Bin Laden Said in Afghanistan; Pakistanis complain that Obama 'Kept them in the Dark'

A Taliban guerrilla in Pakistani custody insists that he met Bin Laden in the mountainous province of Ghazni inside Afghanistan.

The allegation is plausible. The US has very good aerial surveillance of the Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but has never seen a trace of Bin Laden there. He fought over on the Afghanistan side, and developed sophisticated safe houses during that struggle in the 1980s.

Pakistani sources not only continued to deny that Bin Laden is in their country, but they also expressed reservations about the new Obama Afghanistan policy.

They complain that they were “kept in the dark over the finer parts of the review policy” and say that their assessment of the proposed course of action would depend on those details.

Among Islamabad's top concerns, according to Sajjad Malik of the Daily Times:

1. It is not clear where exactly the new US troops will be deployed (though it now seems clear that it will be Helmand and Qandahar provinces in the south).

2. Pakistan is “seriously perturbed” by Washington's allegation that Pakistan is the “epicenter” of terrorism, and by the hint that the US might engage in hot pursuit of Taliban onto Pakistan soil. As a neighbor, Pakistan is concerned at the prospect that NATO will train up a big 150,000-strong Afghanistan Army.

3. The US seems uninterested in achieving reconciliation between Tajiks and Pashtuns, which would have to be part of the solution.

4. The US seems to be overly reliant on the military to impose social peace, which in any case they have not succeeded in doing for the last 8 years.

5. Pakistan is petrified that big US military operations will push a new wave of Pashtuns from Afghanistan into Pakistan, where they would become an element of instability.

6. Obama seems to be deliberately conflating the Taliban with al-Qaeda when in fact the two are distinct.

A Pakistani official told the Daily times, “Our stand is consistent that more troops are not the remedy for the war-torn country, as it will lead to more hatred and create more militants . . . We have been saying that only purposeful dialogue can bring peace and stability in Afghanistan.”

7. They complained that Obama seemed to lump Pakistan with Afghanistan.

Now that it has leaked that the US will also expand its drone strikes into Baluchistan, Pakistan is upset about that step, as well.

Nir Rosen, who knows the situation on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan intimately, dismisses Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plans for counter-insurgency in Afghanistan as based on the advice of 'celebrity pundits' unfamiliar with ground realities and unduly influenced by their idea of what happened in Iraq.

The thing is, it only matters symbolically. Everything I read in open sources suggests that al-Qaeda has almost no command and control structure left.
Tom Engelhardt decries what he sees as President Obama's surrender to the US military-industrial establishment on the issue of the Afghanistan surge.

Aljazeera English interviews Adm. Mike Mullen on Obama's Afghanistan surge, and the interview is British-style combative journalism, though Mullen remains unfazed.



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Carter: Soviets "attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country"

Jimmy Carter, Speech on Afghanistan (January 4, 1980), warning "Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country."



Carter said,

' Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan., which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union.

Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.

The Soviets claim, falsely, that they were invited into Afghanistan to help protect that country from some unnamed outside threat. But the President, who had been the leader of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, was assassinated along with several members of his family?after the Soviets gained control of the capital city of Kabul. Only several days later was the new puppet leader even brought into Afghanistan by the Soviets.

This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world.

This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people.

We must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace. A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to possible control over much of the world's oil supplies.

The United States wants all nations in the region to be free and to be independent. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic, and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed. This would threaten the security of all nations including, of course, the United States, our allies, and our friends. '

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Sachs: 'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan'

Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > 'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan'


Afghanistan is an economic basket case. The blurb says correctly:

' The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; only 13% have access to sanitary drinking water; fewer than one in four are literate; access to electricity is among the lowest in the world. Conditions for women are brutal. If Obama plans to address these issues, he's pretty much keeping it secret, points out world poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. '

To be fair, Obama is calling for much more civilian development, and budgeting money for it. But the real surge that is needed isn't troops, it is Grameen Bank specialists and peace corps volunteers (in the north where they'd be safe).

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Afghanistan, Neighbors React to the Obama Plan

Radio Azadi reports in Dari Persian that the government of President Hamid Karzai has greeted the Obama plan for that country "warmly". Kabul interprets the plan as a pledge to build up the Afghan military and then turn over security duties to it, a sequence that many Afghans find appealing.

As expected, the Taliban rejected the plan as a form of imperialism. They dismissed Hamid Karzai as a Western puppet. But they also pledged that their organization has no international dimensions and they do not seek to commit terrorism in the West. The Taliban are pulling away from the wounded al-Qaeda.

Indians are miffed that their country was not mentioned in the speech. But the Indian government expressed satisfaction with the plan. Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharur said that India was “very pleased that pressure on the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border will not be eased.”


Russia was "largely positive" regarding the new American policy. Russia is afraid of Afghanistan's heroin production, which is addicting Russian youths and, VP Putin holds, interfering with them having children, adding to the Russian population decline. Russia is also afraid of the spread of Afghan religious radicalism to Russian Muslims (15% of the population).

The Pakistani foreign ministry expressed concern on Thursday morning that if US military forces did not coordinate closely with Pakistan, and if they operated close to the Pakistan border, their operations might well push Taliban and other Pashtun religious militants into Pakistan.

Aljazeera English has a video report on this issue



The last time a foreign military staged a 'surge,' i.e. the Soviets in the early 1980s, it produced so much violence that 3 million Afghans were forced to flee to northern Pakistan. Islamabad is wary lest that pattern be repeated.

The split between India and Pakistan here is potentially damaging for the future. Afghanistan is an arena of contention between Islamabad and New Delhi. In the 1980s and 190s, various armed groups were backed by one country or the other. The Taliban were supported by Pakistan, the Northern Alliance by India. If we go back to that kind of proxy war inside Afghanistan, it will be ruinous.

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Cole in Salon: Obama's Surge and the Iraq Fallacy

See my just-published Salon.com article, "Obama's surge: has the president been misled by the Iraq analogy?"

Excerpt:

' President Barack Obama’s just-announced plan for Afghanistan seems modeled less on Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam strategy than on George W. Bush’s Iraq exit strategy. Or, at least it is modeled on the Washington mythology that Iraq was turned from quagmire into a face-saving qualified success by sheer indomitable will and a last-minute troop “surge.” But Afghanistan is not very much like Iraq, and the Washington consensus about its supposed end-game success in Iraq is wrong in key respects. Are think tank fantasies about an Iraq "victory" now misleading Obama into a set of serious missteps in Afghanistan? '

Read the whole thing.



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Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama's Afghanistan Plan

1. Obama's plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than doubled and quality results still obtained?

2. Obama's plan assumes that there can be a truly national Afghan army. But the current one is disproportionately Tajik and signally lacks troops from the troubled Helmand and Qandahar provinces. Unless the ethnic tensions are eased, training a big army could well provoke an anti-Tajik backlash in Pashtun regions that feel occupied.

3. Obama's goal to "break the Taliban's momentum" may well fail. Only 20 percent of insurgencies in modern times are defeated in a decisive military manner.

4. The US counter-insurgency plan assumes that Pashtun villagers dislike and fear the Taliban, and just need to be protected from them so as to stop the politics of intimidation. But what if the villagers are cousins of the Taliban and would rather support their clansmen than white Christian foreigners?

5. Obama is demanding that Pakistan help destroy the Taliban movement, a historical ally of Pakistan in Afghanistan. While Pakistan now has good reason to attempt to wipe out the Pakistani Taliban Movement, which has committed a good deal of terrorism against the country, Islamabad has no reason to attack the Afghan guerrilla groups fighting Karzai. They are fellow Muslims, and are Pashtuns (as are 12 percent of Pakistanis), and dislike India. The Northern Alliance elements in the Karzai government, which have recently grown stronger, are pro-India. Obama is asking Pakistan to betray its national interests, which is not realistic in the absence of some much bigger carrot than a few billion dollars in foreign aid.

6. Obama asserts that although the Afghan presidential election was marked by fraud, the results (the victory of Hamid Karzai) are legitimate within the constitutional framework. But isn't it possible that Karzai has decisively lost legitimacy among broad sections of the Afghan public, wounding him as a partner in working for a recognition of the legitimacy of a greatly expanded foreign occupation army in the country?

7. Obama is demanding accountability from cabinet members in Afghanistan and offering agricultural and economic aid. But 15 present and former cabinet members are under investigation for massive embezzlement, and 7 key ministries were only able to spend 40% of their budget allocation last year. Isn't Obama counting on a culture of official probity and a governmental capacity that simply does not exist in Kabul? What happens when there is more cabinet-level corruption and when the Ministry of Agriculture once again just can't spend the money Obama gives it?

8. Obama assumes that the US is not fighting a broadbased insurgency in Afghanistan. This assumption is true in the sense that there is zero support for Taliban or Sunni extremists among Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and a majority of Pashtuns. But if we looked at the equivalent of counties in Helmand, Qandahar and some other Pashtun provinces, we might find substantial swathes of territory where the insurgency is in fact broadly based. Moreover, Pashtun guerrillas can count on a certain amount of sympathy from other Pashtuns in their struggle against foreign forces-- including the 20-some million Pashtuns of Pakistan. If the issue is not the "cancer" of extremist ideology, but a form of religious Pashtun anti-imperialism, then that could be the basis for a broadly based movement.

9. Obama maintains that the "Taliban" have in recent years made common cause with "al-Qaeda" in seeking to overturn the Karzai government. But although the Taliban control 10-15% of Afghanistan, there are no al-Qaeda operatives to speak of in Afghanistan. That does not sound like much of a common cause. By confusing the Taliban with al-Qaeda, and by confusing the Taliban with other Pashtun guerrilla groups such as Hikmatyar's Hizb-i Islami, Obama risks making the struggle a black and white one, whereas it has strong regional, ethnic and nationalist overtones (see 8 above). Black and white struggles are much more difficult to negotiate to a settlement.

10. The biggest threat of derailment comes from an American public facing 17 percent true unemployment and a collapsing economy who are being told we need to spend an extra $30 billion to fight less than 100 al-Qaeda guys in the mountains of Afghanistan, even after the National Security Adviser admitted that they are not a security threat to the US.


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Obama Partnering with Afghan Gov't But is there any there there?

President Barack Obama's commitment to "finish the job" in Afghanistan by sending 55,000 US troops to that country (counting the 21,000 he dispatched last winter shortly after being inaugurated) depends heavily on a hope of building up an Afghan government and army over to which the US can eventually turn control. But one of the questions we seldom hear any detail about concerns the country's governmental capacity. Does the government function? Can it deliver services?

As might be expected, governmental capacity is low, but here are some specifics. Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of substantial sums of money. There is little parliamentary oversight. Almost no one bothers to attend the parliamentary sessions. The cabinet ministries are unable to spend the money allocated to them on things like education and rural development, and actually spent less in absolute terms last year than they did in the previous two years. Only half of the development projects for which money was allotted were even begun last year, and none was completed.

In other words, we can say of the Afghanistan government what Gertrude Stein said of her inability in later life to find her childhood home in Oakland, Ca.: "There is no there there."

President Hamid Karzai pleaded with the lower house of parliament on Monday to delay its winter recess by one week so that he can present his final cabinet nominees for confirmation, according to Pajhwok. Speaker of the House Yunus Qanuni sniffed that the parliament was responsible for setting its own recess, implying that he would not be strong-armed by the president. (Qanuni is a Tajik formerly a leader of the Northern Alliance, and has long been a rival of Karzai, running against him in 2004; he was a counselor to Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main rival in the August 20 presidential election).

But Qanuni seems to have been one of the few members of parliament who cared one way or another. Nader Khan Katawazai, an MP from Paktika, complained that only 30 of the 238 MPs attended Monday's session. This is the government we are being asked to prop up with blood and treasure? Only 30 legislators bothered to come in to work?

By law, Karzai was supposed to have presented his cabinet to parliament within two weeks of being sworn in (which was two weeks ago). Since he has been insisting he was the winner since early September, he should have had time to put together a cabinet. But he presumably had to make some substitutions once he admitted that three of his current cabinet members were under investigation for corruption. (12 other former cabinet members, having fled the country, were also being looked at for criminal prosecution.

That is the government that the US has been propping up for the last 8 years. 15 cabinet members that Interpol is looking into?

Even the non-corrupt ministers may not be confirmed by the parliament because of substantial dissatisfaction with the inability of many of them to spend the development money their ministries had in the kitty.

Seven ministries spent only 40% of their allocated budget in the past year, according to Pajhwok News. And, the sums expended on development projects declined 10% last year from the two previous years!

Let's repeat that. The Afghanistan government presides over the fifth poorest country in the world. It has millions of dollars in aid to spend for the betterment of its constituents. But it actually managed to spend less on these tasks this year than in previous years, despite having more money.

The Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development expended 10 billion Afghanis from its allocation of 22 billion Afghanis;

The Public Works Ministry spent 6 billion of 18 billion Afghanis;

The Water and Energy Ministry 9 billion of 17.6 billion Afghanis;

The Education Ministry 3 billion Afg of 8 billion Afghanis;

The Public Health Ministry: 2.3 billion out of 5.5 billion Afghanis;

The Finance Ministry spent 3.5 billion out of 5.5 billion Afghanis;

The Agriculture Ministry spent 1.5 billion out of three billion Afghanis.

The chairman of the National Economy Commission, Siddiq Ahmad Usmani, continued that 500 development projects were supposed to have been pursued last year with the 111 bn. Afgh. budget allotment, but in fact, "But work on only 263 of 500 was carried out which are yet to be completed,"

The low governmental capacity of the Afghan state bodes ill indeed for Obama's success in Afghanistan. He will be constantly looking for a reliable partner. He will find shifting quicksand.

Meanwhile, the Taliban, whom no one is accusing of apathy or inefficiency, have begun deploying donkey suicide bombs against foreign troops.

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Swiss Islamophobia Betrays Enlightenment Ideals

Switzerland on Sunday voted by 58 percent in favor of banning minarets.



This campaign poster was banned for being racist, but apparently the goal of the poster, now that is all right.

Swissinfo surveys the headlines in Switzerland Monday morning and finds that the press there universally condemned and expressed dismay at Sunday's vote. Editors expressed consternation at the inevitable tarnishing of Switzerland's image and worried about the consequences. Will there be boycotts? Sanctions? Appeals to the European Court of Human Rights?

I can anticipate right now arguments to excuse this outbreak of bigotry in the Alps that will be advanced by our own fringe Right, of Neoconservatives and those who think, without daring saying it, that "white culture" is superior to all other world civilizations and deserves to dominate or wipe the others out.

The first is that it is only natural that white, Christian Europeans should be afraid of being swamped by people adhering to an alien, non-European religion.

Switzerland is said to be 5 percent Muslim, and of course this proportion is a recent phenomenon there and so unsettling to some. But Islam is not new to Europe. Parts of what is now Spain were Muslim for 700 years, and much of the eastern stretches of what is now the European Union were ruled by Muslims for centuries and had significant Muslim populations. Cordoba and Sarajevo are not in Asia or Latin America. They are in Europe. And they are cities formed in the bosom of Muslim civilization.

The European city of Cordoba in the medieval period has been described thusly:

' For centuries, Cordoba used to be the jewel of Europe, which dazzled visitors from the North. Visitors marveled at what seemed to them an extraordinary general prosperity; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings. The city is said to have had then 200,000 houses, 600 mosques, and 900 public baths. Over the quiet Guadalquivir Arab engineers threw a great stone bridge of seventeen arches, each fifty spans in width. One of the earliest undertakings of Abd al-Rahman I was an aqueduct that brought to Cordova an abundance of fresh water for homes, gardens, fountains, and baths.'

So if the Swiss think that Islam is alien to Europe, then they are thinking of a rather small Europe, not the Europe that now actually exists. Minarets dotted Cordoba. The Arnaudia mosque in Banja Luca dates back to the 1400s; it was destroyed along with dozens of others by fanatics in the civil war that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

As for the likely comeback,that Muslims came to Europe from the 700s of the Common Era as conquerors, unlike Christianity, actually both were conquering state religions. It was the conversion of an emperor that gave a favored position to Christianity in Europe, which was a small minority on the continent at the time. And Charlemagne forcibly imposed Christianity on the German tribes up to the Elbe. In the cases both of European Christianity and European Islam, there were many willing converts among the ordinary folk, who thrilled to itinerant preachers or beautiful chanting.

Others will allege that Muslims do not grant freedom of religion to Christians in their midst. First of all, this allegation is not true if we look at the full range of the countries where the 1.5 billion Muslims live. Among the nearly 60 Muslim-majority states in the world, only one, Saudi Arabia, forbids the building of churches. Does Switzerland really want to be like Saudi Arabia?

Here is a Western Christian description of the situation of Christians in Syria:

' In Syria, as in all other Arab countries of the Middle East except Saudi Arabia, freedom of religion is guaranteed in law . . . We should like to point out too that in Syria and in several other countries of the region, Christian churches benefit from free water and electricity supplies, are exempt from several types of tax and can seek building permission for new churches (in Syria, land for these buildings are granted by the State) or repair existing ones.

It should be noted too that there are Christian members of Parliament and of government in Syria and other countries, sometimes in a fixed number (as in Lebanon and Jordan.)

Finally, we note that a new personal statute was promulgated on 18 June 2006 for the various Christian Churches found in Syria, which purposely and verbatim repeats most of the rules of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches promulgated by Pope John Paul II. '

That is, in Muslim-majority Syria, the government actually grants land to Christians for the building of churches, along with free water and electricity. Christians have their own personal status legal code, straight from the Vatican. (It is because Christians have their own law in the Middle East, backed by the state, that Muslims in the West are puzzled as to why they cannot practice their personal status code.) Christians have freedom of religion, though there are sensitivities about attempts to convert others (as there are everywhere in the Middle East, including Israel). And Christians are represented in the legislature. With Switzerland's 5 percent Muslim population, how many Muslim members of parliament does it have?

It will also be alleged that in Egypt some clergymen gave fatwas or legal opinions that building churches is a sin, and it will be argued that Christians have been attacked by Muslims in Upper Egypt.

These arguments are fallacies. You cannot compare the behavior of some Muslim fanatics in rural Egypt to the laws and ideals of the Swiss Republic. We have to look at Egyptian law and policy.

The Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar Seminary, the foremost center of Sunni Muslim learning, 'added in statements carried by Egyptian newspaper Youm al-Saba’a that Muslims can make voluntary contributions to build churches, pointing out that the church is a house for “worshipping and tolerance.” ' He condemned the fundamentalist Muslims for saying church-building is sinful. And Egypt has lots of churches, including new Presbyterian ones, following John Calvin who I believe lived in . . . Geneva. Aout 6 percent of the population is Christian.

The other problem with excusing Switzerland with reference to Muslims' own imperfect adherence to human rights ideals is that two wrongs don't make a right. The bigotted Right doesn't even have the moral insight of kindergartners if that is the sort of argument they advance. The International Declaration of Human Rights was crafted with the participation of Pakistan, a Muslim country; the global contemporary rights regime is imperfectly adhered to by all countries-- it is a claim on the world's behavior, something we must all strive for. If the Swiss stepped back from it, they stepped back in absolute terms. It doesn't help us get to global human rights to say that is o.k. because others are also failing to live up to the Declaration.

The other Wahhabi state besides Saudi Arabia, Qatar, has allowed the building of Christian churches. But they are not allowed to have steeples or bells. This policy is a mirror image to that of the Swiss. So Switzerland, after centuries of striving for civilization and enlightenment, has just about reached the same level of tolerance as that exhibited by a small Gulf Wahhabi country, the people of which were mostly Bedouins only a hundred years ago.

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