Warfare continues to become more professional and dehumanized every day.

The purpose of Extraordinary Edition is being revisited for winter, headed into 2013. U.S. foreign policy, Central Asia and the Middle East remain key focal points. Economics and culture on your front doorstep are coming into focus here.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

U.N. Official To Call For End Of CIA Drone Strikes

NPR report by Corey Flintoff

An excerpt appears below.

A soon-to-be-released United Nations report will call into question the use of unmanned aircraft for targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The report, to be released next week by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, will call on the United States to stop allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out drone attacks on suspected militants.

The special rapporteur, New York University law professor Philip Alston, told The New York Times that the CIA does not have the public accountability that's required of the U.S. military. Alston says the use of the drones and their firepower should be restricted to the armed forces.


"They have no legal authority to be killing anyone. They have committed the crime of murder under Pakistan's law."


- David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School, on the CIA's risk of criminal prosecution in the use of drones to target suspected militants.
Alston told The Associated Press that he sees "no legal prohibition on CIA agents" piloting the remotely controlled aircraft, but that the practice is undesirable because the C.I.A. doesn't comply with "any of the requirements as to transparency and accountability which are central to international humanitarian law."

Thursday, May 27, 2010

US seeks Pakistan crackdown on Taliban

AP source: US seeks Pakistan crackdown on Taliban

By KIMBERLY DOZIER (AP) May 26, 2010

WASHINGTON — Two top Obama administration officials have told Pakistan that it has only weeks to show real progress in a crackdown against the Pakistani Taliban, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

The U.S. has put Pakistan "on a clock" to launch a new intelligence and counterterrorist offensive against the group, which the White House alleges was behind the Times Square bombing attempt, according to the official.

White House national security adviser James Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta delivered that message to Islamabad last week, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

As first reported by the Los Angeles Times, the high-ranking U.S. delegation presented the Pakistanis with evidence they believe proves that Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad was trained and funded by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP, as the Pakistani Taliban are known. Shahzad is accused of attempting to ignite what turned out to be a poorly constructed car bomb in Times Square.

The evidence also showed that two TTP members escorted Shahzad to a training base in the lawless tribal area of Waziristan, where he received some instruction in how to build explosives, the U.S. official said.

Pakistani authorities have already detained two suspects thought to be those TTP escorts, the official said. The U.S. now expects to see Pakistan carry out further independent counterterrorist operations and quietly increase other unspecified cooperation with the Americans, the official said.

The visiting delegation reminded Pakistani leaders that President Barack Obama had sent them a letter in November, asking for a tougher crackdown against al-Qaida and its affiliates like the TTP, the official said.

So far, many U.S. officials have rated Pakistan's progress on that front as mixed because Pakistan has maintained a detente with some of the al-Qaida affiliates that operate in its frontier provinces, like the Haqqani network.

The official said those in the delegation to Pakistan were hopeful the Shahzad case may spell the difference because the U.S. is asking Pakistan to crack down on a group that is a sworn enemy of Islamabad.

The TTP have launched a series of bloody bombings against Pakistani government targets and civilians over the past year.

Flashback to May 12: No Taliban link found

Looking at comments in the press today regarding Faisal Shahzad, Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation and Miranda rights for terrorism suspects in the balance, you'd never know the link between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban (nevermind the link between Tehrik-e-Taliban and Al Qaeda) was unsubstantiated. In fact, in the pages of the New York Times this substantiation is being forgone. From the Philadelphia Inquirer May 12. Retaliatory drone strikes in the last two paragraphs ...

Pakistan: No Taliban link found in N.Y. plot

By Saeed Shah

McClatchy Newspapers
KARACHI, Pakistan - Pakistani investigators have been unable to find evidence linking Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bombing suspect, with the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, Pakistani security officials said Tuesday. Investigators also have been unable to substantiate Shahzad's reported confession that he received bomb-making training in the country's wild Waziristan region.

The lack of evidence found by investigators stands in contrast to forceful statements by top Obama administration officials linking Shahzad to extremist Pakistani groups.

The prime Pakistani suspect, Muhammad Rehan, was detained last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi after Shahzad was arrested in New York. A member of the banned group Jaish-e-Mohammad, Rehan was the only concrete link found so far between Shahzad, 30, and the extremist underworld in Pakistan.

However, the interrogation of Rehan did not provide any solid link to the Pakistani Taliban or another extremist group, officials said. "We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said a security official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue with journalists. "No Taliban link has come to the fore."

'Intimately involved'
An FBI team that flew into Pakistan after Shahzad was arrested was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. The investigation continues, and new leads yet could emerge.

In Washington, a U.S. official said there was "information that links Shahzad to the TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan], and not all of it is coming from him." The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, cautioned that it still wasn't clear how close a relationship Shahzad had to the Pakistani Taliban.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on a Sunday talk show that the Pakistani Taliban was "intimately involved" in the attempted blast, and he reiterated his stand Tuesday. Also Tuesday, five senators called for adding Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan to the U.S. terror list.

Still, the government in Islamabad is perplexed and angry at Washington's statements and threats about Shahzad links with the Pakistani Taliban. Officials say they believe the Obama administration is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for a new military offensive in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the North Waziristan region, where Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, as well as al-Qaeda, are holed up.

Taliban denial

"There are no roots to the case, so how can we trace something back?" the security official asked.

Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen of Pakistani origin, reportedly has told U.S. interrogators that he trained in Waziristan before the May 1 attack in Times Square, according to the U.S. charges against him. The Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, seemed to claim responsibility for the U.S. bombing attempt.

The video said nothing specifically about New York or Shahzad. The Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The inept construction of the failed bomb has also raised doubts over whether the Taliban could have trained Shahzad.

The U.S. focus on Pakistan's tribal area continued Tuesday with another missile strike from an American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in North Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 suspected extremists.

The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks in the region targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Pentagon Seeks Private Contractor to Move Weapons Through Pakistan/Afghanistan

From Jeremy Scahill May 25 Rebel Reports & The Nation magazine online

It is not, of course, a secret supplies must be delivered to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. What's interesting here is areas where the provisions of the contract being offered--work that apparently can't effectively be done by the U.S. military itself--differs from verbiage in the White House strategy for Afghanistan which contains a draw-down and eventual withdrawal in 2011. The notion that Pakistan and Afghanistan are too dangerous for the U.S. military to negotiate supplies into in coming months is a grim outlook. It's just a proposal of a contract for services, but plans indicate intent to some degree, do they not?

Excerpt taken from Scahill's Rebel Reports appears below ...

"[The United States military is in the process of taking bids from private war contractors to secure and ship massive amounts of US military equipment through sensitive areas of Pakistan into Afghanistan where it will then be distributed to various US Forward Operating Bases and other facilities. According to the contract solicitation, “There will be an average of 5000” import shipments “transiting the Afghanistan and Pakistan ground lines of communication (GLOC) per month,” along with 500 export shipments.” The solicitation states that, “This number may increase or decrease due to US military transportation requirements,” adding, “The contractor must maintain a constant capability to surge to any location within Afghanistan or Pakistan” within a 30-day period. Among the duties the contractor will perform is “intelligence, to include threat assessments throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

And while it seems the US is trying to put a Pakistani or Afghan face on the work, the terms of the contract mandate that US personnel will be involved with inherently risky and potentially lethal operations. Among the firms listed by the Department of Defense as “interested vendors” are an Afghan firm tied to a veteran CIA officer and run by the son of Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, and a Pakistani firm with links to Blackwater.]"

Monday, May 24, 2010

Drones and Democracy

Story on Truthout.org Sunday, May 23, 2010 by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier

A particularly brutal excerpt ...

"The social worker recalled arriving at a home that was hit, in Miranshah, at about 9:00 PM, close to one year ago. The house was beside a matchbox factory, near the degree college. The drone strike had killed three people. Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands. One body was still on fire when he reached there. Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight. They couldn't pick up the charred parts in one piece. Finding scraps of plastic, they transported the body parts away from the site. Three to four others joined in to help cover the bodies in plastic and carry them to the morgue.

But these volunteers and nearby onlookers were attacked by another drone strike, 15 minutes after the initial one. Six more people died. One of them was the brother of the man killed in the initial strike.

The social worker said that people are now afraid to help when a drone strike occurs because they fear a similar fate from a second attack. People will wait several hours after an attack just to be sure. Meanwhile, some lives will be lost that possibly could have been saved."

Sunday, May 23, 2010

War is making you poor

From Common Dreams May 21
War Is Making You Poor
by Abby Zimet

... Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida introduces the "War Is Making You Poor Act" to highlight the obscene amounts being spent on Iraq and Afghanistan ...


Plus: Hidden Costs of War video

UK plans to leave Afghanistan

"We have obligations to deal with poverty and human rights but that is no different in Afghanistan from dozens of other countries."

—British Defense Secretary Liam Fox

From Australian Broadcast (ABC) May 23

"Britain considers policy shift on Afghanistan"

British defence secretary Liam Fox has indicated that the country's new government is reconsidering its approach to the war in Afghanistan.

He is currently on a visit to Kabul, but before he left London, Mr Fox revealed the potential change of policy.

In remarks in a newspaper interview, Mr Fox said Britain should focus less on state-building in Afghanistan and more on speeding up the withdrawal of its troops.

Mr Fox described Afghanistan as a broken 13th century country.

"National security is the focus now. We are not a global policeman," he told The Times.

"We have obligations to deal with poverty and human rights but that is no different in Afghanistan from dozens of other countries.

"We shouldn't deploy British troops unless there are overwhelming humanitarian emergency considerations or a national security imperative."

The comments will dismay those who see the massive expansion of the Afghan education system, funded by donors such as the UK, and the opening of school doors to girls as major successes of the post-Taliban era.

The former head of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, warned against any drastic changes in policy.

"The priority, as Liam Fox says, is to deal with the security situation in Afghanistan and to ensure that the streets of the UK and the rest of the world are safe, safer than they are at present," he said.

"But in order to do that we must rebuild and repair the society in Afghanistan and that does include things like education policy, the economy, governance."

Britain's new foreign secretary, William Hague, also sought to assure Kabul of his government's commitment.

Ahead of a visit by three senior ministers, Mr Hague said that the conflict in Afghanistan is his most urgent priority, and Britain cannot set any kind of date for a withdrawal.

"There isn't going to be an arbitrary or artificial timetable. I don't think it's going to work like that," he said.

"As I say, we have to give the situation, the strategy that has been set out the time and the support to succeed.

"That does need, and require, Britain's continued military involvement. There is no doubt about that."

- ABC/BBC

Also,
Press TV Story taken from Aletho News ...

In a U-turn in Britain’s policy regarding the Afghan war, senior government officials say they want UK soldiers to return home as soon as possible.

In an interview with The Times newspaper before arriving in Kabul on Saturday, Defense Secretary Liam Fox described the Afghan war as Britain’s most urgent priority. He said no more troops will be deployed in Afghanistan, adding that he wants to speed up the withdrawal of UK soldiers and training of Afghan forces.

Fox emphasized that the new government in London will put national security issues on top of its priority list.

“National security is the focus now. We are not a global policeman. We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened,” Fox said.

Britain is the second-largest contributor of troops to Afghanistan. It has deployed some 10,000 soldiers in the war-torn country. The number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 stands at 286.

Friday, May 21, 2010

US warns of terror link to Pakistan catering firm

AP story by KATHY GANNON and ASIF SHAHZAD May 21

ISLAMABAD – The U.S. Embassy warned Friday that terrorist groups may have "established links" to an upscale catering company in Pakistan that security officials said was owned by a suspect arrested over the failed car bombing in Times Square.

The suspect who owned Hanif Rajput Catering Service was among a group of six that have been detained in Pakistan since the May 1 botched attack in New York, said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer who gave details on the identities of those arrested on condition his own name not be used.

The group appeared to be wealthy and educated members of Pakistan's small urban elite.

They included the owner of a large computer shop in Islamabad who allegedly called the prime suspect detained in the United States, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, urging him to flee the country; a man who worked for a cell phone company who had an MBA from the United States; and a retired army major and his brother, who was a computer engineer.

An army spokesman earlier this week denied a media report that the former major had been arrested in the case.

In an unusual statement on its website that was e-mailed to Americans in Pakistan, the embassy said U.S. government personnel had been instructed to avoid using Rajput, a well-known firm that has been used by the American embassy and other foreign missions in the capital.

The message said Rajput was owned by Rana Ashraf Khan and his son Salman Ashraf Khan.

Earlier this week, a senior security official had named a suspect arrested in Pakistan over links to Shahzad as Salman Ashraf, whom the intelligence officer confirmed was the owner of Rajput.

The security official said another arrested suspect was a cousin of Salman Ashraf. He said both men were suspected of having financial links with Shahzad. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.

A man who answered the phone at Rajput declined to comment on the allegations made by the U.S. Embassy.

A biography on the Rajput website said Salman Ashraf Khan studied in Houston, Texas, before returning home to help run the family business. It said Rana Ashraf Khan worked for Pakistan International Airlines for 20 years and then started the catering firm.

Rajput cooks for large parties, providing food, cutlery and grand tents at embassy compounds and the homes of the well-to-do in Islamabad and other cities.

Shahzad is accused of leaving an SUV rigged with a homemade car bomb in Times Square on May 1. The bomb failed to explode. He was arrested May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport while heading to Dubai.

U.S. authorities suspect he had contact with members of the Pakistani Taliban in their hideouts in the northwest of the Pakistan close to the Afghan border. Pakistan says it is cooperating with the probe, but has released little information about what it is finding.

Shahzad was born in Pakistan but moved to the United States when he was 18. He is the son of former air force vice marshal and led a privileged life. He has family roots in the major northwestern city of Peshawar, but he grew up in at least one other city, Karachi, relatives and officials have said.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Backyard Predator Drones

"Each Predator and Reaper costs American taxpayers $4 million to $12 million and each Hellfire missile some $70,000, and the drones are causing anti-American sentiment to spread, especially in the Muslim world."

by Chen Weihua
China Daily 05/18/2010
chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn

I never realized I was so close to the war zone in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border until I went to Syracuse in upstate New York a week ago.

The Hancock Field there has been turned into a base for drones that fly over Pakistan and Afghanistan for bombing missions. This means that someone sitting in the control room is playing a computer game that is killing real people thousands of miles away.

The strikes may have achieved the goals of assassinating some Taliban leaders and militants; yet, high collateral damage has been reported by both Pakistani and US sources. Pakistani authorities reported that in 2009 alone, some 700 civilians died during the drone attacks.

The high casualties - of innocent people - should be a grave concern for "anti-war" President Barack Obama, who authorized more drone strikes in his first year as president than his predecessor George W. Bush did in his last four years in office.

Civilian deaths are clearly a problem. A CNN report last week quoted Tadd Scholtis, spokesman for General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, as saying US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan could someday win medals for restraint that prevents civilian casualties in combat.

This proposal under consideration simply means that too many innocents are being killed, and that the army has not exercised enough restraint.

Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of the nature of the drone attacks launched from an air force base near their home, despite numerous protests across the country against the drones.

Just a few days before my trip to Syracuse, peace activists from upstate New York gathered outside the Hancock Air Force base to oppose the unmanned aircraft attacks.

On May 18-19, protesters from across California and some from Nevada will hold a rally in San Diego outside the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which builds the Predator and Reaper drones.

Cindy Sheehan, who held a prolonged anti-war protest in 2005 outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, led a rally near the CIA headquarters in Virginia early this year, calling the CIA-operated drone bombing "immoral" and "terrorism with a big budget."

Demonstrations were also witnessed last year outside the Creech Air Force Base, only 35 miles from Las Vegas, resulting in the arrests of a number of peace activists.

In contrast to the anti-war activists, mainstream US media and scholars have been relatively quiet on the issue. Most have been talking endlessly about Times Square bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad's ties to the Taliban and whether his legal rights and citizenship should be deprived.

They have largely ignored the rising anger among Pakistanis about the drone Hellfire missile attacks. Shahzad also reportedly claimed that his intention was to retaliate for the drones, which he saw in Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan.

A Gallup poll last August showed that only 9 percent of Pakistanis support the drone attacks, while 67 percent oppose them. The majority saw the US as a bigger threat than the Taliban.

A recent Newsweek report quotes local villagers as saying that every family there has one male member in the Taliban force.

In the war on terror, many Americans seem to be worried that criticizing the US government and military would make them look unpatriotic or un-American.

Each Predator and Reaper costs American taxpayers $4 million to $12 million and each Hellfire missile some $70,000, and the drones are causing anti-American sentiment to spread, especially in the Muslim world.

If that money is used to build schools there to reflect the US' soft power, it will win more hearts and minds and make Americans safer.

Stopping the drones launched from American citizens' backyards is no less urgent than finding the true connection of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Aletho News: “What kind of democracy is America, where people do not ask these questions?”

From Aletho News Tuesday ...

“What kind of democracy is America, where people do not ask these questions?”
By Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier | Pulse Media | May 18, 2010

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) and Josh Brollier (Joshua@vcnv.org) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence www.vcnv.org

Islamabad–On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.

One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government. Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan. He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions. “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”

Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area. Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Bomb attack kills 13 people in NW Pakistan

May 18, 11:35 AM EDT
By ISHTIAQ MAHSUD
Associated Press Writer

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (AP) -- A remote-controlled bomb targeting a police patrol killed 13 people Tuesday in an area of northwestern Pakistan where many citizens fled last year to escape an army offensive against the Taliban, police said.

The attack, which killed three police officers and 10 civilians, occurred as the patrol vehicle traveled through the town of Dera Ismail Khan, said Gul Afzal Khan, the police chief in the area. He initially blamed the explosion on a suicide bomber but later said it was a remote-controlled bomb.

The victims included a senior police officer in the area as well as his guard and driver, Khan said. The civilians killed included a couple and their two children who were passing by on a motorcycle.

Another 15 people were injured by the homemade bomb that police explosives expert Inayatullah Khan said contained nearly 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of explosives.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Dera Ismail Khan in mid-October when the army launched a big ground offensive against the Pakistani Taliban's main stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border.

The displacement added to an already serious problem in Pakistan caused by similar operations launched earlier in the year, especially one in the Swat Valley.

In total, an estimated 3 million Pakistanis fled to other areas of the country to avoid conflict last year, the highest number of internally displaced people anywhere in the world, according to a U.N.-backed report released Monday.

Around two-thirds were able to return to their homes by the end of the year, but some 1.2 million remain displaced, said the report published by the Norwegian Refugee Council, a non-governmental organization.

That number has grown this year as thousands of people have fled smaller operations the military has launched in the tribal areas against militants who fled the offensive in South Waziristan.

One such operation launched in Orakzai in mid-March has killed hundreds of suspected insurgents and caused more than 200,000 people to flee.

Pakistan has also been wracked by political turmoil this year following the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a controversial amnesty protecting scores of government officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, from corruption charges dating back several years.

The fallout from the decision took a new turn late Monday when Zardari pardoned Interior Minister Rehman Malik only hours after a high court upheld a previous conviction and prison sentence issued against him in absentia in 2004.

Zardari decided to issue the pardon because he believes the original case was part of a politically motivated "witch hunt" by then-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said Tuesday.

It is unclear how the Supreme Court, which has a tense relationship with Zardari and has pushed for the old corruption cases to be reopened, will respond to the president's action.

CIA director, national security adviser to meet with officials in Pakistan

Washington Post story by Karen DeYoung
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Excerpt - Officials say the administration has been pleased so far with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation, which has focused on any role insurgent groups there might have played in helping to train and otherwise assist bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad.

But officials said that Jones and Panetta intend to reiterate to the Pakistanis the importance that the administration places on more aggressive military action against groups allied with al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Shahzad, a Pakistani American, has said he traveled to the region to train with elements of the Pakistani Taliban, officials say.

The bombing attempt has already given rise to questions from Congress about Pakistan's zeal in confronting radical groups; a successful attack in the United States would severely undermine a bilateral relationship that is a crucial part of the administration's Afghanistan war strategy.

"It's important they hear our latest thinking on the danger to all of us from the tribal areas. That's very, very real," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the ongoing investigation and the intelligence relationship with Pakistan.

Tuesday bomb blasts in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Twelve dead in Pakistan: New York Times "Bomb Kills Pakistani Police Officer" by Pir Zubair Shah May 18, 2010

Eighteen dead in Afghanistan: CNN International "At least 18 dead after Afghan suicide attack" Atia Abawi and CNN wire staff May 18, 2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

Drones and the Ethics of War

This essay, posted Friday, attempts to briefly address the emerging arguments in what appears to be a debate shaping together over the ethics of using armed unmanned aerial vehicles.

President Obama is quoted as saying in a speech, "We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed." This sentiment has manifested itself in the contrary strident legal posturing of State Department legal adviser Harold Koh with no signs of halting, reducing or altering the methods of drone attacks, which have increased following the Times Square bombing attempt.

What's missing here is any human rights argument that human beings--combatants, non-combatants in proximity to or whose lives are entwined with those of combatants--have some kind of right to expect not to be hunted by robots with electric eyes being piloted by indoctrinated nationalists who believe what they are doing--no matter what it is--to be benevolent.

Further complicating this aspect of the issue is the tendency of comments to news outlets following various articles on drone attacks to maintain drones have the ability to "kill the bastards" while service men and women risk no physical danger. This line evades the key issue that children, villagers, farmers, unarmed inhabitants in an agrarian culture are not "the bastards," and the warfare of extermination is, on paper, a part of our past and not our future.

Until these discrepancies are addressed no productive debate on the ethics of UAVs and their use to murder civilians in relentless pursuit of "high-value targets" is going to take place. Rhetorically, we are left with the pre-World War II mentality of "might makes right," and nothing more sophisticated or justified.

From the website Pakistan Defense (defence.pk)

May 14th, 2010

Drones and the Ethics of War

by David E. Anderson

According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.

Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notable the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on American than they prevent? It is a hard question.”

The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.

CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.

“In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).

Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.

More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”

Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”

Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”

Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”

The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”

The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.

An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’

O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’

In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”

The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.

“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”

As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.

The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”

In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.

Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”

The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”

It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.

For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”

But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”

Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).

Sunday, May 16, 2010

US Predators carry out first strike in Khyber

From The Long War Journal, by Bill Roggio May 15, 2010 12:14 PM

Excerpted material of particular note:

"Both the Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Islam are known to operate bases and training camps in the Tirah Valley, as well as in Bara and Jamrud in Khyber. These safe havens enable these terror groups to launch attacks inside Pakistan as well across the border in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan. In November 2008, the US military attacked Taliban forces in the Tirah Valley after they retreated across the border from Nangarhar in Afghanistan. US strike aircraft and artillery killed seven Taliban fighters during the hot pursuit."


"The Khyber Pass is NATO's main conduit for supplies into Afghanistan; an estimated 70 percent of NATO's supplies move through this strategic crossing point. The Taliban forced the Khyber Pass to be shut down seven times between September 2007 and April 2008 due to attacks."

Decide for yourself: Predator drones on YouTube

"I'd say the thing I enjoy most about the job is knowing what's going to be in the paper the next day, and, when I read about it, knowing I was involved." Major Clayton Marshall, Predator pilot

"I guess the most rewarding is when I was able to assist with actually employing hellfire weapons."
Major James Ackerman, Predator pilot

Drones at home: UAVs and the border patrol

The eye in the sky comes home from the battlefields. An El Paso Times story by Maggie Ybara.

"The Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday that it authorized a drone to fly back and forth between Fort Huachuca, an Army installation near Sierra Vista, Ariz., and Big Bend National Park beginning June 1, said Vincent Perez, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas."

Friday, May 14, 2010

Protests in Eastern Afghanistan After US Night Raid Kills 10 Civilians

From Anti-war.com

US Insists Everyone Killed Was 'Insurgent'

by Jason Ditz, May 14, 2010

Well over a month after promising to serious curtail night raids in Afghanistan, another such US raid in Nangarhar Province has sparked massive protests after relatives reported that the 10 people slain by the US were civilians.

NATO confirmed the US attack, but insisted it targeted a suspected “hideout” and the US insists every person killed inside was an “insurgent.” They also claim to have found rifles in the home.

Nangarhar’s governor’s office reports that the raid was an attempt to arrest one of the people who lived in the house, though most of the people in the house did not appear to be “suspects” until they were killed by US troops in the attack.

The attack was the second high profile night raid by US troops in the tiny province in the past few weeks. Two weeks ago US troops attacked the home of an Afghan MP and killed one of her relatives, a father of five.

Faisal Shahzad introduces us to "Guardrail": a "Minority Report"-style surveillance technology

Excerpt from Jeremy Scahill's May 4 Nation magazine online story ...

A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system that, as the plane flies overland "sucks up" digital and electronic communications. "Think of them as manned drones. They're drones, but they have men sitting in them piloting them and they can be networked together," said the source. "You have many of them--four, five, six of them--and they all act as a node and they scrape up everything, anything that's electronic and feed it back." The source added: "It sucks up everything. We've got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That's the point."

Guardrail has been used for years by the US military. In recent years, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has also used the "Constant Hawk" and "Highlighter" aerial sensor platforms. All of these programs have recently undergone a series of upgrades.

So were US special forces involved with Shahzad's arrest?

"My conjecture at the moment is that immediately after this went down and they knew that he was on the loose, parts of the domestic counter-terrorism operations that they had set up during the Bush administration were reactivated," says the Special Forces source. "They're compartmentalized. So they kicked into high gear and were supporting law enforcement. In some cases, law enforcement may not have even known that some of the signals intelligence was coming from covert military units."

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Pakistan denies Taliban link to Times Square bomb suspect

Investigators dismiss US claims that Faisal Shahzad was working under direction of Pakistani Taliban

From the London Guardian Tuesday 11 May 2010 18.57 BST
by Saeed Shah in Karachi

see also Huffington Post: "Pakistan: No Evidence Pakistani Taliban Linked To Shahzad"

Pakistani investigators have found no evidence to support American claims that the failed Times Square bomber was working under the direction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Guardian has learned.

Senior officials in Washington – including the attorney general, Eric Holder, and John Brennan, the White House's special adviser on counterterrorism – have said that the suspected bomber, Faisal Shahzad, conspired with militants in Pakistan, but a Pakistani security official with knowledge of the investigation said: "No Taliban link has come to the fore."

The interrogation of Muhammad Rehan, a friend of Shahzad who was arrested last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi, has not yielded a link to the Pakistani Taliban or any other militant group. Rehan, a member of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad extremist group, remains the only suspected link found between 30-year-old Shahzad and the militant underworld in Pakistan.

Officials in Islamabad are perplexed and angry at statements from Washington about Shahzad's links with the Pakistani Taliban, believing that the US is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for new military offensives in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the north Waziristan region.

"We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn't introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban," said the security official.

"There are no roots to this case, so how can we trace something back?"

An FBI team which flew into Pakistan after the arrest of Shahzad was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. More than a dozen other suspects taken into custody in Karachi have been released, but the investigation is continuing, so new leads could yet emerge.

Rehan's arrest as he left prayers at the Karachi mosque was seized on by the international press as evidence of Shahzad's involvement with Pakistani militant groups. It emerged that Rehan and Shahzad had last year taken a 1,000-mile road trip from Karachi to Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan's tribal area, raising further suspicions.

However, Pakistani investigators have found that Rehan was not a very active member of JEM, a violent group primarily against India and with no history of global activities. He knew Shahzad because he is related to Shahzad's wife.

Shahzad, a naturalised American citizen of Pakistani origin, told US interrogators that he had been trained in Waziristan, part of Pakistan's tribal area, according to the court charges laid against him.

After the failed attack, the Pakistani Taliban released a video in which its chief trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, appeared to claim responsibility. But that video said nothing specifically about New York, Shahzad, or a car bomb.

Since then, the Pakistani Taliban's official spokesman, Azam Tariq, has twice denied that his group was involved with Shahzad. The ineptness of Shahzad's bomb, which did not go off, also raised doubts over whether the Pakistani Taliban could have trained him.

Holder said at the weekend that the Pakistani Taliban were "intimately involved" in Shahzad's attempted bombing. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, also warned Islamabad of "dire consequences" if a plot originating in Pakistan succeeded in the US.

But David Petraeus, the American general in charge of the Middle East and central Asia, had previously said that Shahzad was a "lone wolf" who was "inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn't have direct contact with them".

A senior Pakistani government official said: "There is a disconnect between the Pentagon and the [Obama] administration. The Pentagon gets it that more open pressure on Pakistan is not helpful."

The US focus on Pakistan's tribal area, thought to be a power base for the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, as well as Pakistani Taliban, continued today with another missile strike from an unmanned American drone aircraft, the third such attack since the failed Times Square bombing. The strike, in north Waziristan, reportedly killed at least 14 militants. The Obama administration has unleashed an intensive campaign of drone attacks inside Pakistani territory, targeting extremist hideouts in the tribal area.

Standard military training propaganda

From a RawStory post by Radioactivegavin ...

In a RealNews interview with conscientious objector to the U.S. military, Josh Stieber, a glimpse of military life is shared with the rest of us. This is not Hollywood, this is how the military prepares citizens for an imperial marching force. If we heard a translation coming out of Nazi Germany that sounded like this, we'd all think, "Oh, yeah. That's because they were supremacists and they were absolutely wrong."

Josh Stieber tells RealNews ...

"One that stands out in my mind is—it goes, 'I went down to the market where all the women shop/I pulled out my machete and I begin to chop/I went down to the park where all the children play/I pulled out my machine gun and I begin to spray.'"

Campaign to push Taliban out of Kandahar has 7 months to succeed

May 11 article in The Australian comes via Afghan Conflict Monitor ...

THE campaign to drive the Taliban out of Kandahar province has until the end of the year to succeed if it is to capitalise on maximum troop numbers and political unity, Nato commanders and Western diplomats told The Times.

"Our mission is to show irreversible momentum by the end of 2010 - that's the clock I'm using," Brigadier-General Frederick Hodges, the US Director of Operations in southern Afghanistan, said. "We'll never have more capacity than we have by late summer 2010. We'll never have it any better."

The joint Nato-Afghan campaign - codenamed Hamkari, which is the Dari word for co-operation - will use the biggest number of troops and police in the country yet. Thousands of Afghan National Army soldiers and paramilitaries are to combine with the existing coalition force in Kandahar as well as additional units from among the 13,000 troops being sent in the second phase of the US surge.

The military strategy involves combining regular US soldiers and special forces with Afghan police and paramilitaries to establish 32 posts around Kandahar city at every access point along the key route through the province. Afghan army units and coalition troops will then attempt to clear the Taliban from the outlying districts of Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwayi.

President Karzai and Western commanders have avoided calling Hamkari an operation and have emphasised its political and administrative focus. Kandahar is the Taliban's traditional heartland and its population has become disaffected with the nepotism, ineptitude and corruption that have characterised the local government.

"I'm not going to talk about a D-day or an H-hour or even, for that matter, military operations," said Major-General Nick Carter, the British officer commanding coalition forces in the south. "This is much more about getting the population to feel secure in the hands of its own government and its own security forces so that it then begins to work... as an informing population, so that it denies the insurgent the freedom of movement to come in and intimidate and mount `spectaculars'."

The first phase of Hamkari began a fortnight ago and the strategy will include measures such as registering weapons, vehicles, hotels, madrassas and seminaries. Western officials are keen to have a broader range of village and tribal representation in the shuras, or councils, which communicate with officials. They are also keen to bolster the authority of Tooryalai Wesa, the Governor, at the expense of the city's current strongman, Ahmad Wali Karzai, the half-brother of the President.

Nato commanders estimate that up to 75 per cent of Taliban fighters in Kandahar province, most of whom are concentrated in the three districts targeted by the military campaign, are locals who may reintegrate if they are offered the right incentives. The commanders are also encouraged by the absence of foreign fighters. "We've seen no hardcore al-Qa'ida links here," a senior Nato intelligence officer told The Times. "Zero al-Qa'ida."

Yet Nato officers know that they have a tough deadline. By the end of the year troop numbers will decline and Dutch forces will withdraw. In November political attention in Washington will be focused on the midterm elections and critics of the war will remind President Obama of his pledge to start pulling out combat troops in 2011.

"If there's a change in the game and it looks like we can run the table then Obama will gain some political oxygen," noted a senior Western diplomat involved closely with the Hamkari campaign. "But if we can't deliver by Christmas... people at home will remind the President of the deal (to begin the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2011)."

Apart from the need for evidence of success, Nato planners have several other concerns. Officers note that it took the Afghan Government too long to put ministry level representatives in two districts of Helmand that were cleared of the Taliban during Operation Moshtarak this year, and question how it will fare in Kandahar, which is four times the size.

Although the Western officials are keen for the Taliban fighters to reintegrate, as yet there is no plan from the Government to encourage this. "There has to be a carrot at the end of the stick if these fighters are to reintegrate," one officer said, "but as yet we don't see one from Kabul."

Drones attack Taliban targets in Pakistan

Financial Times story by Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad

Published: May 12 2010 03:10

CIA-flown pilot-less drone aircraft on Tuesday fired more than 15 missiles at a suspected Taliban stronghold in Pakistan’s lawless north Waziristan region killing at least 24 suspected militants.

The attack was the biggest of its kind since the failed attempt by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born US national, to blow up New York’s Times Square on May 1.

Tuesday’s attack, said by a Pakistani intelligence official to be “Washington’s payback”, follows claims by US officials that Mr Shahzad is connected to Taliban militants. Mr Shahzad was arrested last week.

The Pakistani intelligence official said the missiles hit two targets – a vehicle driving three militants through a village and a nearby compound used for the training of recruits.

The attack took place in an area known to be controlled by Gul Bahadur, a Taliban commander.

In the past few months, US officials have increasingly acknowledged Pakistan’s growing importance as an ally in Washington’s efforts to secure the Afghanistan-Pakistan region where al-Qaeda and Taliban militants continue to pose a major resistance.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, on Tuesday said relations between the US and Pakistan continued to improve, brushing aside concerns over tensions after the failed New York bombing attempt. “There is nothing to worry about, our relationship is smooth and it is moving towards a partnership,” he said.

But a foreign ministry official in Islamabad warned that further US attacks on Pakistani soil of the kind seen on Tuesday will “inevitably bring in frictions of the kind that no one wants to see. You can’t bomb a country increasingly and expect cordial relations at the same time.”

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

US mulls putting Pakistan Taliban on terrorism list

This item, should the U.S. decide to follow through, runs distictly counter to the prescription in a previous post here, New York Review of Books piece by Ahmed Rashid Feb. 25, A Deal with the Taliban?, which specifically pores over the history of the Pakistani Taliban.

Maybe it's too late.


US mulls putting Pakistan Taliban on terrorism list
Tue May 11, 2010 4:40pm EDT* Pakistani Taliban tied to failed May 1 Times Square bomb

(EXCERPT)

* 'Terrorist' designation would lead to punitive measures

* Five Democratic senators urge Clinton to make the move (Adds more from State Department spokesman)

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was looking into putting the Pakistani Taliban, the group tied to the failed car bombing in New York's Times Square, on the U.S. list of "foreign terrorist" groups.

Adding the Pakistani Taliban to the list would trigger punitive measures such as freezing assets tied to the group, barring foreign nationals with links to it from entering the United States and making it a crime to give any material help.

"It is something we are considering in light of what happened, and obviously the investigation will yield information that might give us greater clarity," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters.

Crowley said there was a lengthy legal process before a group could be designated a "foreign terrorist organization" and he did not know when a decision would be made.

"We have been focused on this group for some time and, without being specific, we have been working with our Pakistani counterparts and we have taken appropriate action to diminish the capabilities of this group and others in the region," Crowley said, referring to military action to target Pakistani Taliban leaders.

Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested two days after authorities say he parked a sport utility vehicle packed with a bomb in New York's busy Times Square on May 1.

Poll shows Afghanistan not worth it; Obama handling it well, though

This poll makes people seem dumb. Or maybe just polls. Or like polls show that people aren't paying attention ... when polled. Or when reading the news.

Let's just say there is a problem in the way you are asking the questions if more than half of your respondents say they're against the endeavor in question, then immediately following that answer, over half of them contend they approve of the way the same endeavor is being handled. Puzzling, troublesome.

Washington Post-ABC News poll featured on Huffington Post May 11

On Afghanistan, a negative shift
Afghan president Hamid Karzai's visit to the White House this week arrives as the public's take on the war there has tilted back to negative, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

A majority says the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, marking a return to negative territory after a brief uptick in public support in the wake of the announcement of the administration's new strategy for the conflict.

Despite the shift in views on the war, President Obama's ratings for handling the conflict have remained positive since the unveiling of the new strategy - 56 percent approve, 36 percent disapprove.

Views on the war's value have become more negative among both Democrats and independents. In the new poll, 56 percent of independents say it is not worth fighting, up from 47 percent in December. Among Democrats, 66 percent say it's not worth it, including half who feel that way strongly.

Republicans are solidly behind the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, with 69 percent saying the war is worth its costs.

Q. All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, or not? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

-- Worth it -- -Not worth it-
NET Strongly NET Strongly
4/25/10 45 26 52 38
12/13/09 52 33 44 35
11/15/09 44 30 52 38
10/18/09* 47 28 49 36
9/12/09 46 28 51 37
8/17/09 47 31 51 41
7/18/09 51 34 45 34
3/29/09 56 37 41 28
2/22/09 50 34 47 37
12/14/08 55 NA 39 NA
7/13/08 51 NA 45 NA
2/25/07 56 NA 41 NA
*10/18/09 "was" and "has been" wording half sampled. Previous "was".

By Jennifer Agiesta | May 9, 2010; 4:56 PM ET

Huffington Post story follows ...

Majority of Americans think Afghanistan "not worth it." According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 44% of Americans believe the Afghan war is worth its costs, while 52% disagree. This ends a brief jump in popular support for the war that occurred after President Obama announced his new surge strategy.

Support for the war is weakest among Democrats, two-thirds of whom agree the Afghan war is not worth it. A majority of Independents (56%) also feel the war isn't worth fighting. On the other hand, 69% of Republicans surveyed believe the war is worth its costs.

Though Americans seem to be losing confidence in the Afghan war, the poll finds they still approve of Obama's handling of the war by a 20-point margin: 56% approve, while 36% disapprove.

Treat Karzai with more respect, Obama tells officials. In advance of a four-day summit with the Afghan president, Obama has warned his senior staff to stop criticizing the Afghan government, the Washington Post and the Telegraph report.

This follows several months of press leaks and public criticism of Karzai, his family, and top officials for corruption, incompetence, and alleged ties to Afghanistan's opium industry. Karzai retaliated for the diplomatic slights by musing about joining the Taliban during a meeting with Afghan elders.

The Obama administration's divisions over Karzai are well-known. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is regarded as Karzai's "best friend" in Washington, while Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor James L. Jones are known to be among his harshest critics.

The divide extends to Kabul: Gen. Stanley McChrystal has repeatedly urged Obama to identify more closely with Karzai, while Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke have urged him to distance himself from the Afghan president.

But in recent days, most senior U.S. officials have publicly expressed their support for Karzai. This helps Obama achieve the goal he has set for the Karzai summit: to reassure the Afghan President that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, and to its president, will extend beyond the withdrawal of U.S troops to the country, set to begin in June 2011.

Pressure mounts on Pakistan to take on North Waziristan militants. The revelation that the Pakistan Taliban are linked to the Times Square bomb plot has contributed to a major reversal in the Pakistan-U.S. relationship, Reuters and the New York Times report.

The U.S. has long lobbied Pakistan to take action in North Waziristan, but pressure has become more direct in the past few days. This past week, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson relayed a "forceful" message to Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari, urging him to take action. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to relay a similar message.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, warned in an interview with CBS that there would be "severe consequences" if the Times Square plot were linked to the Pakistani Taliban.

Pakistani officials have been quick to argue their troops are overstretched after mounting operations in South Waziristan and the Swat valley. But Ahmed Rashid, in a column for the BBC, warns that Pakistan's strategy of leaving North Waziristan alone is not working, noting that "thousands of fighters and their commanders [from Swat and South Waziristan] have regrouped" in there, and have since rolled back much of the progress Pakistan claimed to make elsewhere in the northwest of the country.

Patrick Cockburn in Pakistan 4/22

"It isn't just journalists but politicians from the rest of Pakistan who never come to see us," said local leaders in Ghazni Khel, a poor agricultural village in the middle of parched farmland.

This Counterpunch piece by Patrick Cockburn from April 22 is another one I just ... missed. It's about trying to live on Pakistan's Northwest Frontier where the Taliban will come after you if they think you are cooperating with the military and the military will come after you if they think you are cooperating with the Taliban.

Reprisal and Revenge
Vicious War on Pakistan's N.W. Frontier

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Staying alive is not a simple business for people in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. The local Taliban and the army compete mercilessly to establish their authority along the border with Afghanistan. "If we support the army, the Taliban is unhappy and if we support the Taliban then the army is unhappy," lamented one local resident living outside Peshawar.

This unhappiness can have dire consequences for the civilian population. In the case of the army this usually means ordering civilians out of a hostile area and then plastering it with high explosives. The Taliban is on the retreat, but it likes to show it is still a force to be reckoned with by sending its suicide bombers to kill anybody it sees co-operating too enthusiastically with the army.

Mostly the Taliban favors soft targets. I was driving through Kohat district on the main road leading south from the Khyber Pass last weekend when we passed through a small village where a few hours earlier a suicide bomber had driven a vehicle packed with explosives into the gate of the local police station. The explosion had brought down concrete beams and ripped open the fronts of shops. Three police officers and four civilians had been killed. The police had draped brightly colored sheets over the wreckage to hide the extent of the damage suffered by the police station. Some shopkeepers were milling around trying to salvage their goods, but overall nobody looked too surprised at what had happened.

It is a nasty little war that receives little attention in the rest of Pakistan or in the outside world. It is dangerous for journalists to visit the area. When they do come they are usually escorted by the army and police. These are sensible precautions as was recently underlined when a British journalist and his two advisers, two former members of Pakistan's powerful ISI military intelligence, were kidnapped; they are now being held for ransom in North Waziristan.

"It isn't just journalists but politicians from the rest of Pakistan who never come to see us," said local leaders in Ghazni Khel, a poor agricultural village in the middle of parched farmland. It was not difficult to see why. Though everybody agrees that security is better than when the Taliban were roaming freely, life is still dangerous. At a hastily called village meeting one man complained: "It is difficult for us to go out in the evening because we are afraid of kidnappers who pick us up on the road and take us away." A doctor described how he had been kidnapped with his 13-year-old son and held for 70 days until they escaped by digging through the ceiling of the room where they had been kept captive.

I was able to go to Ghazni Khel because it is the village of Selim Saitullah Khan, a powerful local tribal leader, politician and industrialist who was going there with his own well-armed bodyguards. Mr Khan felt that the outside world should get some inkling of what life is like on the north-west frontier of Pakistan. He is deeply conscious of the poverty that afflicts the area, mainly because of the lack of water and electricity. In an impromptu speech to villagers, he said that for all the slaughter caused by suicide bombers in the area a greater number of people were dying because of poor hospitals and bad administration. He says the best plan is to build a dam in a nearby gorge to provide water for irrigation and to generate electricity.

Mr Khan may be right about economic and social deprivation killing more people than political violence, but it must be a close thing. The Pakistan Taliban are being driven back by army offensives. They have lost several of their best-known leaders to US-directed drone attacks. But they are not going down without a fight and are eager to prove that nobody who turns against them will escape their vengeance.

Just how savage this revenge can be is illustrated by the fate of the village of Shah Hassan, not far from Lakki Marwat. At the end of last year the villagers had asked the Taliban, for whom it had been a sanctuary, to leave to avoid an onslaught by the army. The Taliban agreed to go but warned the villagers that they would exact vengeance. On 1 January many of the young men of the village were crowded together playing volleyball when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives killing about 100 of them. The bomber turned out to be from Shah Hassan and two of his victims were his brothers.

The violence in the North West Frontier Province is less reported than that in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in recent weeks more Pakistanis than Iraqis or Afghans have been dying in suicide bomb attacks. The Pakistan Taliban seem to have an endless supply of young men willing to kill themselves for the cause. Almost anybody might be their target. Recently they attacked Shia refugees from an army offensive as they collected food aid. In Peshawar a suicide bomber bizarrely targeted a meeting of the Janaat-i-Islami political party, which supports the Taliban, killing 24 and injuring 45.

But it would be wrong to think of the people of the frontier provinces as passive victims. "Everybody here is armed to the teeth," says one of Mr Khan's assistants with pride.

Even the Taliban have to take account of local public opinion because it is backed up by armed force organized along tribal lines. Mr Khan says that his tribe and its allies could easily raise a fighting force of 2,000 men in the course of a day.

This ability to command a significant armed force helped Mr Khan and other local leaders to get rid of the Taliban in Lakki Marwat, starting in 2006. "Before then we thought the army and the Taliban were in league," says a local leader. "We wanted to stop the army and the Taliban fighting there."
The army also has to keep in mind local feelings, particularly as its main supply route runs through Lakki Marwat. New bridges are being built and it is expected that the route will ultimately be used to support an offensive to drive the Afghan Taliban from their bastion in North Waziristan. We met several military convoys, the first vehicle with its lights on to warn civilian drivers to get off the road.

People are impressed by the ability of US drones to find their targets. There are many conspiratorial explanations for this, such as special electronic chips being covertly slipped into people's pockets so the drone can home in on them. But local leaders say that the Taliban's reputation for ferocity is enough to deter any conscious collusion with the army: "People are so frightened that they don't co-operate with the army because they are convinced the Taliban will come after them," one said.

The retreat of the Taliban is good news for the US-led forces in Afghanistan. The US and Nato convoys on the road are no longer such easy meat for the Taliban as they were when the Islamic militants had checkpoints on the road. Truck drivers used to carry boards bearing the slogan "long live the Taliban" which they would attach to the front of their vehicles when entering Taliban-controlled territory.

Local businessmen recall happy days when they bought pirated Nato containers which on one occasion turned out to be entirely filled with whisky and on another contained a disassembled Apache helicopter. "Unsaleable," remembers one potential broker disgustedly. "We wouldn't have known how to put it together."

The state within a state once created by the Pakistan Taliban is ceasing to exist and can probably never be resurrected in its previous form. But they still have many militants waiting for the army to relax its grip. The people of the north-west frontier, cautious and skilled in personal survival, are not going to write off the Pakistan Taliban just yet.

Patrick Cockburn is the the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."

Karzai visit: beneath the veneer of glad-handing

"Afghanistan's Karzai arrives in Washington for visit intended to ease tensions"

A Washington Post story delves into some of the rifts in the high ranks of the military over strategies and policies in Afghanistan, specifically where it regards how to handle Hamid Karzai. An excerpt of the more compelling aspects of the story (the last half, dealing with military brass in the place of dinner with Joe Biden) appears below ...

(By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2010)

Tensions in the administration's relationship with Karzai began a year ago, when U.S. officials sought to find a viable candidate to challenge him in presidential elections held in August. Karzai eventually won another five-year term amid widespread allegations of fraud. Although the administration pledged a renewed partnership, sharp exchanges over the last several months have tested both sides.

Although recognizing the need to maintain good relations with Karzai, the administration hopes to dilute his authority and enhance regional stability in Afghanistan by strengthening government at the district and local levels. Strong local governance is viewed as crucial to the success of an upcoming offensive in the southern city of Kandahar -- a Taliban stronghold -- that U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal said Monday would be "decisive" in the overall Afghanistan war effort.

Karzai's visit also comes amid reports of dissension between McChrystal, the overall commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who once had McChrystal's job. As Obama was formulating his new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy late last summer, Eikenberry sent a pair of diplomatic cables to Washington questioning Karzai's competence and whether any strategy could succeed as long as he was president.

Asked at a White House media briefing Monday whether his concerns had been allayed, Eikenberry said that "Karzai is the elected president of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a close friend and ally, and of course I highly respect President Karzai in that capacity."

McChrystal, who also spoke at the briefing, tried to head off questions about reports of personal and policy disagreements between him and Eikenberry, opening his remarks by saying: "It's good to be here today with my colleague and friend Karl Eikenberry."

Eikenberry returned the favor, beginning his statement by complimenting the remarks of "my friend and partner in Afghanistan over many years, General Stan McChrystal."

The two have disagreed, among other things, on whether to address Afghanistan's energy and agricultural problems with quick-fix solutions proposed by the military or more sustainable projects, favored by Eikenberry, that take longer to show results. In a report released Monday, the Center for American Progress, generally supportive of the administration, charged that "officials are paying too little attention to the sustainability of the programs and the Afghan state we are achieving."

The center, staffed by many former Obama campaign advisers, said that the Karzai government "operates on a highly centralized patronage model in which power and resources are channeled through Hamid Karzai's personal and political allies" in a system that "invites corruption, rent-seeking, and a hemorrhaging of domestic legitimacy."

UK Telegraph: Karzai to ask Obama for billions more to fight Taliban

A recent visitor to ExEd, C Tuttle, posting to Firedoglake.com, tips us off to this UK Telegraph story from May 7 ...

By Ben Farmer in Kabul
Published: 11:56PM BST 07 May 2010

The Afghan president and ten ministers will tell members of the US Congress they need billions of dollars to end the eight-year-old Taliban insurgency.

Ministers will ask American politicians to fund an ambitious scheme to use jobs, training, aid and amnesties to coax militants from the battlefield.
They will say they need money for their armed forces, farming, education, health and job schemes to win over rural Afghans who still view the Kabul regime as weak, corrupt and ineffective.

Relations between Kabul and Washington plummeted after Mr Karzai railed against foreign interference and blamed his backers for the country's fraud and corruption.

The diplomatic row had at one point appeared to jeopardise Mr Karzai's invitation to the White House. Sources close to Mr Karzai said a successful visit was now considered "extraordinarily important".

The delegation will arrive in Washington on Monday to lobby Congress as it considers a Pentagon request for £22 billion of extra funds for the war in Afghanistan.

Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the architect of the plan to persuade Taliban foot soldiers to defect, said securing more money was a key objective of the visit.

He said: "We need their support to build our civil institutions. We need their technical support and we need their financial support. They have promised us money in the past, now we need to see if they will give it."

A Western military officer involved in building the Afghan police and army said the ministries of defence and interior had drawn up "a very long shopping list".

American commanders fighting alongside British forces in Helmand this week admitted the continuing lack of competent Afghan police and administrators had slowed efforts to widen Kabul's grip after the drive to rid the province of Taliban fighters in Operation Moshtarak.

David Sedney, a deputy assistant secretary of defence, told the senate foreign relations committee: "The number of those civilians ... who are trained, capable, willing to go into (Taliban-controlled areas) does not match at all demand."

Mr Stanekzai said the delegation would seek American pressure on Islambad to squeeze Taliban safe havens inside Pakistan.

He said: "We need them to put more pressure on Pakistan to stop this double game. We must stop the organisational support behind the insurgency."

In repetitive report on Shahzad, a claim of Adm. Mullen on the phone with Pakistan's army chief

By Elise Labott, CNN
May 10, 2010

This report is repetitive and irrelevant, warranted to appear in a hard news outlet maybe Friday or Saturday. However, it contains a rather spurious claim at the end that Admiral Mullen spoke with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani on the phone with assurances.

If this is not a fabrication, it addresses a claim I made in a post yesterday that vague pressure upon Pakistan from a global powerhouse like Secretary Clinton is sure to fetch murderous, wholesale results in a place where the army charges out into the tribal areas hunting for retribution for mud on the face of some suits in Islamabad because government affairs aren't going according to plan.

The last paragraph of Elise Labott's story quotes an unidentified source speaking about a top brass phone conversation. Were this bit of information a deliberate leak, we must ask why the U.S. military would want CNN to whisper in the ears of its audience Pakistan isn't being tossed into the cold without dinner to hunt terrorists.

"CNN has learned that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, chief of the Pakistani Army, to discuss the matter. But Mullen called to 'reassure Kayani we are not trying to pressure him as a result of this case,' said a senior U.S. military official. 'Mullen didn't call to say, 'You gotta do more because this Pakistani-American was trained on your territory.'"

Monday, May 10, 2010

Pentagon report on Afghanistan 4/26

From Stars and Stripes
By Jeff Schogol
Stars and Stripes online edition, Wednesday, April 28, 2010
• Read the report (FULL TEXT AVAILABLE; see above link) (PDF, 4MB)

[excerpt]
ARLINGTON, Va. — Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, according to a congressionally mandated report released Wednesday on progress in Afghanistan.

Coalition forces have decided to focus their efforts on 121 key districts in Afghanistan, but right now, NATO has enough forces to operate in only 48 of those districts, the report said.

There are currently 86,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up from about 30,000 when President Barack Obama took office. By August, there will be 98,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

With the rest of the U.S. and foreign partner troops that will arrive in Afghanistan this year, coalition and Afghan security forces will be able to focus on all 121 districts "over coming months," a senior Defense official said Wednesday, declining to be more specific.

Also, from Inter Press Service (IPS)

Pentagon Doubts Grow on McChrystal War Plan
Analysis by Gareth Porter*


[excerpt]
WASHINGTON, May 10, 2010 (IPS) - Although Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's plan for wresting the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar from the Taliban is still in its early stages of implementation, there are already signs that setbacks and obstacles it has encountered have raised serious doubts among top military officials in Washington about whether the plan is going to work.

Scepticism about McChrystal's ambitious aims was implicit in the way the Pentagon report on the war issued Apr. 26 assessed the progress of the campaign in Marja. Now, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai begins a four-day round of consultations with President Barack Obama and other senior U.S. officials here this week, the new report has been given even more pointed expression by an unnamed "senior military official" quoted in a column in the Washington Post Sunday by David Ignatius.

The senior military officer criticised McChrystal's announcement in February that he had "a government in a box, ready to roll in" for the Marja campaign, for having created "an expectation of rapidity and efficiency that doesn't exist now", according to Ignatius.

The same military official is also quoted as pointing out that parts of Helmand that were supposed to have been cleared by the offensive in February and March are in fact still under Taliban control and that Afghan government performance in the wake of the offensive had been disappointing, according to Ignatius.

The outlook at the Pentagon and the White House on the nascent Kandahar offensive is also pessimistic, judging from the comment to Ignatius by an unnamed "senior administration official". The official told Ignatius the operation is "still a work in progress", observing that McChrystal's command was still trying to decide how much of the local government the military could "salvage" and how much "you have to rebuild".

Pakistan to come under U.S. pressure on militant hub

As the United States applies monolithic and global pressure to the government in Islamabad, Pakistan will see its military chasing the ends without regard to the means. The U.S. state department is being deliberately vague as though they want Islamabad to be clear violence in Pakistan's tribal areas (that appears in U.S. and European media) is a U.S. concern, but not their problem. We can only anticipate results that are hasty, brutal and directed at satiating U.S. interests however poorly specified: civilian deaths with official reports of peculiarly high numbers of targets killed, all of them "militants."

Reuters story May 10, 2010

By Faisal Aziz – Mon. May 10, 8:09 am ET

KARACHI (Reuters) – Pakistan will come under greater U.S. pressure to attack a militant stronghold in the northwest, an official said, but with the army battling in several areas and resources stretched, Pakistan's own interests must come first.

The United States is convinced that Pakistani Taliban militants allied with al Qaeda were behind the attempted bombing in New York's Times Square on May 1, U.S. officials said on Sunday.

Ally Pakistan is cooperating with U.S. investigators trying to determine the nature of the militant links of the suspected bomber, a Pakistan-born naturalized American who is under arrest in the United States.

But U.S. pressure for Pakistani action against the main militant hub left on its lawless Afghan border is bound to mount.

"The pressure from the United States to start operations in North Waziristan has been there, and after the Times Square incident, the pressure will grow," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official who declined to be identified.

The New York bomb plot suspect, Faisal Shahzad, 30, was arrested on Monday last week, two days after authorities say he parked a crude car bomb in Times Square. Authorities say he has been cooperating in the investigation.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and other U.S. officials said on Sunday the Pakistani Taliban were involved.

Holder said the U.S. government was satisfied with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation, adding there was nothing to suggest the Pakistani government was aware of the plot.

The al Qaeda-linked Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) is an alliance of factions that has killed many hundreds of people in bomb attacks.

Tension with the United States, Pakistan's biggest aid donor, can worry stock investors but the main Pakistani index closed 0.16 percent up at 10,288.14 on hopes the International Monetary Fund would soon approve a fifth tranche of an $11.3 billion loan for Pakistan, dealers said.

LIMITATIONS

Over the past year, the armed forces have mounted offensives against militant strongholds in the northwest, largely clearing several areas including their bastion of South Waziristan.

But North Waziristan has not been tackled, even though TTP members are believed to have taken refuge with allied Afghan factions based there that are not fighting the Pakistani state.

The army says it must secure the areas it has cleared before attacking there. But analysts say Pakistan sees the Afghan factions in North Waziristan as tools for its long-term objectives in Afghanistan, where Pakistan wants to see a friendly government and the sway of old rival India minimized.

"Basically, what the U.S. wishes is that we go into North Waziristan, and primarily that means targeting the Haqqani and Gul Bahadur networks," the Pakistani intelligence official said, referring to the two main Afghan Taliban factions there.

"But we have our own limitations. We are there in South Waziristan and yes, some of the militants are fleeing to Orakzai and some to North Waziristan, and we are following them. At the same time, our capacity is limited and we cannot open all fronts together. That will be against our national interest."

"We are not saying that we won't target the militants there, but we have to do that within our capacity and resources. The U.S. will keep putting pressure and we will try and take that pressure and act as best as we can while preserving our interests."

U.S. officials have in recent days been praising Pakistani efforts against militants, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows over the weekend when she told the CBS network Pakistan would face "severe consequences" if a successful attack in the United States was traced to Pakistan.

Retired Pakistani intelligence officer Asad Munir said U.S. blame would be counter-productive.

"If they blame Pakistan, I don't think they'll win this war," he said. "They (Pakistani forces) will go to North Waziristan but it will take time. If Pakistan is pressured, it will be disastrous."

"The 'do more' mantra will lead to thinking in the military that this is happening despite their people being killed every day and ultimately foot soldiers will be demoralized," he said.

(Additional reporting by Kamran Haider, Sahar Ahmed; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Chris Allbritton and Jerry Norton)

Colin Powell and the Terror Industrial-Complex

From an Oct. 16, 2009 Rawstory.com article

Quoted in a Gentleman's Quarterly magazine interview with former Secretary of State Colin Powell in September of 2007

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?" Powell asked. "People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. ... The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."

When Powell delivered a speech at the University of Oklahoma a short time later, campus reporters asked what he had meant by his remarks, and he replied, "We're spending an enormous amount of money on homeland security, and I think we should spend whatever it takes. But I think we have to be careful that we don't get so caught up in trying to throw money at the terrorist and counter-terrorist problem that we're essentially creating an industry that will only exist as long as you keep the terrorist threat pumped up. ... Let's make sure that we are spending money on the right things and not spending money just to spend money."

Sunday, May 9, 2010

The demonization of a viewpoint: drones are inappropriate for legitimate warfare

Quoted in a May 6 Sify News (India) article describing Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad's conversations with Connecticut neighbors.

But last year, Shahzad's fixation on U.S. policy in the Middle East was evident at a house party in leafy Shelton, Conn.

Neighbor Dennis Flanner said a brooding Shahzad was staring at the TV news in a room packed with drunken partygoers.

"They were talking about those drones blowing things up in Afghanistan," Flanner, 18,said. "He was the only one watching it. Everybody else was just having a good time."

At one point, Flanner said, a reveler told Shahzad to loosen up and have some fun. Shahzad wasn't having it.

"They shouldn't be shooting people from the sky," Shahzad replied, according to Flanner. "You know, they should come down and fight."


Note: so what we're seeing here is if you believe the UAV drones are somehow unfit to the rules of engagement or otherwise a cowardly or inhumane way to engage people who may or may not be enemy combatants; if you disagree in any way with the facts these machines are operated from a distant location by CIA agents and independent service providers on a corporate-government contract, then you agree with all terrorists and all terrorism. If you are of Middle Eastern decent or related to people of Islamic faith (racial, religious and ethnic discrimination), you are certainly not doing enough to distinguish yourself from terrorists.

Do such arguments sound fair to any degree? If you were attempting to defend yourself under the given circumstances against these arguments, do you think you would be able to prove your position outside of wrongdoing or malicious intent?

For now, I'm glad this is appearing in the Indian press and not on Yahoo News or USA Today.

Pakistan's missle test

Associated Press story on USA Today

Pakistan tests 2 missiles, wants nuke recognition

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan successfully test-fired two ballistic missiles Saturday capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the military said, as the Islamic nation's leader urged the world to recognize it as a legitimate nuclear power.
The Shaheen-1 missile has a range of about 400 miles, while the second Ghaznavi missile could hit targets at a distance of 180 miles, an army statement said. Both can carry conventional and nuclear warheads.

Pakistan's missiles are mostly intended for any confrontation with archrival India, and the range of the Shaheen-1 would include the Indian capital of New Delhi. Saturday's tests — which featured the rare launch of two missiles — are unlikely to aggravate tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors, since they both routinely conduct missile tests.

The latest Pakistani missile test came more than a week after the leaders of two sides met in Bhutan on the sidelines of a regional conference, hoping to improve relations that have been strained since the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other senior army and civil officials witnessed the launches at an undisclosed location, and the missiles "successfully hit the target areas," the statement said.

Gilani also urged world powers "to recognize Pakistan as a dejure nuclear power with equal rights and responsibilities," the army statement said. The prime minister called for cooperation on civilian nuclear power, which would help relieve Pakistan's chronic energy shortages.

Pakistan has refused to sign non-proliferation accords and faces a nuclear trade ban.

"Energy is a vital economic security need of Pakistan and nuclear energy is a clean way forward," the statement said.

Pakistan became a declared nuclear power in 1998 by conducting nuclear tests in response to those carried out by India. Islamabad test-fired its first missile that same year.

The safety of its nuclear arsenals has been a matter of concern since 2004 when the architect of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, confessed to spreading sensitive technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Pakistan has since set up strict controls to prevent any such repeat and the retired Khan is living under virtual house arrest.

But a recent report, commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and released by Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, found that Pakistan faces formidable risks in safeguarding its nuclear warheads. Danger persists from "nuclear insiders with extremist sympathies, al-Qaeda or Taliban outsider attacks, and a weak state."