[A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Return to Afghanistan: Americans begin to suffer grim and bloody backlash
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 14 August 2002

The US special forces boys barged into the Kandahar guest house as if
they belonged to an army of occupation. One of them wore kitty-litter
camouflage fatigues and a bush hat, another was in civilian clothes,
paunchy with jeans. The interior of their four-wheel drives glittered
with guns.

They wanted to know if a man called Hazrat was staying at the guest
house. They didn't say why. They didn't say who Hazrat was. The
concierge had never heard the name. The five men left, unsmiling,
driving at speed back on to the main road. "Why did they talk to me like
that?" the concierge asked me. "Who do they think they are?" It was best
not to reply.

"The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have
been promised," the local district officer in Maiwind muttered to me a
few hours later. "We believe the Americans want to help us. They
promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this.
After that ..." He didn't need to say more. Out at Maiwind, in the
oven-like grey desert west of Kandahar, the Americans do raids, not aid.

Even when the US military tries to bend its hand to a little
humanitarian work, the Western NGOs (non-governmental organisations
working with the UN) prefer to keep their distance. As a British NGO
worker put it with devastating frankness in Kandahar: "When there is a
backlash against the Americans, we want a clear definition between us
and them." You hear that phrase all the time in Afghanistan. "When the
backlash comes..."

It is already coming. The Americans are being attacked almost every
night. There have been three shootings in Kandahar, with an American
officer wounded in the neck near the airport two weeks ago. American
troops can no longer dine out in Kandahar's cafés. Today, US forces
are under attack in Khost province. Two Afghan auxiliaries were killed
and five American soldiers wounded near the Pakistan border at the end
of July.

For the NGOs in Kabul, the danger lies in the grey area, a deliberate
grey area, they say, which the Americans have created between military
operations and humanitarian aid. "Up in Kunduz, they've got what they
call a 'humanitarian liaison team' that has repaired a ward in a local
hospital and been involved in rebuilding destroyed bridges," the Briton
said. "Some of the men with them have been in civilian clothes but
carrying guns. We took this up with them, because Afghans began to think
that our aid organisation also carried guns. The US told us their men
didn't carry weapons openly or wear full uniforms out of deference to
the feelings of local tribal leaders. Eventually, we all had to raise
this matter in Washington."

It's not difficult to see the dangers. In Kabul, for example, the
Americans operate an outfit called the CJCMOTF, the Coalition Joint
Civil-Military Operations Task Force, whose mission, an official US
document says, includes "expertise in supply, transportation, medical
[sic], legal, engineering and civil affairs". Headquartered in Kabul, it
has "daily contact with [the] US embassy". Their personnel definitions
include "physician, veterinarian, attorney, civil engineer, teacher,
firefighter, construction, management" but their military experience is
listed as "Desert Storm, Operation Provide Comfort, Panama, Haiti,
Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo". Then there's the CHLC, the "Coalition
Humanitarian Liaison Centre", at Mazar-i-Sharif whose objective has been
"liaison between assistance [sic] community and military coalition" and
which has included "rebuilding public facilities, 14 schools, providing
a generator for the airport terminal and providing a medical clinic, a
veterinarian clinic and a library".

But its tasks also include "security information", a "channel of
communication to coalition commanders, US embassy and USAID" and, an
interesting one, this, "miscellaneous supplies, eg concertina wire".
Somehow, rebuilding schools has got mixed up with the provision of
barbed wire.

It makes the aid agencies shudder. "I have banned all coalition forces
from my compound and will not meet with them in public," a Western
humanitarian official told me in Kabul. "If they want to contact me, I
tell them to send me e-mails. I will meet them only in certain public
authority offices. Yes, of course we are worried that people will
mistake us for the military. They have these 'humanitarian units' and
they ask 'how can we coordinate with you?' but I refuse to co-ordinate
with them. They simply have no idea how to deal with the social,
cultural, political complex of life here. They are really not
interested. They just want to fight a 'war on terror'. I don't think
they care."

This was no minor official but a Western co-ordinator handling millions
of dollars of international aid. He knows, as do his staff, how angry
Afghans are becoming at the growing US presence in their country. As
long as Washington goes on paying the private salaries of local
warlords, including some who oppose President Hamid Karzai, a kind of
truce will continue to exist, but Afghans take a shrewd interest in
America's activities here and their anger has been stoked by US bombing
raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.

After the Americans bombed a wedding party in Uruzgan on 30 June - the
death toll reliably stands at 55 after several more wounded died -
Pashtuns were outraged at eyewitness accounts of US troops preventing
survivors helping the wounded. They were especially infuriated by a
report that the Americans had taken photographs of the naked bodies of
dead Afghan women.

An explanation is not difficult to find. For their own investigation, US
forces may well have taken pictures of the dead after the Uruzgan raid
and, since bombs generally blast the clothes off their victims, dead
female Afghans would be naked. But the story has become legend.
Americans take pictures of naked Afghan women. It's easy to see how this
can turn potential Afghan friends into enemies.

Now guerrilla attacks are increasingly targeting Afghan forces loyal to
the government or loyal to local drug-dealers who are friendly with the
Americans. Just as the first mujahedin assaults on the Russians after
the 1980 Soviet invasion tended to focus on Moscow's local Afghan
communist allies, so the new attacks are being directed at America's
Afghan allies.

Even in the Panjshir valley, in Molla, the closest village to the tomb
of Ahmed Shah Masood, the Northern Alliance commander murdered by two
Arab suicide bombers posing as journalists just two days before 11
September, the local Muslim cleric has been preaching against the
Americans.

One Friday last month, Imam Mohamed Sayed told his worshippers he had a
dream and he had seen the dead Masood wearing a sad face. "He was not
happy," Imam Sayed told his largely pro-American congregation. "He said
the Americans are like the Russians and that we must wage 'holy war'
against them."

Mercifully for the Americans - for this is largely friendly, Tajik
territory for the United States - Imam Sayed's audience was largely
unmoved. For the moment, at least.

-----

Robert Fisk: Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster
The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are
there during the beatings
The Independent, 14 August 2002

The garden was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar
heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message
was straightforward. "This is a secret war," the Special Forces man told
me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening." And of
course, we are not supposed to know. In a "war against terror",
journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to
sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.

How many human rights did the mass killers of 11 September allow their
victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on?
But the man in the garden was worried. He was not an American. He was
one of the "coalition allies", as the Americans like to call the patsies
who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. "The Americans don't
know what to do here now," he went on. "Their morale in Afghanistan is
going downhill - though there's no problem with the generals running
things in Tampa. They're still gung-ho. But here the soldiers know
things haven't gone right, that things aren't working. Even their
interrogations went wrong". Brutally so, it seems.

In the early weeks of this year, the Americans raided two Afghan
villages, killed 10 policemen belonging to the US-supported government
of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American
reporters - in a rare show of mouse-like courage amid the
self-censorship of their usual reporting - quoted the prisoners as
saying they had been beaten by US troops. According to Western officials
in Kandahar, the US troops "gave the prisoners a thrashing".

Things have since changed. The American forces in Afghanistan, it seems,
now leave the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the
so-called Afghan Special Forces, a Washington-supported group of thugs
who are based in the former Khad secret police torture centre in Kabul.
"It's the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for
information now - not the Americans," the Western military man told me.
"But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are
culpable, they let it happen."

This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky
clean with advisers, there were some incidents of "termination with
extreme prejudice", after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys
who did the torture. The same with the Russians. When their soldiers
poured across the border in 1979, they quickly left it to their Afghan
allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police to carry out the "serious"
interrogations. And if this is what the Americans are now up to in
Afghanistan, what is happening to their prisoners at Guantanamo? Or, for
that matter, at Bagram, the airbase north of Kabul to which all
prisoners in Kandahar are now sent for investigation if local
interrogators believe their captives have more to say.

Of course, it's possible to take a step back from this dark and sinister
corner of America's Afghan adventure. In the aftermath of the Taliban's
defeat humanitarian workers have achieved some little miracles. Unicef
reports 486 female teachers at work in the five south-western provinces
of the country with 16,674 girls now at school. Only in Uruzgan, where
the Taliban were strongest, has not a single female teacher been
employed. UN officials can boast that in these same, poverty-belt
provinces, polio has now been almost eradicated.

The UN was fighting polio before the Taliban collapsed, and the drugs
whose production the Taliban banned are now back on the market. The
poppy fields are growing in Helmand province again, and in Uruzgan local
warlords are trying to avoid government control in order to cultivate
their own new poppy production centres. In Kabul, where two government
ministers have been murdered in seven months, President Karzai is now
protected - at his own request - by American bodyguards. And you don't
have to be a political analyst to know what kind of message this sends
to Afghans.

Kabul is alive with the kind of rumours that can never be substantiated
but that stick in the mind, just as the dust of Kandahar stays in the
throat and on the lips of all who go there. "The British forces were
right to leave," a British humanitarian worker announced over dinner in
Kabul one night. "They realised that the Americans had no real interest
in returning this country to law and order. They knew that the Americans
were going to fail. So they got out as soon as they could. The Americans
say they want peace and stability. So why don't they let Isaf (the
international force in Kabul) move into the other big cities of
Afghanistan? Why do they let their friendly warlords persecute the rest
of the country?"

Far more disturbing are persistent reports from northern Afghanistan of
the massacre of thousands of Pashtuns after the slaughter at General
Dostum's Qal-i-Jangi fort last November These mass murders, according to
a humanitarian worker I have known for two decades - he played a brave
role in preventing killings in Lebanon in 1982 - went on into December
with the full knowledge of the Americans. But the US did nothing about
it, any more than they did about the 600 Pakistani prisoners at
Shirbagan, some of whom are still dying of starvation and ill-treatment
at the hands of their Northern Alliance captors.

"There are mass graves all across the north, and the Americans, who know
about this, have said nothing," my old friend said. "The British
intelligence people knew this, too. And the British have said nothing."

There are those in Kabul who suspect that the Americans are now in
Afghanistan for secondary reasons: to operate in and out of Pakistan,
rather than in Afghanistan itself. "They've had plenty of muck-ups in
Afghanistan and they could not base thousands of their soldiers in
Pakistan," a Western officer in Kabul said. "They're safer here, and now
they can go in and out of Pakistan and keep the pressure on Musharraf
from here - and on the Iranians too."

Last week, The Independent revealed that FBI officers have been seizing
Arabs from their homes in Pakistan and bringing them across the border
to Afghanistan for interrogation at Bagram.

It was the Special Forces man in the south who saw things a little more
globally. "Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there's
another war - if they go to war in Iraq. But the US can't handle two
wars at the same time. They would be overstretched." So to end America's
"war against terror" in Afghanistan - a war that has left the
drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the
Afghan government, many al-Qa'ida men on the loose and absolutely no
peace in the country - we have to have another war in Iraq.

As if the Israeli-Palestine conflict is not enough. But when Donald
Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State, can identify only a "so-called"
Israeli-occupied territory on the West Bank - the occupation troops
there presumably being mistaken by the Pentagon as Swiss or Burmese
soldiers - there's not much point in taking a reality check in
Washington.

The truth is that Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster.
Pakistan is now slipping into the very anarchy of which its opposition
warned. And the Palestinian-Israeli war is now out of control. So we
really need a war in Iraq, don't we?