The Independent on Feb 9th seems to make us aware that there are contradictory messages coming from Afghanistan. This death toll is more than the no. killed in the 1982 Falklands war.
Gen Stanley McChrystal the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan is aiming to retake Marjah which is now in Taliban hands; he wanted the citizens to know that an Afghan Government will be there to replace the Taliban. But the Taliban are not going to leave without a fight. They said that they would "defeat the infidel invader". They also have brave international Mujahedin behind them.
Mahar now looks empty; most of the families have now gone, but as a farmer says: he has no money to leave with his family and cannot move them to safety.
With accusations being levelled at MI5 today Feb; and there are prisoners at Guantanamo Bay that "committed suicide" simultaneously by hanging themselves in their cells, yet the cells are checked every 10 minutes, with 5 guards for 28 prisoners but the bodies weren't discovered for two hours!
Lord Newburger cited that MI5 must have known about the treatment and torture of Binyam Mohamed with apparently all those condoning this treatment. The trials go on and the public get more and more disillusioned with the institutions that they had trusted for so many years.
We are from a first world country, but how will the Afghans be able to trust the US, UK,China and the big powers.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Thursday, 14 January 2010
The Insurgency
There is a disturbing element to this insurgency. In 2010 more Afghans are dying in their country's dispute than anytime since 2001. This is due to the Taliban's use of roadside bombs. This contradicts the fact that the Afghans are less in conflict with them than the imposed forces of the US, UN and NATO. The UN, stated that at least 2,412 civilians were killed last year and a further 3,566 wounded as a direct result of the war between Taliban led insurgents and the Western backed government. A friend who is a traveller in the area is quick to point out that the Afghans, apart from their treatment of women, admire what the Taliban are doing on the ground getting electricity working, but "These suicide attacks and roadside bombs most often kill innocent Afghans, not international forces," a human rights advocate said. "This is not the way of Islam and is against international law. This disregard for lives, must stop."
A vindication of US General Stanley McChrystal's policy of restricting the use of air strikes, even so 359 were still killed in air strikes. He told President Karzai that everything would be done to protect civilians. Yet he is the architect of a troop surge, that will see 37,000 more foreign soldiers arrive in Afghanistan this year, and this will certainly result in more violence and deaths.
A vindication of US General Stanley McChrystal's policy of restricting the use of air strikes, even so 359 were still killed in air strikes. He told President Karzai that everything would be done to protect civilians. Yet he is the architect of a troop surge, that will see 37,000 more foreign soldiers arrive in Afghanistan this year, and this will certainly result in more violence and deaths.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Carnage in Afghanistan-again.
Balawi was seen as a devout but an aloof Muslim and he told his family that he was going to visit his second wife in Turkey to continue his studies as a doctor, before he returned to Afghanistan. He was recruited in Jordan and managed to lure the CIA officers into a meeting at a gym at Base Chapman with promise that he would reveal the top men in Al Queda.
He detonated himself at this meeting killing all there, amongst the 6 CIA men was a cousin of the son of the late President of Jordan.
He detonated himself at this meeting killing all there, amongst the 6 CIA men was a cousin of the son of the late President of Jordan.
Monday, 4 January 2010
The Total Mounts
Watson a bomb dispersal expert was killed on New Year's Eve by a Taliban bomb. His death took to 108 the forces that have died in this conflict. But a few days ago, I believe as we speak the total has gone up to 110. I see in the Independant today Jan 4th that a Canadian platoon has already taken part in offering the Afghan forces support as two months ago 5 British soldiers were gunned down by a Afghan Policeman they were mentoring, it was reported in The Times he was called Golbadein. It must have proved difficult to inspire confidence in the troops with this happening!
The way the Afghan war is likely to go is for US President Barack Obama and the British Prime Minister and other heads of govenment to meet and discuss the issue as all believe that Afghanisation should take place. An agreement between Mr Brown and Hamid Karzai is expected after his recent visit in London.
The first headquarters would be in the Kandahar province, General Shir Mohammed Zazai, working alongside Major General Nick Carter, in charge of 45,000 UK, US and other NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan. We shall be in a supporting role to the Afghan forces.
I hear today there is a demonstration at Wooten Bassett against the forces families that show so much respect for all the soldiers that give their lives and whether you believe that they should or shouldn't be there, you can understand that this is a powder-keg about to go off!!
The way the Afghan war is likely to go is for US President Barack Obama and the British Prime Minister and other heads of govenment to meet and discuss the issue as all believe that Afghanisation should take place. An agreement between Mr Brown and Hamid Karzai is expected after his recent visit in London.
The first headquarters would be in the Kandahar province, General Shir Mohammed Zazai, working alongside Major General Nick Carter, in charge of 45,000 UK, US and other NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan. We shall be in a supporting role to the Afghan forces.
I hear today there is a demonstration at Wooten Bassett against the forces families that show so much respect for all the soldiers that give their lives and whether you believe that they should or shouldn't be there, you can understand that this is a powder-keg about to go off!!
Friday, 4 December 2009
The elephant is down
Jonathon sent this: From The Times : December 4, 2009
Barack Obama’s plan is seriously flawed. We need more
By Paddy Ashdown
The Taleban’s favourite phrase in recent months has been: “The elephant is down, now all we have to do is slay it.” The best thing about this week’s Obama speech was that they now know the elephant is not down; it is engaging the fight with renewed strength, determination and vigour. The Taleban are now under real pressure in northern Pakistan and, with the right resources, the right leadership and the right military strategy on the ground, we now have a chance to begin to turn the military tide in Afghanistan. So is this enough for success (however limited your definition)? The answer is no. The Obama speech gave us was a military plan — but not yet a political one. It was, in short, necessary, but not sufficient.
When General Stanley McChrystal sent his proposal to the President, it included a carefully integrated plan for both the military (broadly, an extra 30,000 troops and a focus on protecting the people, not chasing the enemy) and the political aspect. The speech contained the first but was almost silent on the second. Perhaps this is still to come. But if it is not, then what we have heard so far will not be enough. What the President intended was for audiences in the US and Afghanistan to hear different things. His message to the domestic audience was supposed to be “troops home in 18 months” and to the Taleban, “30,000 extra troops”. My worry is that the wrong people got the wrong message. What the US heard was “30,000 more troops” while what the Taleban heard was “in 18 months, they’ll be gone”. The Taleban commander Mullah Omar once famously said: “They may have the watches, but we have the time.” I fear we may have inadvertently given volume to that message. I understand the temptation of timelines and exit strategies for those who have to win domestic support. But they also tell our enemies how long they have to wait before we give up. It is far better to deal with these things through milestones rather than timelines. For instance we could set milestones for the growth and professionalisation of the Afghan Army and police, set target times for them to be delivered and, as they are, hand over our functions to Afghan structures and pull out as we do so. In Bosnia, we formulated this into a Mission Implementation Plan, a public document that served not just to hold us to key tasks, but also to provide accountability to our political masters. A mission implementation plan for Afghanistan, capable of being debated in national parliaments at home and providing a visible road map of progress for Afghans as well, is a better way to gain public support than artificial deadlines that, in the case of July 2011, look to me almost undeliverable. It is not difficult to see why the President felt that he needed, for domestic purposes, to say that withdrawal would start in July 2011. But this does not make it right. Other elements of the strategy were also either missing or too lightly glossed over. First and foremost, there was nothing about the absolute necessity to ensure that, at last and after six damaging years of muddle, the tower of Babel that is the international community in Afghanistan will now work to a single plan, act on a single set of priorities and speak with a single voice. It is the absence of this, more than anything else that has caused our failures and cost us so many lives. The only person whose authority is powerful enough to bash international heads together and make this happen is the US President. Yet there was nothing of this in his speech. Second, what political element there was in the President's speech seemed to rely still on the belief that President Karzai is reformable and will reform. Some might think this a triumph of hope over experience. Of course we cannot change Afghanistan’s newly elected President; of course we have no option but to support him. But that does not mean we need to pile all our eggs into this rather rickety basket. One of the impediments to success in Afghanistan is that we have been trying to force a Western-style centralised constitution on to a country whose traditions have been tribal and local for 1,000 years. This is a golden opportunity to begin to shift the weight of our effort away from strengthening Kabul, to building up governance from the bottom. This would at once give us a political strategy that runs with, rather than against, the grain of Afghan society, while creating the best context for a serious programme of reconciliation with the tribally based Taleban. Taleban reconciliation was mentioned in the President's speech — but only with a single, almost off-hand, remark. Yet this was a main plank of the McChrystal strategy. We need to be clear here. Taleban reconciliation is not an easy option to hard fighting. It may always be possible to split the oddly low-level Taleban commander away with a bag of gold or the promise of a job. But serious negotiation with a Taleban prepared to put aside the gun in favour of pursuing constitutional means will never come while they think — with justification — that they are winning on the battlefield. But if in the next year or so we can begin to turn this around we will need a serious, thought-through, heavyweight programme to bring those Taleban who will lay aside the gun for the ballot box into the fold. And that needs to be much more clearly laid out now if it is to have significant impact and be properly prepared for — especially among non-Pashtun Afghans who regard such an approach with deep suspicion. I had also hoped to see, in the President’s speech a clear statement of a wider regional strategy that would include not just Pakistan but also Iran, India, and maybe even Russia and China. Without this, success will be much more difficult. One other thing struck me about this week’s speech. The old Obama so famously comfortable in his own skin, seemed distinctly uncomfortable in that of a war leader. Gordon Brown, too, looks especially miserable talking of conflict. I do not think either feels comfortable with this — and who would? We all understand that our Prime Minister will never be Henry V before Agincourt. But the US President has formidable gifts of oratory and he will need to deploy them more confidently, if he is to pull this one off. As my colleague Nick Clegg has said, you cannot win a war on half horsepower. Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon was the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia
Barack Obama’s plan is seriously flawed. We need more
By Paddy Ashdown
The Taleban’s favourite phrase in recent months has been: “The elephant is down, now all we have to do is slay it.” The best thing about this week’s Obama speech was that they now know the elephant is not down; it is engaging the fight with renewed strength, determination and vigour. The Taleban are now under real pressure in northern Pakistan and, with the right resources, the right leadership and the right military strategy on the ground, we now have a chance to begin to turn the military tide in Afghanistan. So is this enough for success (however limited your definition)? The answer is no. The Obama speech gave us was a military plan — but not yet a political one. It was, in short, necessary, but not sufficient.
When General Stanley McChrystal sent his proposal to the President, it included a carefully integrated plan for both the military (broadly, an extra 30,000 troops and a focus on protecting the people, not chasing the enemy) and the political aspect. The speech contained the first but was almost silent on the second. Perhaps this is still to come. But if it is not, then what we have heard so far will not be enough. What the President intended was for audiences in the US and Afghanistan to hear different things. His message to the domestic audience was supposed to be “troops home in 18 months” and to the Taleban, “30,000 extra troops”. My worry is that the wrong people got the wrong message. What the US heard was “30,000 more troops” while what the Taleban heard was “in 18 months, they’ll be gone”. The Taleban commander Mullah Omar once famously said: “They may have the watches, but we have the time.” I fear we may have inadvertently given volume to that message. I understand the temptation of timelines and exit strategies for those who have to win domestic support. But they also tell our enemies how long they have to wait before we give up. It is far better to deal with these things through milestones rather than timelines. For instance we could set milestones for the growth and professionalisation of the Afghan Army and police, set target times for them to be delivered and, as they are, hand over our functions to Afghan structures and pull out as we do so. In Bosnia, we formulated this into a Mission Implementation Plan, a public document that served not just to hold us to key tasks, but also to provide accountability to our political masters. A mission implementation plan for Afghanistan, capable of being debated in national parliaments at home and providing a visible road map of progress for Afghans as well, is a better way to gain public support than artificial deadlines that, in the case of July 2011, look to me almost undeliverable. It is not difficult to see why the President felt that he needed, for domestic purposes, to say that withdrawal would start in July 2011. But this does not make it right. Other elements of the strategy were also either missing or too lightly glossed over. First and foremost, there was nothing about the absolute necessity to ensure that, at last and after six damaging years of muddle, the tower of Babel that is the international community in Afghanistan will now work to a single plan, act on a single set of priorities and speak with a single voice. It is the absence of this, more than anything else that has caused our failures and cost us so many lives. The only person whose authority is powerful enough to bash international heads together and make this happen is the US President. Yet there was nothing of this in his speech. Second, what political element there was in the President's speech seemed to rely still on the belief that President Karzai is reformable and will reform. Some might think this a triumph of hope over experience. Of course we cannot change Afghanistan’s newly elected President; of course we have no option but to support him. But that does not mean we need to pile all our eggs into this rather rickety basket. One of the impediments to success in Afghanistan is that we have been trying to force a Western-style centralised constitution on to a country whose traditions have been tribal and local for 1,000 years. This is a golden opportunity to begin to shift the weight of our effort away from strengthening Kabul, to building up governance from the bottom. This would at once give us a political strategy that runs with, rather than against, the grain of Afghan society, while creating the best context for a serious programme of reconciliation with the tribally based Taleban. Taleban reconciliation was mentioned in the President's speech — but only with a single, almost off-hand, remark. Yet this was a main plank of the McChrystal strategy. We need to be clear here. Taleban reconciliation is not an easy option to hard fighting. It may always be possible to split the oddly low-level Taleban commander away with a bag of gold or the promise of a job. But serious negotiation with a Taleban prepared to put aside the gun in favour of pursuing constitutional means will never come while they think — with justification — that they are winning on the battlefield. But if in the next year or so we can begin to turn this around we will need a serious, thought-through, heavyweight programme to bring those Taleban who will lay aside the gun for the ballot box into the fold. And that needs to be much more clearly laid out now if it is to have significant impact and be properly prepared for — especially among non-Pashtun Afghans who regard such an approach with deep suspicion. I had also hoped to see, in the President’s speech a clear statement of a wider regional strategy that would include not just Pakistan but also Iran, India, and maybe even Russia and China. Without this, success will be much more difficult. One other thing struck me about this week’s speech. The old Obama so famously comfortable in his own skin, seemed distinctly uncomfortable in that of a war leader. Gordon Brown, too, looks especially miserable talking of conflict. I do not think either feels comfortable with this — and who would? We all understand that our Prime Minister will never be Henry V before Agincourt. But the US President has formidable gifts of oratory and he will need to deploy them more confidently, if he is to pull this one off. As my colleague Nick Clegg has said, you cannot win a war on half horsepower. Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon was the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Four Ways to Fix Afghanistan Without Guns
Robin sent this in:
Once before, Clare Lockhart was charged with rebuilding Afghanistan. Now, as the new administration sends her — and 30,000 troops — back there, she has a new plan. Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/clare-lockhart-1209#ixzz0YfhrgRRU
Monday, 30 November 2009
99th and counting!!
In the Independant this Monday 30th Nov the news stated that one more soldier had died in the Helmand provance and the army were fearing defeat at home. Today Obama promised
that the US would go from 68,000 to 100,000 and the President walked round Fort Hood shaking hands with the young soldiers as these would be going out, Cape Hood which was where the medic Psychiatrist suddenly turned his gun on 10 soldiers and himself as he was expected to go to Afghanistan the next day, and it was thought that he was a muslim and the presence of the US army in Afghanistan really insenced him, the true reason we shall never know.
General Stanley McCrystal the commanding officer said that it was not going to be easy and he hoped that their stay wouldn't be too long!!
that the US would go from 68,000 to 100,000 and the President walked round Fort Hood shaking hands with the young soldiers as these would be going out, Cape Hood which was where the medic Psychiatrist suddenly turned his gun on 10 soldiers and himself as he was expected to go to Afghanistan the next day, and it was thought that he was a muslim and the presence of the US army in Afghanistan really insenced him, the true reason we shall never know.
General Stanley McCrystal the commanding officer said that it was not going to be easy and he hoped that their stay wouldn't be too long!!
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