of Economy Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal.
You will also need to know that the ISI has declared that it is most pleased that the United States is setting up Mullah Omar’s Taliban in a fancy district of Qatar to begin the final forced “reconciliation” of the Afghan people with the genocidal Taliban high command. The ISI is seeing to it that Omar’s Haqqani wing will have Qatari office space of their own so that they won’t feel left out of the bargain.
And here’s Hekmatyar’s mouthpiece, immediately prior to the Koran riots: “If any groups are ignored in the peace talks, it would change to resistance force against the government and could be a major threat to Afghanistan,” Mr Baheer said. “Destabilizing Afghanistan is not a difficult task, it’s too easy.”
In other words, nice filthy little disgrace of a capitulation you’ve got going here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it, we want our piece. And with the right people in the right places, “destabilizing Afghanistan” is a very easy thing to do indeed.
I now introduce Afghan analyst Abdul Ali Faiq, who these days works in London with the European Campaign for Human Rights in Afghanistan. Abdul has closely tracked the trajectory of this past week’s protests and their locales, and he’s also closely monitored the local buzz and the factional polemics in Dari/Farsi and Pashto media. His findings stand in sharp contradiction to the story that most westerners are hearing about what’s going on. But they are perfectly consistent with Amrullah Saleh’s assessment.
The whole thing’s got Hekmatyar’s signatures all over it.
“What happened at Baghram, this is not a concern for the 29 million people of Afghanistan,” Faiq told me. Some soldiers mistakenly burned a Koran, it was a sad and regrettable mistake, even President Barack Obama is falling all over himself issuing groveling apologies. Most Afghans have their minds on other things. “They say, why should we care?”
One of Faiq’s key findings is that even in the Tajik and Hazara areas of the north – Kabul, Parwan, and so on – and in the Persian west – Herat, for instance – the specific locales of the violence and the slogans being shouted are associated with ethnic pockets of Pashtuns, but more importantly, with centres of Hezb-e-Islami.
“It’s a manipulation of the masses,” Faiq says. “It is Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. This is a milking cow for them. They have made this drama. They made this scenario.”
Many Afghans are legitimately aggrieved by the sacrilegious aspect of the Bagram incident. But what most Afghans are more likely to notice is that it’s almost poetically emblematic of what a growing number of people across the country’s political, ethnic and religious divides now cannot help but conclude: the Obama administration holds them and their sorry little country in utter contempt, and he never did mean it when he said he was going to be the president who would take Afghanistan seriously for once.
The American surrender crept up so subtly, and was couched in such syrupy lies — of course all wars end in negotiations, of course all negotiations must be Afghan-led — that it was accomplished before most Afghans had even an inkling that they were being sold out.
You think it’s hard to figure out who’s who around the presidential palace in Kabul? Most North Americans and Europeans couldn’t tell you the first thing about who’s who around the Obama White House these days. Cut the Afghans some slack here. It’s taken them a while, but they’ve finally figured out that as far as the whole “Af-Pak” thing goes, it’s all Joe Biden, all the time, and he’s the dumbest American vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle.
My friend Sanjar Sohail, editor of the liberal Kabul daily Hasht-e Sohb, put it this way: “This is good for the Khomeinists, the ISI, and for Hezb-e Islami. If there was no Koran burning at the Bagram base, it would have been something else, and of course Hezb-e-Islami is benefiting from it.”
No serious person in Afghanistan has any doubt that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if not living in a mansion in Rawalpindi within a short limousine ride from ISI HQ, is living in swank digs known to the ISI, somewhere, instead of spending his days at the International Criminal Court at the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity, which is where he belongs.
It should tell you something that the reason the ISI generals invented the Taliban in the first place was that they thought Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami were a bit too harsh. Hekmatyar had been the ISI’s most lavishly-funded war-criminal proxy all through the 1980s. The ISI wanted something a little less bloodthirsty, so in around 1994 they replaced him and Hezb with Mullah Omar and his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar’s been ostensibly freelance ever since.
Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.
A Pashtun supremacist turned Stalinist, then drug-trafficker and drooling Islamist fanatic, Hekmatyar ran his Hezb faction in Leninist style, a habit he picked up from his days as a student at Kabul University, where he’d been jailed for two years for his part the murder of a Maoist rival. Hekmatyar is an equal-opportunity butcher. He was the gangster the ISI spent most of its American money on during the anti-Soviet jihad (although they say he never won a battle against the Soviets and that all his victims were Afghans) and was also the Saudis’ anointed proxy for a while, and has also been a frequent guest of Khomeinist Iran.
Hekmatyar rushed to Osama bin Laden’s aid after September 11. He brags about having helped Al Qaida forces escape through the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan, and he brought Al Qaida fugitives back with him to Iran, where he wore out his welcome after a year or so. Dozens of the more deadly attacks carelessly attributed to the Taliban in recent years were Hekmatyar jobs. His Hezb gangsters have even carried off some spectacular whacks of Talib columns, just to prove they can do it. It was a Hekmatyar rocket that came close to killing Karzai at a military parade in Kabul in 2008.
We are supposed to believe the ISI doesn’t know his whereabouts, and we are supposed to believe the Americans will scruple about cutting Hekmatyar in on Obama’s new reconciliation and power-sharing action in Qatar. Believe what you like, but believe this: the vampire’s back in town.
Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.
Terry Glavin tries to see behind the dust kicked up by the Koran burning riots in Afghanistan, and with help from Amrullah Saleh spies a pattern that first manifested clearly in the deadly Mazar-i-Sharif riots last year:
An Equal Opportunity Butcher Returns to Afghanistan
by Terry Glavin
The National Post [Canada]
February 27, 2012
In a column in the Ottawa Citizen I examined the shadowy and overlooked forces at work behind the latest bloodcurdling eruptions of what we’re all expected to believe are the offended religious sensibilities of those inscrutable Afghans. I relied mainly on some key observations the legendary Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh shared with me during a telephone conversation in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The script that’s playing out in the latest riots in Afghanistan is an almost play-by-play reenactment of last April’s berserking, which everyone was also expected to apprehend as eruptions of religious outrage, but which was also no such thing. For an elaboration of what was really going on last April, you can look it up in an essay I wrote for Dissent while the ashes in Mazar were still smouldering.
In my column, there is mention of the psychopathic mass-murderer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency also gets honourable mention, and I am not hesitant to reiterate here that no adequate remedy for the ISI may exist except to get rid of everyone above the rank of major.
To appreciate what follows, you’ll want to know straight away that Hekmatyar heads up the original faction of Hezb-e-Islami, an offshoot of which is well represented in Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, and even in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, in the person of Economy Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal.
You will also need to know that the ISI has declared that it is most pleased that the United States is setting up Mullah Omar’s Taliban in a fancy district of Qatar to begin the final forced “reconciliation” of the Afghan people with the genocidal Taliban high command. The ISI is seeing to it that Omar’s Haqqani wing will have Qatari office space of their own so that they won’t feel left out of the bargain.
And here’s Hekmatyar’s mouthpiece, immediately prior to the Koran riots: “If any groups are ignored in the peace talks, it would change to resistance force against the government and could be a major threat to Afghanistan,” Mr Baheer said. “Destabilizing Afghanistan is not a difficult task, it’s too easy.”
In other words, nice filthy little disgrace of a capitulation you’ve got going here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it, we want our piece. And with the right people in the right places, “destabilizing Afghanistan” is a very easy thing to do indeed.
I now introduce Afghan analyst Abdul Ali Faiq, who these days works in London with the European Campaign for Human Rights in Afghanistan. Abdul has closely tracked the trajectory of this past week’s protests and their locales, and he’s also closely monitored the local buzz and the factional polemics in Dari/Farsi and Pashto media. His findings stand in sharp contradiction to the story that most westerners are hearing about what’s going on. But they are perfectly consistent with Amrullah Saleh’s assessment.
The whole thing’s got Hekmatyar’s signatures all over it.
“What happened at Baghram, this is not a concern for the 29 million people of Afghanistan,” Faiq told me. Some soldiers mistakenly burned a Koran, it was a sad and regrettable mistake, even President Barack Obama is falling all over himself issuing groveling apologies. Most Afghans have their minds on other things. “They say, why should we care?”
One of Faiq’s key findings is that even in the Tajik and Hazara areas of the north – Kabul, Parwan, and so on – and in the Persian west – Herat, for instance – the specific locales of the violence and the slogans being shouted are associated with ethnic pockets of Pashtuns, but more importantly, with centres of Hezb-e-Islami.
“It’s a manipulation of the masses,” Faiq says. “It is Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. This is a milking cow for them. They have made this drama. They made this scenario.”
Many Afghans are legitimately aggrieved by the sacrilegious aspect of the Bagram incident. But what most Afghans are more likely to notice is that it’s almost poetically emblematic of what a growing number of people across the country’s political, ethnic and religious divides now cannot help but conclude: the Obama administration holds them and their sorry little country in utter contempt, and he never did mean it when he said he was going to be the president who would take Afghanistan seriously for once.
The American surrender crept up so subtly, and was couched in such syrupy lies — of course all wars end in negotiations, of course all negotiations must be Afghan-led — that it was accomplished before most Afghans had even an inkling that they were being sold out.
You think it’s hard to figure out who’s who around the presidential palace in Kabul? Most North Americans and Europeans couldn’t tell you the first thing about who’s who around the Obama White House these days. Cut the Afghans some slack here. It’s taken them a while, but they’ve finally figured out that as far as the whole “Af-Pak” thing goes, it’s all Joe Biden, all the time, and he’s the dumbest American vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle.
My friend Sanjar Sohail, editor of the liberal Kabul daily Hasht-e Sohb, put it this way: “This is good for the Khomeinists, the ISI, and for Hezb-e Islami. If there was no Koran burning at the Bagram base, it would have been something else, and of course Hezb-e-Islami is benefiting from it.”
No serious person in Afghanistan has any doubt that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if not living in a mansion in Rawalpindi within a short limousine ride from ISI HQ, is living in swank digs known to the ISI, somewhere, instead of spending his days at the International Criminal Court at the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity, which is where he belongs.
It should tell you something that the reason the ISI generals invented the Taliban in the first place was that they thought Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami were a bit too harsh. Hekmatyar had been the ISI’s most lavishly-funded war-criminal proxy all through the 1980s. The ISI wanted something a little less bloodthirsty, so in around 1994 they replaced him and Hezb with Mullah Omar and his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar’s been ostensibly freelance ever since.
Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.
A Pashtun supremacist turned Stalinist, then drug-trafficker and drooling Islamist fanatic, Hekmatyar ran his Hezb faction in Leninist style, a habit he picked up from his days as a student at Kabul University, where he’d been jailed for two years for his part the murder of a Maoist rival. Hekmatyar is an equal-opportunity butcher. He was the gangster the ISI spent most of its American money on during the anti-Soviet jihad (although they say he never won a battle against the Soviets and that all his victims were Afghans) and was also the Saudis’ anointed proxy for a while, and has also been a frequent guest of Khomeinist Iran.
Hekmatyar rushed to Osama bin Laden’s aid after September 11. He brags about having helped Al Qaida forces escape through the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan, and he brought Al Qaida fugitives back with him to Iran, where he wore out his welcome after a year or so. Dozens of the more deadly attacks carelessly attributed to the Taliban in recent years were Hekmatyar jobs. His Hezb gangsters have even carried off some spectacular whacks of Talib columns, just to prove they can do it. It was a Hekmatyar rocket that came close to killing Karzai at a military parade in Kabul in 2008.
We are supposed to believe the ISI doesn’t know his whereabouts, and we are supposed to believe the Americans will scruple about cutting Hekmatyar in on Obama’s new reconciliation and power-sharing action in Qatar. Believe what you like, but believe this: the vampire’s back in town.
Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.
Tuesday, February 28
Mystery of the Burned Bagram Korans: the plot thickens
Photo Caption: Afghan laborers who worked at the U.S. base in Bagram speak during an interview at a restaurant in Bagram north of Kabul February 23, 2012. In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow labourers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail*********
The excerpts I present below, from four news reports on the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield, present such striking discrepancies in the accounts of what transpired that a story that seemed so clear-cut at first (U.S. soldiers inadvertently burned Korans) qualifies as a genuine mystery. The mystery can't be chalked up to sloppy reporting; two of the reports -- the first and second ones I present -- represent two different stories.
If readers who were with this blog in the bad old days groan, 'Not another Chinese Pig Illness Mystery to solve' -- we had lots of data to pore over with that mystery, so of course we had to inch along day after day, week after week. There's not enough data publicly available at this point to even make a blindfolded stab at solving the Bagram Koran Burning mystery, but that shouldn't stop us from pondering anomalies in the anecdotal data that are available. The caveat is that it's such a mystery it might not turn out to be a mystery, but where's your sense of adventure?
The first excerpts I'll feature are taken from an Associated Press wire service report filed Tuesday, February 21 from Kabul, Afghanistan by Deb Riechmann; it seems to be the earliest comprehensive report on the Koran burning incident; in any event it was published by several press organizations and news websites as the 'breaking' news on the Koran incident, and it framed subsequent media discourse about the incident. (I'm not sure from the reports I've read whether the Koran burning took place at night on the 21st or in the wee hours of the 22nd.)
AP report via TIME magazine:
[...] Ahmad Zaki Zahed, chief of the provincial council, said U.S. military officials took him to a burn pit on the base where 60 to 70 books, including Korans, were recovered.Now I'll return to the Reuters report I featured it in its entirety in my February 26 post (Not Since Mazar-i-Sharif, or why the story of the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield is improbable), in which I also detailed a few of the questions I had about the workers' account of the incident. To review the salient passages from the Reuters report (published February 23) as they relate to the AP account.
The books were used by detainees once incarcerated at the base, he said. "Some were all burned. Some were half-burned," Zahed said, adding that he did not know exactly how many Korans, the Muslim holy book, had been burned.
Zahed said five Afghans working at the pit told him that the religious books were in the garbage that two soldiers with the U.S.-led coalition transported to the pit in a truck late Monday night. When they realized the books were in the trash, the laborers worked to recover them, he said. "The laborers there showed me how their fingers were burned when they took the books out of the fire," he said.
[...]
(Clearly the meeting at the restaurant with the reporter, which took place inside Bagram Airfield underneath a photo of Masood, as cited in the Reuters caption, is not the interview site described in the report, although the photo of Masood seems to be ubiquitous. I'll assume the interview started at one site and finished at another but was described by the report as a single interview site for the sake of simplicity):
Afghan laborer recalls rage as he tried to save charred KoransNow I'll turn to another Reuters report, published February 21 at 4:24 PM EST. The time suggests the report was filed in the early morning, Afghanistan time, which is 9-1/2 hours head of Eastern Time:
By Hamid Shalizi
(Writing by Rob Taylor, editing by Michael Georgy)
BAGRAM - In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow laborers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
Jamil, 22, was with other workers at a disposal centre inside the base when a woman and two men, wearing U.S. military uniforms, arrived on Monday in a truck piled with religious material and books.
While the vehicle was stopped at the centre gate, another laborer named Wali glanced in the back and saw the Korans, which the Americans dumped into an oven.
[...]
"I was ready to shed my blood and kill them or be killed," Jamil told Reuters, sitting in a heavy winter jacket, a checked scarf tied tight around his neck.
The laborers, after learning from Wali what was in the truck, rushed to the oven to stop what NATO has called a tragic blunder. Their account could not be independently verified, but was backed by local Afghan police and officials.
"We told the driver they were all religious materials and asked why they were burning them. The Americans said they were materials from prisons and they had orders to dispose of them," Jamil said.
The men plunged their hands into the oven to try to save the texts, some burning their fingers and hands as they pulled eight Koran copies from the fire, he said.
"The boys gathered and started shouting 'Allah u Akbar' (God is Greatest), clutching fragments of burning text to their chests," he said. "The truck fled the site with almost half the books still inside."
[...]
Jamil said U.S. soldiers were at first willing to allow them to take away the charred remains of the Korans, explaining how some parts made their way outside the base, but said arriving Afghan interpreters immediately realized the material could incite rage on the streets.
"The Americans first told us through the translators 'we don't want your Korans, take them away'. The Afghan "dog washers" intervened and told the Americans, 'If you let them take these books out, there will be a disaster'," he said.
Eventually freed with the material, the men ran out into the streets, waking people up and shouting about the transgression, which added fresh fuel to widespread anger that already exists over civilian deaths and intrusive NATO night raids.
[...]
Now sitting under a picture of one of Afghanistan's most famous heroes, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Masood, Jamil said he and the other laborers were afraid of retaliation by NATO or Afghan security forces.
"We have done a heroic job of saving and serving our religion. But we are also afraid of being taken and disappearing," he said. Others nearby offered support, including Afghan local officials and police, and a mullah who said they were heroes "whose faces should be famous."
"No one can touch you guys. All the people of Afghanistan stand by you. Don't be afraid," one government official said. Their material was handed to Afghan government officials for evidence, while their actions were praised by Karzai.
[...]
Afghans vent fury over Koran burning, U.S. apologizesFrom that last it's unlikely Karzai's investigation represents the cutting edge in forensic evidence gathering and analysis. That would be most unfortunate given that a Koran burning is a blasphemy in Afghanistan and that penalties for blasphemy are among the harshest in the world and can include execution by hanging. I'll assume that U.S. troops would have immunity from such prosecution and penalty but I can see how Afghans who approve of their blasphemy law wouldn't agree to an exception in this case.
By Samar Zwak
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; Writing by Michael Georgy and Rob Taylor; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Mohammad Zargham)
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. helicopters fired flares to disperse hundreds of angry Afghans who massed outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday after hearing staff there had burned copies of the Koran.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued an apology for "inappropriate treatment" of Islam's holy book at the base to try to contain fury over the incident - a public relations disaster for Washington as it tries to pacify the country ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops in 2014.
White House spokesman Jay Carney later echoed his remarks, telling a briefing, "We apologize to the Afghan people and disapprove of such conduct in the strongest possible terms."
Protesters started to gather after Afghan laborers found charred remains of copies of the Koran as they collected rubbish from Bagram air base, the provincial governor's office said in a statement.
As many as 2,000 Afghans massed outside several gates to the base, the main centre for NATO-led forces just north of the capital Kabul, chanting anti-foreigner slogans and throwing stones, said Reuters reporters at the scene.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban in Afghanistan condemned the incident, both of them saying the values of Islam had been "degraded".
Winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is critical to U.S. efforts to defeating the Taliban, but critics say Western forces often fail to grasp Afghanistan's religious and cultural sensitivities.
A senior U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said staff at Bagram had decided to remove "extremist literature" and other materials left in a library in the base's detention block.
"They (the materials) were taken out of the library for good reason but they were being disposed of in a bad way," the official said.
"There was a breakdown in judgment in this matter but there was no breakdown in our respect for Islam," the official added.
NATO ORDER
In a statement issued by the Pentagon, Panetta said NATO had ordered an investigation into the "deeply unfortunate" incident.
NATO's top general in Afghanistan, General John Allen, apologized for "actions" at the base and said a new order had been given to all coalition forces in Afghanistan to take part in training in the proper handling of religious materials.
"This was not intentional in any way," said Allen, the head of Afghanistan's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
"I offer my sincere apologies for any offence this may have caused, to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan," he added.
The apologies did little to ease the anger.
"We want them out of our country now," said Zmari, 30, a protester who has a shop near Bagram.
"We Afghans don't want these Christians and infidels, they are the enemy of our soil, our honor and our Koran," said Haji Shirin, one of the protesters at the heavily fortified compound, which is home to 30,000 foreign troops and civilians.
"I urge all Muslims to sacrifice themselves in order to pull out these troops from this soil."
President Karzai's office condemned the incident and said the president had appointed a delegation of senior clerics to investigate how it occurred.
[...]
The fourth report, from the Christian Science Monitor, published February 22, nails down that the Pentagon has launched an investigation, although it's still unclear to me whether the investigation is independent of the one at NATO. I have heard at least one report subsequent to publication of the CSM report that calls into question whether NATO had actually confirmed that the Korans in question were from Parwan prison at Bagram, but the CSM report, which contains direct quotes, is so detailed on the point that I'll accept its version.
Again, I'm excerpting only the passages I find relevant to the other reports I quoted:
Quran burning: Were prisoners hiding extremist messages in books?
The Pentagon has launched an investigation into the Quran burning at a US detention facility in Afghanistan. Prisoners might have used the books to pass secret messages, a spokesman says.
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
February 22, 2012
The US military is now investigating whether American military officials ordered Qurans to be destroyed because prisoners at a US detention facility were passing extremist messages in them, an International Security Assistance Force spokesman said Wednesday.
“We haven’t got any proof of that yet, and that is a vital part of the investigation that is ongoing,” Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson said in a Pentagon briefing Wednesday.
Indeed, the entire library of the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest US military facilities in Afghanistan, may have been ordered destroyed because of the extremist messages contained in texts, he added.
“It was a considerable amount of material,” General Jacobson said, though he added that he “cannot say” if it was the “entire” library.
[...]
Afghan night shift workers at Bagram attempted to stop the burning of the Qurans, showed the books to their day shift colleagues, and brought the Qurans off-base.
“That is when material left the facility,” Jacobson said.
In addition to extremist messages written on Qurans, prisoners at the US detention facility may have been circulating leaflets “that held inflammatory material,” Jacobsen said.
The question remains, he adds, “How did Qurans come into this material that was then taken into the burn pit?”
The investigation will also look into whether NATO officials exercised “misjudgment,” or knowingly gave the order to destroy Qurans. “Who basically told soldiers to take it and dispose of it in an improper way?” Jacobson said.
[...]
Monday, February 27
"Afghanistan surges as still America's number one hot spot, overshadowing Syria and Iran"
The above observation from retired Indian career diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, writing for the Feb. 28 edition of Asia Times Online about Kabul on razor's edge. Yuppers, that it is. My favorite line from his analysis: "Obama was wrong to have left Afghanistan to the State Department and the late Richard Holbrooke's cronies to handle."
Thanks for letting us know LOL
Oh gosh. [wiping away tears of laughter] Now where are we in space and time? From today's Washington Post: Suicide attack outside NATO base kills 9 Afghans in fresh reprisals to Koran burnings.
Here's my favorite headline from this weekend, from Fox News Cable: After riots give way to murder, US restates commitment to Afghanistan
Gee, maybe the patient ones among the Afghans are finally learning from the Pakistanis: Screw being patient. Act out, and get the attention of the US news media. Why, CNN even took time from its saturation coverage of the downtrodden Syrians to interview Ryan Crocker about the crisis in Afghanistan. What next? A whole 30 seconds of news from Afghanistan every night on the telly? I'm not sure I could stand the shock.
Can Ryan Crocker pull a rabbit out of the hat? If he can find where President Obama hid the bunny, maybe. We'll just have to stay tuned. And please don't miss my Sunday essay, Not Since Mazar-i-Sharif, or why the story of the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield is improbable. I worked really hard on it, in between plowing through 204 reports on Afghanistan LOL don't mind me; I'm giddy from lack of sleep. Over and out.
Thanks for letting us know LOL
Oh gosh. [wiping away tears of laughter] Now where are we in space and time? From today's Washington Post: Suicide attack outside NATO base kills 9 Afghans in fresh reprisals to Koran burnings.
Here's my favorite headline from this weekend, from Fox News Cable: After riots give way to murder, US restates commitment to Afghanistan
Gee, maybe the patient ones among the Afghans are finally learning from the Pakistanis: Screw being patient. Act out, and get the attention of the US news media. Why, CNN even took time from its saturation coverage of the downtrodden Syrians to interview Ryan Crocker about the crisis in Afghanistan. What next? A whole 30 seconds of news from Afghanistan every night on the telly? I'm not sure I could stand the shock.
Can Ryan Crocker pull a rabbit out of the hat? If he can find where President Obama hid the bunny, maybe. We'll just have to stay tuned. And please don't miss my Sunday essay, Not Since Mazar-i-Sharif, or why the story of the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield is improbable. I worked really hard on it, in between plowing through 204 reports on Afghanistan LOL don't mind me; I'm giddy from lack of sleep. Over and out.
Afghan War: all eyes on the secret cable
Secret U.S. cable warned about Pakistani havens. That information about the cable was leaked suggests a bare-knuckle brawl underway in Washington ....
[...] The cable, which was described by several officials familiar with its contents, could be used as ammunition by senior military officials who favor more aggressive action by the United States against the Haqqani havens in Pakistan. It also could buttress calls from senior military officials for a more gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan as the 2014 deadline for ending combat operations approaches.
These military officials have maintained for months that the strategy of targeting raids against Taliban leadership and building local Afghan governance is showing impressive results. But they warn that worsening conditions in Pakistan and the ability of insurgent groups to find haven there necessitates a larger American force than many in the Obama administration are advocating.
[...]
Sunday, February 26
The real story on the Syrian situation
John Batchelor has it. Anyone who writes to say this isn't the story I'm getting from the BBC, PBS, CNN, FNC, Washington Post and New York Times, I'd reply go to sleep; you're up past your bedtime.
Not Since Mazar-i-Sharif, or why the story of the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield is improbable
I'll preface this post with a question to American readers: Do you think there's anyone in U.S. law enforcement, from the Department of Justice and FBI all the way down to the local police forces, who doesn't know about the incident Americans refer to simply as "Waco?"(1)
The answer, of course, is "Of course not." Even if police memories about details of the siege and disastrous storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco got a little hazy over the years, the bombing in Oklahoma City -- the worst terrorist incident in American history up to that time -- done in part to avenge Waco, refreshed them.
The fallout from Waco arguably changed the entire American culture and very definitely changed the culture of U.S. law enforcement. One consequence is that even the most stupid American law enforcement official knows one thing about Waco: Never do that again.
Agreed?
All right. Now I'll proceed to the February 22, 2012 Koran burning incident at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Prior to the incident, if there was one thing even the most stupid ISAF officer in Afghanistan knew, it was never burn a Koran within sight or earshot of a Muslim. This knowledge reached all the way down to the grunt level, and in particular the American grunt level.
Why?
Because before and after deployment to Afghanistan, everyone in the NATO forces is given 'sensitivity' training about the handling of Islamic religious materials -- training that was stepped up last year.
Why last year?
Because on April 1, 2011 a mob of thousands of Afghans overwhelmed guards at a lightly guarded United Nations compound in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and murdered seven UN workers -- four Nepali guards and three Europeans -- and according to UN officials beheaded two of the victims, although the Afghan government later denied that the beheadings had occurred. (2)
The mob was particularly enraged because it couldn't find any Americans to kill; at that time Mazar-i-Sharif was the 'safest' city in Afghanistan, so safe that U.S. troops no longer patrolled there in any significant number.
The Afghan rioters didn't stop with murder; they tried to destroy the compound, burning down part of it and trying to dismantle the rest, cement block by cement block, with their bare hands.
Now why did thousands of Afghans in a city that was probably less anti-American than other in Afghanistan suddenly set out to kill Americans?
Because they'd been whipped up by three conservative Muslim clerics in the pay of the Afghan government, who called in sermons at a large mosque to avenge the burning of a Koran in the USA by American pastor named Terry Jones.(3)
How did the clerics learn about the Koran burning incident in the USA?
Because Afghan President Hamid Karzai told them. To be sure that as many Afghans as possible knew about the Koran burning incident, on March 31 -- the day before the UN compound was stormed -- he made a public declaration about it and denounced it as an affront to Islam. Prior to that very few Afghans knew about the incident, which had occurred on March 20, 2011.(2)
There's a reason very few Afghans knew of the incident but I'm telling you just enough at this point to get across that the NATO command in Afghanistan was traumatized by the incidents that those who closely follow the war refer to simply as "Mazar-i-Sharif" even though the rioting spread to another city, Kandahar.
If my memory serves, in all 24 people across Afghanistan were killed in the rioting over the burned Koran. If the number doesn't sound very alarming, Mazar-i-Sharif was the first time that rioting on that scale against the United States was carried out in an urban setting in Afghanistan and in an area where the Taliban didn't have sway. According to one Afghan official the mob in Mazar-i-Sharif was as large as 20,000. If the number wasn't quite that large, it was definitely several thousand.
The rioting in Kandahar, where the riots were nowhere near as large as in Mazar-i-Sharif, wasn't so alarming because the Taliban there had clearly decided to make hay from the storming of the UN compound. For more than a year prior Taliban had been making inroads in the city, traditionally the stronghold of the 'Northern Alliance,' but the attack on the UN compound was not instigated by Taliban.
The Mazar-i-Sharif incident and its implications were so serious that General David Petraeus, at that time commander of ISAF, made a rather extraordinary public appeal to Americans, which the Wall Street Journal discussed in an April 4, 2011 report headlined, Petraeus says Quran burning endangers war effort.(4) He said in part:
I've touched on incidents surrounding the Mazar-i-Sharif attack to focus on the fact that the Koran burning incident at Bagram was highly improbable. This is particularly the case given how the incident was described to a Reuters correspondent by alleged eyewitnesses. This doesn't mean the eyewitnesses were lying or wholly or in part mistaken about what they saw; it means that it's almost outside the bounds of possibility that three U.S. soldiers at Bagram would burn copies of the Koran within sight of Muslims. Yet according to the eyewitnesses, that's what happened:
Even if a certifiably insane officer had signed off on the order, or even if the soldiers had somehow misunderstood the order, are we expected to assume that no less than three U.S. soldiers at Bagram -- Gossip Central for the U.S. command in Afghanistan -- were unaware of Mazar-i-Sharif and Gen. Petraeus's plea?
Even if the soldiers were at first unaware that the material loaded into the truck was copies of the Koran, from the laborer's account they were made aware by the Afghans who were party to the incident. So the soldiers would have known they were burning Korans within eyesight of Muslims -- again, a highly improbable act.
In fact, the act as described to the Reuters correspondent, was so improbable that from his report, the Afghans who spoke with him clearly didn't believe it was a blunder; they believed American soldiers were always trying to test the faith of Afghan Muslims. In consideration of Mazar-i-Sharif and the fact that at the time all of Afghanistan was bone-dry tinder just waiting for a match, the soldiers wouldn't have chosen that particular means to test the Afghan laborers' faith.
Bagram and every U.S. base in Afghanistan would have been on high alert at that time because the video of U.S. soldiers urinating on Afghan corpses had been widely circulated in the country. And Afghans who hadn't actually seen the video knew about it. The ensuing uproar hadn't even settled down by the time U.S. soldiers pulled up to an incineration facility at Bagram with copies of the Koran in tow.
The sprawling complex at Bagram has been the site of many terrorist incidents and rocket attacks since the U.S. invasion, few of which receive much if any press. So even if the soldiers weren't up on all the details of Mazar-i-Sharif and General Petraeus's public plea, and even if they'd dozed off during sensitivity training and skipped the part in the manual that read NEVER BURN A KORAN IN FRONT OF AFGHANS, they would have thought of the video after being confronted by hysterical Afghans and told each other, 'Maybe we better clarify our orders.'
But the video incident wasn't why Afghanistan was set to explode at that time. In the cities the rush to the exits, which had started when President Obama announced 2014 as the pullout date for U.S. combat troops and increased in pace after news of secret U.S. negotiations with Taliban in Qatar circulated in the country, had morphed into a stampede in the wake of SecDef Leon Panetta's February 1 announcement that the pullout date had been moved up by a year.
Any Afghan who had big money to protect was shipping it out of the country, officials in the Karzai were making frantic preparations to relocate to Dubai or other destinations, and a nation that depended for most its GDP on business generated by the NATO presence was facing the now very real prospect of imminent mass starvation and a civil war.
As for the American assurance that the USA would hang out in Afghanistan beyond 2014 -- Americans and their other NATO buddies had already stabbed Afghans in the back, and more than once. To assume they wouldn't do it again -- well, by the middle of this February Afghans had given up on assumptions other than one: Assume Americans are lying in their teeth about staying on in Afghanistan beyond next week.
On top of this was layered the consternation that once again Karzai had been circumvented in Western forces' secret negotiations with the Taliban; this time first in Germany then in Qatar.
No matter how many Afghans dislike Karzai and his regime, the lack of transparency about the negotiations told Afghans that they would have no decision about how far down the river NATO was going to sell them to Pakistan. And Karzai's attempt to persuade the public that he'd been a party to the negotiations had, by the eve of his departure for a trilateral summit in Pakistan, fizzled.
Worse, Karzai's attempt to save face by publicly confronting Pakistan's leaders at the summit about their support for the Taliban was treated with the diplomatic version of snickering in Washington and Islamabad. Karzai was considered so powerless that the officials who deigned to comment on his outburst could afford to be patronizing.
Layered on top of this was the 'urination video' uproar.
Layered on top of it all was the dressing down that Karzai received from a delegation of U.S. members of Congress because he was blocking finalization of the U.S.-Afghanistan strategic partnership over the issues of NATO night raids and U.S. control of prisons in Afghanistan. Doubtful the congress members would have perceived their little talk with Karzai as a dressing down, but that's how he would have seen it.
That brings us up to three days before the Koran burning incident at Bagram.
That was the situation in Afghanistan, a situation well known at Bagram, as it existed on the day of the Koran burning incident.
In light of the situation, I find it next to impossible that no less than three U.S. soldiers at Bagram would have ignored the pleas of Afghan laborers not to burn the Koran copies. Maybe a year earlier it could have happened, although even that would have been improbable, but not since Mazar-i-Sharif.
True, incidents considered impossible or near the edge of impossibility do happen. But as we know from The Hound of the Baskervilles, when faced with the highly improbable we need to attempt to rule out more probable explanations before we accept the seemingly impossible to be true.
In this case ruling out more probable explanations might prove to be extremely difficult even though two and possibly three official investigations of the Koran burning incident are underway. NATO launched an investigation; according to the Reuters report Karzai's government has launched one, and according to a televised news report I saw Friday, the U.S. military has "offered" to launch its own investigation.
One possible problem with these investigations is that key forensic evidence was given to the Karzai regime for its investigation before ISAF could examine it. See the Reuters report, below.
Another problem, if I read the Reuters report correctly, is that much of the evidence was removed from the scene before any investigator or even the three U.S. soldiers had a chance to examine it. The report doesn't specifically say but the wording suggests that the Afghan driver of the truck containing the bulk of the burn materials sped off when he saw the uproar, leaving the U.S. soldiers to radio for backup, including translators; the driver, it seems, being the only party to the incident who could translate for the laborers.
Then there is the problem with examining the accounts of the laborers. From the Reuters report, if looks as if the Karzai administration got to them first. And they are ostensibly so frightened of what ISAF or Afghan Army investigators might do to them that it would be unlikely anyone from the NATO investigation team could talk to them without a gaggle of "local officials," clerics, and a few people from the Interior Ministry present -- not the ideal circumstances for questioning a witness.
Here I interject that if my readers in Kabul are irritated that I seem to be casting unnecessary aspersions on the word of Afghans, I'm not letting anyone off the hook.
Right now, who controls Afghanistan is the highest-stakes poker game on the planet. That's even without the opium factor. There are several players at the table who want the USA out of the country right away, and who would pay any amount of money to see this happen.
So there's the possibility that one or more of the three American soldiers took a bribe to set off a firestorm, or that their commanding officer did -- or that someone or more than one person at ISAF who's connected with the disposal of sensitive materials did; if so, it wouldn't be the first bribery scandal to hit Bagram.(5) But the emphasis in the Reuters report is on the account given by the Afghan parties to the incident, so that is where I'm focusing questions in my little foray as armchair detective.
Another question may be nothing more than an inconsequential detail that could be dismissed with knowledge of garbage-disposal procedures at the Bagram complex. I referred to the burn site as a 'burn pit' when I first wrote about the incident; in this I was following how news reports referred to the site; even today I saw a report in a British paper that referred to the site as a burn pit. But from the Reuters report, the Korans were placed in an "incinerator oven."
I'd assume there are burn pits at Bagram, given the large amount of garbage the complex generates. But it would make sense if classified or other highly sensitive materials are disposed of in an incinerator, where it can be assured that scraps of paper don't escape the flames of a burn pit.
In that case, I'd assume that papers prepared for the incinerator had covers or in some other way the materials were hidden so that civilians, such as Afghan trash disposal experts, shall we call them, couldn't see the material they loaded into the ovens. I'd assume the same could apply to even to U.S. soldiers tasked with burning sensitive material. But from the Reuters account, the nature of the materials on the truck was plainly visible -- no covers on the Korans, nothing.
Also, I note that Jamil referred in the plural to prisons; if the translator didn't hear wrong, that could suggest Bagram is a site for disposal of sensitive material taken from all U.S.-controlled prisons in Afghanistan. I'd assume in that case that an order for disposal of such material is subject to closer scrutiny than one signing off on disposal of regular garbage.
Then I have questions about the incinerator oven itself. I am not the expert on incinerators but I think they work on a different principle than a burn pit, and that you wouldn't have a hand left to suffer burns if you stuck one in an incinerator after its process had started -- if you could even open the incinerator door at that point. Don't they come outfitted with safety locks that prevent the door from being opened once the incinerator has started? At least, the modern ones?
I'm just asking; I haven't had time to research incinerators and don't know the year and model of the one at Bagram. Maybe it was left over from the Soviet occupation and works on the bellows principle.
Again, such questions might easily be answered by a knowledge of procedures at the airfield, but I broach them to illustrate how fine the tooth comb must be when examining an incident that on the surface is improbable. Before turning over the platform to Reuters, one more quote from the report:
I've done this because I'm concerned that NATO (and/or the Karzai administration) might be so eager to put the issue to bed that they won't dwell on inconsistencies in the evidence or testimony that could drag out an inquiry, on the theory this could further inflame Afghan passions.
Yet at least 30 people have already died because of the Koran burning story, including four U.S. soldiers, and many more have been wounded, including seven Special Forces troops. And right now America's name is mud in Afghanistan, and many Afghans are calling for the trial and hanging of the American soldiers alleged to have burned copies of the Koran.
So what I've tried to do in this post is make a case for a transparent forensic investigation of an incident that as described is very unlikely. Both the Afghans and Americans are entitled to such an investigation.
Afghan laborer recalls rage as he tried to save charred Korans
By Hamid Shalizi
February 23, 2012
Reuters
BAGRAM - In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow laborers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
Jamil, 22, was with other workers at a disposal centre inside the base when a woman and two men, wearing U.S. military uniforms, arrived on Monday in a truck piled with religious material and books.
While the vehicle was stopped at the centre gate, another laborer named Wali glanced in the back and saw the Korans, which the Americans dumped into an oven.
The burning of the holy books lasted just five minutes, but that short action could complicate U.S.-led efforts to pacify Afghanistan before NATO combat troops leave at the end of 2014.
"I was ready to shed my blood and kill them or be killed," Jamil told Reuters, sitting in a heavy winter jacket, a checked scarf tied tight around his neck.
The laborers, after learning from Wali what was in the truck, rushed to the oven to stop what NATO has called a tragic blunder. Their account could not be independently verified, but was backed by local Afghan police and officials.
"We told the driver they were all religious materials and asked why they were burning them. The Americans said they were materials from prisons and they had orders to dispose of them," Jamil said.
The men plunged their hands into the oven to try to save the texts, some burning their fingers and hands as they pulled eight Koran copies from the fire, he said.
"The boys gathered and started shouting 'Allah u Akbar' (God is Greatest), clutching fragments of burning text to their chests," he said. "The truck fled the site with almost half the books still inside."
VIOLENT PROTESTS
Thousands of Afghans have staged violent protests for three days over an incident that highlights the deep cultural divide that still exists ten years after U.S. troops invaded to oust the Taliban.
Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence. Desecration is considered one of the worst forms of blasphemy.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has launched an investigation into the incident, for which U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO commanders have offered apologies, blaming a lack of religious and cultural understanding.
NATO's top commander in the country, U.S. Marine General John Allen, ordered his troops to complete additional training by March 3 on the identification, significance and proper handling of religious materials.
Jamil said U.S. soldiers were at first willing to allow them to take away the charred remains of the Korans, explaining how some parts made their way outside the base, but said arriving Afghan interpreters immediately realized the material could incite rage on the streets.
"The Americans first told us through the translators 'we don't want your Korans, take them away'. The Afghan "dog washers" intervened and told the Americans, 'If you let them take these books out, there will be a disaster'," he said.
Eventually freed with the material, the men ran out into the streets, waking people up and shouting about the transgression, which added fresh fuel to widespread anger that already exists over civilian deaths and intrusive NATO night raids.
Now sitting under a picture of one of Afghanistan's most famous heroes, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Masood, Jamil said he and the other laborers were afraid of retaliation by NATO or Afghan security forces.
"We have done a heroic job of saving and serving our religion. But we are also afraid of being taken and disappearing," he said. Others nearby offered support, including Afghan local officials and police, and a mullah who said they were heroes "whose faces should be famous."
"No one can touch you guys. All the people of Afghanistan stand by you. Don't be afraid," one government official said. Their material was handed to Afghan government officials for evidence, while their actions were praised by Karzai.
CULTURAL, RELIGIOUS SENSITIVITIES
German Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, the spokesman for coalition forces, said on Wednesday that after 10 years of NATO experience in Afghanistan, soldiers should have known to check with cultural advisers attached to their units on how to properly dispose of religious material.
All members of 50-nation coalition provided cultural and religious sensitivity training to troops before and after they deployed to the country, Jacobson said.
He declined to confirm comments to Reuters by a senior U.S. official that the material had been removed from a library at Parwan detention center at the base because of concerns that some was extremist in nature and being used to pass messages among prisoners.
Jamil said he believed the actions of the soldiers had been "intentional and stupid," while the Taliban urged Afghans to kill and beat Western soldiers.
Bagram Police Chief Abdul Hafiz Mutawakkil said the Americans in the country had little awareness of Afghanistan's complex tribal and religious currents.
"Otherwise no one would do such stupidity," he said, watching over elite Afghan police securing deserted shops and streets where thousands rioted on Tuesday, as NATO helicopters fired flares in a bid to halt the quickly-spreading violence.
"Those who are aware and committed to religious values never commit such actions, but those not aware of other religions ... do such things out of ignorance," Mutawakkil said.
Jawad, one of the laborers, said he no longer wanted to work at the base, despite relatively good wages of $650 a month in a country where more than a third live under the poverty line.
"The Americans always do such blasphemy to test how strong our Muslim faith is. It is best for us that the government provide us with another job," Jawad said.
(Writing by Rob Taylor, editing by Michael Georgy)
1) Waco Siege, Wikipedia
2) Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning, Killing 12; April 1, 2011, The New York Times
3) Dove World Quran burning controversy, Wikipedia
4) Petraeus says Quran burning endangers war effort; April 4, 2011, The Wall Street Journal
5) Bagram Airfield, Wikipedia
The answer, of course, is "Of course not." Even if police memories about details of the siege and disastrous storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco got a little hazy over the years, the bombing in Oklahoma City -- the worst terrorist incident in American history up to that time -- done in part to avenge Waco, refreshed them.
The fallout from Waco arguably changed the entire American culture and very definitely changed the culture of U.S. law enforcement. One consequence is that even the most stupid American law enforcement official knows one thing about Waco: Never do that again.
Agreed?
All right. Now I'll proceed to the February 22, 2012 Koran burning incident at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Prior to the incident, if there was one thing even the most stupid ISAF officer in Afghanistan knew, it was never burn a Koran within sight or earshot of a Muslim. This knowledge reached all the way down to the grunt level, and in particular the American grunt level.
Why?
Because before and after deployment to Afghanistan, everyone in the NATO forces is given 'sensitivity' training about the handling of Islamic religious materials -- training that was stepped up last year.
Why last year?
Because on April 1, 2011 a mob of thousands of Afghans overwhelmed guards at a lightly guarded United Nations compound in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and murdered seven UN workers -- four Nepali guards and three Europeans -- and according to UN officials beheaded two of the victims, although the Afghan government later denied that the beheadings had occurred. (2)
The mob was particularly enraged because it couldn't find any Americans to kill; at that time Mazar-i-Sharif was the 'safest' city in Afghanistan, so safe that U.S. troops no longer patrolled there in any significant number.
The Afghan rioters didn't stop with murder; they tried to destroy the compound, burning down part of it and trying to dismantle the rest, cement block by cement block, with their bare hands.
Now why did thousands of Afghans in a city that was probably less anti-American than other in Afghanistan suddenly set out to kill Americans?
Because they'd been whipped up by three conservative Muslim clerics in the pay of the Afghan government, who called in sermons at a large mosque to avenge the burning of a Koran in the USA by American pastor named Terry Jones.(3)
How did the clerics learn about the Koran burning incident in the USA?
Because Afghan President Hamid Karzai told them. To be sure that as many Afghans as possible knew about the Koran burning incident, on March 31 -- the day before the UN compound was stormed -- he made a public declaration about it and denounced it as an affront to Islam. Prior to that very few Afghans knew about the incident, which had occurred on March 20, 2011.(2)
There's a reason very few Afghans knew of the incident but I'm telling you just enough at this point to get across that the NATO command in Afghanistan was traumatized by the incidents that those who closely follow the war refer to simply as "Mazar-i-Sharif" even though the rioting spread to another city, Kandahar.
If my memory serves, in all 24 people across Afghanistan were killed in the rioting over the burned Koran. If the number doesn't sound very alarming, Mazar-i-Sharif was the first time that rioting on that scale against the United States was carried out in an urban setting in Afghanistan and in an area where the Taliban didn't have sway. According to one Afghan official the mob in Mazar-i-Sharif was as large as 20,000. If the number wasn't quite that large, it was definitely several thousand.
The rioting in Kandahar, where the riots were nowhere near as large as in Mazar-i-Sharif, wasn't so alarming because the Taliban there had clearly decided to make hay from the storming of the UN compound. For more than a year prior Taliban had been making inroads in the city, traditionally the stronghold of the 'Northern Alliance,' but the attack on the UN compound was not instigated by Taliban.
The Mazar-i-Sharif incident and its implications were so serious that General David Petraeus, at that time commander of ISAF, made a rather extraordinary public appeal to Americans, which the Wall Street Journal discussed in an April 4, 2011 report headlined, Petraeus says Quran burning endangers war effort.(4) He said in part:
"Every security force leader's worst nightmare is being confronted by essentially a mob, if you will, especially one that can be influenced by individuals that want to incite violence, who want to try to hijack passions ...Yes. That was the nightmare, and that is why NATO stepped up its sensitivity training last year.
I've touched on incidents surrounding the Mazar-i-Sharif attack to focus on the fact that the Koran burning incident at Bagram was highly improbable. This is particularly the case given how the incident was described to a Reuters correspondent by alleged eyewitnesses. This doesn't mean the eyewitnesses were lying or wholly or in part mistaken about what they saw; it means that it's almost outside the bounds of possibility that three U.S. soldiers at Bagram would burn copies of the Koran within sight of Muslims. Yet according to the eyewitnesses, that's what happened:
BAGRAM - In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow laborers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.At the end of this writing I'm posting the entire Reuters report, which contains several interesting details. For now, the fallout from Mazar-i-Sharif virtually rules out that the Koran burning incident at Bagram was a "blunder." Even at a small, remote base in Afghanistan the incident is improbable but at Bagram, which houses not only U.S. troops but also NATO/ISAF command posts as well as civilian U.S. government personnel and a prison, the incident verges on the impossible.(5)
Jamil, 22, was with other workers at a disposal centre inside the base when a woman and two men, wearing U.S. military uniforms, arrived on Monday in a truck piled with religious material and books.
While the vehicle was stopped at the centre gate, another laborer named Wali glanced in the back and saw the Korans, which the Americans dumped into an oven.
[...]
"I was ready to shed my blood and kill them or be killed," Jamil told Reuters, sitting in a heavy winter jacket, a checked scarf tied tight around his neck.
The laborers, after learning from Wali what was in the truck, rushed to the oven to stop what NATO has called a tragic blunder. Their account could not be independently verified, but was backed by local Afghan police and officials.
"We told the driver they were all religious materials and asked why they were burning them. The Americans said they were materials from prisons and they had orders to dispose of them," Jamil said.
The men plunged their hands into the oven to try to save the texts, some burning their fingers and hands as they pulled eight Koran copies from the fire, he said.
"The boys gathered and started shouting 'Allah u Akbar' (God is Greatest), clutching fragments of burning text to their chests," he said. "The truck fled the site with almost half the books still inside."
[...]
Even if a certifiably insane officer had signed off on the order, or even if the soldiers had somehow misunderstood the order, are we expected to assume that no less than three U.S. soldiers at Bagram -- Gossip Central for the U.S. command in Afghanistan -- were unaware of Mazar-i-Sharif and Gen. Petraeus's plea?
Even if the soldiers were at first unaware that the material loaded into the truck was copies of the Koran, from the laborer's account they were made aware by the Afghans who were party to the incident. So the soldiers would have known they were burning Korans within eyesight of Muslims -- again, a highly improbable act.
In fact, the act as described to the Reuters correspondent, was so improbable that from his report, the Afghans who spoke with him clearly didn't believe it was a blunder; they believed American soldiers were always trying to test the faith of Afghan Muslims. In consideration of Mazar-i-Sharif and the fact that at the time all of Afghanistan was bone-dry tinder just waiting for a match, the soldiers wouldn't have chosen that particular means to test the Afghan laborers' faith.
Bagram and every U.S. base in Afghanistan would have been on high alert at that time because the video of U.S. soldiers urinating on Afghan corpses had been widely circulated in the country. And Afghans who hadn't actually seen the video knew about it. The ensuing uproar hadn't even settled down by the time U.S. soldiers pulled up to an incineration facility at Bagram with copies of the Koran in tow.
The sprawling complex at Bagram has been the site of many terrorist incidents and rocket attacks since the U.S. invasion, few of which receive much if any press. So even if the soldiers weren't up on all the details of Mazar-i-Sharif and General Petraeus's public plea, and even if they'd dozed off during sensitivity training and skipped the part in the manual that read NEVER BURN A KORAN IN FRONT OF AFGHANS, they would have thought of the video after being confronted by hysterical Afghans and told each other, 'Maybe we better clarify our orders.'
But the video incident wasn't why Afghanistan was set to explode at that time. In the cities the rush to the exits, which had started when President Obama announced 2014 as the pullout date for U.S. combat troops and increased in pace after news of secret U.S. negotiations with Taliban in Qatar circulated in the country, had morphed into a stampede in the wake of SecDef Leon Panetta's February 1 announcement that the pullout date had been moved up by a year.
Any Afghan who had big money to protect was shipping it out of the country, officials in the Karzai were making frantic preparations to relocate to Dubai or other destinations, and a nation that depended for most its GDP on business generated by the NATO presence was facing the now very real prospect of imminent mass starvation and a civil war.
As for the American assurance that the USA would hang out in Afghanistan beyond 2014 -- Americans and their other NATO buddies had already stabbed Afghans in the back, and more than once. To assume they wouldn't do it again -- well, by the middle of this February Afghans had given up on assumptions other than one: Assume Americans are lying in their teeth about staying on in Afghanistan beyond next week.
On top of this was layered the consternation that once again Karzai had been circumvented in Western forces' secret negotiations with the Taliban; this time first in Germany then in Qatar.
No matter how many Afghans dislike Karzai and his regime, the lack of transparency about the negotiations told Afghans that they would have no decision about how far down the river NATO was going to sell them to Pakistan. And Karzai's attempt to persuade the public that he'd been a party to the negotiations had, by the eve of his departure for a trilateral summit in Pakistan, fizzled.
Worse, Karzai's attempt to save face by publicly confronting Pakistan's leaders at the summit about their support for the Taliban was treated with the diplomatic version of snickering in Washington and Islamabad. Karzai was considered so powerless that the officials who deigned to comment on his outburst could afford to be patronizing.
Layered on top of this was the 'urination video' uproar.
Layered on top of it all was the dressing down that Karzai received from a delegation of U.S. members of Congress because he was blocking finalization of the U.S.-Afghanistan strategic partnership over the issues of NATO night raids and U.S. control of prisons in Afghanistan. Doubtful the congress members would have perceived their little talk with Karzai as a dressing down, but that's how he would have seen it.
That brings us up to three days before the Koran burning incident at Bagram.
That was the situation in Afghanistan, a situation well known at Bagram, as it existed on the day of the Koran burning incident.
In light of the situation, I find it next to impossible that no less than three U.S. soldiers at Bagram would have ignored the pleas of Afghan laborers not to burn the Koran copies. Maybe a year earlier it could have happened, although even that would have been improbable, but not since Mazar-i-Sharif.
True, incidents considered impossible or near the edge of impossibility do happen. But as we know from The Hound of the Baskervilles, when faced with the highly improbable we need to attempt to rule out more probable explanations before we accept the seemingly impossible to be true.
In this case ruling out more probable explanations might prove to be extremely difficult even though two and possibly three official investigations of the Koran burning incident are underway. NATO launched an investigation; according to the Reuters report Karzai's government has launched one, and according to a televised news report I saw Friday, the U.S. military has "offered" to launch its own investigation.
One possible problem with these investigations is that key forensic evidence was given to the Karzai regime for its investigation before ISAF could examine it. See the Reuters report, below.
Another problem, if I read the Reuters report correctly, is that much of the evidence was removed from the scene before any investigator or even the three U.S. soldiers had a chance to examine it. The report doesn't specifically say but the wording suggests that the Afghan driver of the truck containing the bulk of the burn materials sped off when he saw the uproar, leaving the U.S. soldiers to radio for backup, including translators; the driver, it seems, being the only party to the incident who could translate for the laborers.
Then there is the problem with examining the accounts of the laborers. From the Reuters report, if looks as if the Karzai administration got to them first. And they are ostensibly so frightened of what ISAF or Afghan Army investigators might do to them that it would be unlikely anyone from the NATO investigation team could talk to them without a gaggle of "local officials," clerics, and a few people from the Interior Ministry present -- not the ideal circumstances for questioning a witness.
Here I interject that if my readers in Kabul are irritated that I seem to be casting unnecessary aspersions on the word of Afghans, I'm not letting anyone off the hook.
Right now, who controls Afghanistan is the highest-stakes poker game on the planet. That's even without the opium factor. There are several players at the table who want the USA out of the country right away, and who would pay any amount of money to see this happen.
So there's the possibility that one or more of the three American soldiers took a bribe to set off a firestorm, or that their commanding officer did -- or that someone or more than one person at ISAF who's connected with the disposal of sensitive materials did; if so, it wouldn't be the first bribery scandal to hit Bagram.(5) But the emphasis in the Reuters report is on the account given by the Afghan parties to the incident, so that is where I'm focusing questions in my little foray as armchair detective.
Another question may be nothing more than an inconsequential detail that could be dismissed with knowledge of garbage-disposal procedures at the Bagram complex. I referred to the burn site as a 'burn pit' when I first wrote about the incident; in this I was following how news reports referred to the site; even today I saw a report in a British paper that referred to the site as a burn pit. But from the Reuters report, the Korans were placed in an "incinerator oven."
I'd assume there are burn pits at Bagram, given the large amount of garbage the complex generates. But it would make sense if classified or other highly sensitive materials are disposed of in an incinerator, where it can be assured that scraps of paper don't escape the flames of a burn pit.
In that case, I'd assume that papers prepared for the incinerator had covers or in some other way the materials were hidden so that civilians, such as Afghan trash disposal experts, shall we call them, couldn't see the material they loaded into the ovens. I'd assume the same could apply to even to U.S. soldiers tasked with burning sensitive material. But from the Reuters account, the nature of the materials on the truck was plainly visible -- no covers on the Korans, nothing.
Also, I note that Jamil referred in the plural to prisons; if the translator didn't hear wrong, that could suggest Bagram is a site for disposal of sensitive material taken from all U.S.-controlled prisons in Afghanistan. I'd assume in that case that an order for disposal of such material is subject to closer scrutiny than one signing off on disposal of regular garbage.
Then I have questions about the incinerator oven itself. I am not the expert on incinerators but I think they work on a different principle than a burn pit, and that you wouldn't have a hand left to suffer burns if you stuck one in an incinerator after its process had started -- if you could even open the incinerator door at that point. Don't they come outfitted with safety locks that prevent the door from being opened once the incinerator has started? At least, the modern ones?
I'm just asking; I haven't had time to research incinerators and don't know the year and model of the one at Bagram. Maybe it was left over from the Soviet occupation and works on the bellows principle.
Again, such questions might easily be answered by a knowledge of procedures at the airfield, but I broach them to illustrate how fine the tooth comb must be when examining an incident that on the surface is improbable. Before turning over the platform to Reuters, one more quote from the report:
German Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, the spokesman for coalition forces, said on Wednesday that after 10 years of NATO experience in Afghanistan, soldiers should have known to check with cultural advisers attached to their units on how to properly dispose of religious material.I'm betting they did know; i.e., given the reasons I've laid out in this post I think Jacobson is right -- they should have known and followed proper procedure. Of course this doesn't make it definite that they did know and follow; "tragic blunders" can happen. But I've brought up for review information that I think should raise a reasonable doubt about the Koran burning story, as it's been described to the press by officialdom and the Afghan laborers who spoke to Reuters.
I've done this because I'm concerned that NATO (and/or the Karzai administration) might be so eager to put the issue to bed that they won't dwell on inconsistencies in the evidence or testimony that could drag out an inquiry, on the theory this could further inflame Afghan passions.
Yet at least 30 people have already died because of the Koran burning story, including four U.S. soldiers, and many more have been wounded, including seven Special Forces troops. And right now America's name is mud in Afghanistan, and many Afghans are calling for the trial and hanging of the American soldiers alleged to have burned copies of the Koran.
So what I've tried to do in this post is make a case for a transparent forensic investigation of an incident that as described is very unlikely. Both the Afghans and Americans are entitled to such an investigation.
Afghan laborer recalls rage as he tried to save charred Korans
By Hamid Shalizi
February 23, 2012
Reuters
BAGRAM - In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow laborers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
Jamil, 22, was with other workers at a disposal centre inside the base when a woman and two men, wearing U.S. military uniforms, arrived on Monday in a truck piled with religious material and books.
While the vehicle was stopped at the centre gate, another laborer named Wali glanced in the back and saw the Korans, which the Americans dumped into an oven.
The burning of the holy books lasted just five minutes, but that short action could complicate U.S.-led efforts to pacify Afghanistan before NATO combat troops leave at the end of 2014.
"I was ready to shed my blood and kill them or be killed," Jamil told Reuters, sitting in a heavy winter jacket, a checked scarf tied tight around his neck.
The laborers, after learning from Wali what was in the truck, rushed to the oven to stop what NATO has called a tragic blunder. Their account could not be independently verified, but was backed by local Afghan police and officials.
"We told the driver they were all religious materials and asked why they were burning them. The Americans said they were materials from prisons and they had orders to dispose of them," Jamil said.
The men plunged their hands into the oven to try to save the texts, some burning their fingers and hands as they pulled eight Koran copies from the fire, he said.
"The boys gathered and started shouting 'Allah u Akbar' (God is Greatest), clutching fragments of burning text to their chests," he said. "The truck fled the site with almost half the books still inside."
VIOLENT PROTESTS
Thousands of Afghans have staged violent protests for three days over an incident that highlights the deep cultural divide that still exists ten years after U.S. troops invaded to oust the Taliban.
Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence. Desecration is considered one of the worst forms of blasphemy.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has launched an investigation into the incident, for which U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO commanders have offered apologies, blaming a lack of religious and cultural understanding.
NATO's top commander in the country, U.S. Marine General John Allen, ordered his troops to complete additional training by March 3 on the identification, significance and proper handling of religious materials.
Jamil said U.S. soldiers were at first willing to allow them to take away the charred remains of the Korans, explaining how some parts made their way outside the base, but said arriving Afghan interpreters immediately realized the material could incite rage on the streets.
"The Americans first told us through the translators 'we don't want your Korans, take them away'. The Afghan "dog washers" intervened and told the Americans, 'If you let them take these books out, there will be a disaster'," he said.
Eventually freed with the material, the men ran out into the streets, waking people up and shouting about the transgression, which added fresh fuel to widespread anger that already exists over civilian deaths and intrusive NATO night raids.
Now sitting under a picture of one of Afghanistan's most famous heroes, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Masood, Jamil said he and the other laborers were afraid of retaliation by NATO or Afghan security forces.
"We have done a heroic job of saving and serving our religion. But we are also afraid of being taken and disappearing," he said. Others nearby offered support, including Afghan local officials and police, and a mullah who said they were heroes "whose faces should be famous."
"No one can touch you guys. All the people of Afghanistan stand by you. Don't be afraid," one government official said. Their material was handed to Afghan government officials for evidence, while their actions were praised by Karzai.
CULTURAL, RELIGIOUS SENSITIVITIES
German Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, the spokesman for coalition forces, said on Wednesday that after 10 years of NATO experience in Afghanistan, soldiers should have known to check with cultural advisers attached to their units on how to properly dispose of religious material.
All members of 50-nation coalition provided cultural and religious sensitivity training to troops before and after they deployed to the country, Jacobson said.
He declined to confirm comments to Reuters by a senior U.S. official that the material had been removed from a library at Parwan detention center at the base because of concerns that some was extremist in nature and being used to pass messages among prisoners.
Jamil said he believed the actions of the soldiers had been "intentional and stupid," while the Taliban urged Afghans to kill and beat Western soldiers.
Bagram Police Chief Abdul Hafiz Mutawakkil said the Americans in the country had little awareness of Afghanistan's complex tribal and religious currents.
"Otherwise no one would do such stupidity," he said, watching over elite Afghan police securing deserted shops and streets where thousands rioted on Tuesday, as NATO helicopters fired flares in a bid to halt the quickly-spreading violence.
"Those who are aware and committed to religious values never commit such actions, but those not aware of other religions ... do such things out of ignorance," Mutawakkil said.
Jawad, one of the laborers, said he no longer wanted to work at the base, despite relatively good wages of $650 a month in a country where more than a third live under the poverty line.
"The Americans always do such blasphemy to test how strong our Muslim faith is. It is best for us that the government provide us with another job," Jawad said.
(Writing by Rob Taylor, editing by Michael Georgy)
1) Waco Siege, Wikipedia
2) Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning, Killing 12; April 1, 2011, The New York Times
3) Dove World Quran burning controversy, Wikipedia
4) Petraeus says Quran burning endangers war effort; April 4, 2011, The Wall Street Journal
5) Bagram Airfield, Wikipedia
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