Britain 'risking defeat in Afghanistan'
Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont
Sunday October 22, 2006
The Observer
Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former head of Britain's armed forces, has broken ranks to launch an attack on the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, warning that British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.
In one of the strongest interventions in the conduct of the War on Terror, Inge also charged a lack of any 'clear strategy' guiding British operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Former Top Bush Administration Official Calls For Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Iraq
NATO Occupation Forces Accused of Executing Afghan Civilians
Afghan father in hospital after losing wife, children in NATO bombing
By: SUE BAILEY
10/20/06 -- - October 19, 2006 - 15:35 -- KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) - Abdul Karim is recovering in hospital after a village bombing just west of Kandahar killed his wife, son and two daughters.
Another son wounded in the 2 a.m. NATO attack Wednesday was finished off by unidentified soldiers who entered the family's ruined mud home to search it, said the distraught farmer.
Karim, 60, had tried to conceal his 16-year-old son under a blanket, he said through a translator in an interview at the Mirwaise Hospital in Kandahar.
"When they saw my son in wounded condition, they shot him and killed him in front of my eyes."
Karim and his only surviving child, an 18-year-old son, were both hit as three homes in the tiny village of Ashogha were pummelled by helicopter and jet air strikes.
The young man ran for cover in a dried stream bed as rockets and bombs blasted suspected Taliban positions. He awoke in hospital with numerous wounds, including to his left foot and side.
"Now I and my son Sakhi Jan, we are admitted in hospital and we want justice," said Karim.
At least three soldiers came to search the house, he said. In the darkness and confusion, however, he could only describe them as being "foreign."
Maj. Daryl Morrell, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said he could not disclose which, if any, ground troops took part in the planned operation to detain suspects in recent roadside bombings in the adjacent Panjwaii district.
Nor could Morrell say whether Canadian artillery units in the region were used, citing "operational reasons."
The nationality of the planes involved in the air strike was not disclosed. Canada does not have strike aircraft in the region, although some 2,200 Canadian troops are stationed in Kandahar province.
There was no immediate word on whether Abdul Karim's allegations about his son's death will be investigated by NATO.
His village was attacked about one kilometre from the scene of September's Operation Medusa, one of the fiercest battles between western forces and insurgents since the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001.
NATO said in a statement it regrets any civilian casualties, and makes every effort to minimize such incidents.
Shell-shocked villagers in Ashogha angrily condemned the raid - a potential setback for coalition forces trying to win crucial support from Afghans in their fight against increasingly bold insurgents.
President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly demanded that NATO and U.S.-led coalition troops take more care to avoid hurting civilians during military operations. Incidents like the deaths in Ashogha only undermine his government's already-weak standing in many parts of the country.
Karzai said nine civilians were killed and 11 wounded during the Ashogha attack, while another 11 civilians died during a fight in Tajikan village in neighbouring Helmand province Wednesday.
"I have mentioned this several times in the past that every effort should be made to ensure the safety of civilians and that inflicting harm to them is not acceptable to us," the president said in a statement. "Once again, I urge NATO forces to take maximum caution during their military operations to avoid harming civilians."
© 2006 Rogers Communications Inc
Maybe it is time to cut and run from Afghanistan. Otherwise, we could be stuck there for another decade or so, until we are picked off to an extent that we have to leave.
The sad part of the story is this. Despite the Bush administration's sham "peace" and fake "democracy," it might have made -- might still make -- a success of Afghanistan if only it delivered on that third big promise: to rebuild the bombed-out country. Most Afghans, after the dispersal of the Taliban, were full of hope and ready to work. The tangible benefits of reconstruction -- jobs, housing, schools, health-care facilities -- could have rallied them to support the government and turn that illusory "democracy" into something like the real thing. But reconstruction didn't happen. When NATO-led forces moved into the southern provinces this summer to keep the peace and continue "development," Lieutenant-General David Richards, British commander of the operation, seemed astonished to find that little or no development had so far taken place.
For that failure the U.S. is to blame. Until this year, the American-led Coalition assumed sole charge of "security" operations outside Kabul, but it never put enough troops on the ground to do the job. (Sound familiar?) As a result, aid workers (both international and Afghan) lost their lives, and non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) withdrew to Kabul, or like Médecins Sans Frontières, left the country altogether. Private contractors who remained in the field found themselves regularly diverting project funds to "security," so that, as in Iraq, aid money poured into operations that belonged in the military budget.
A recent audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) using "an accounting shell game" to hide mammoth cost overruns on projects -- as high as 418% -- resulting partly from such security problems. There's every reason to believe that an audit of Afghanistan reconstruction by many of the same firms under contract to USAID would reveal similar accounting practices used for the same reason. Without peace there can be no security, and without security no development.
...
It's hard to believe there are still people out there who still defend Bush's policy on Afghanistan and Iraq.
...
]Our failure to confront radical Islam is there for all to see
UK Telegraph
By Denis MacShane
At long last, the debate on Islamism as politics, not Islam as religion, is out in the open. Two weeks ago, Jack Straw might have felt he was taking a risk when publishing his now notorious article on the Muslim veil. However, he was pushing at an open door. From across the political spectrum there is now common consent that the old multicultural emperor, before whom generation of politicians have made obeisance, is now a pitiful, naked sight.
The 10,000 Muslims in my constituency of Rotherham can only benefit from removing the dead hand of ideological Islamism – allowing their faith to be respected and their children to flourish in a Britain that finally wakes up to what must be done. Despite the efforts of extremists to prevent any sort of rational debate about the place of Islam in Britain, it is at last happening.
A fight-back is beginning to reclaim Britain from the grip of those who refuse to acknowledge the centrality of British values of tolerance, fair play and parliamentary democratic freedoms – notably those of free speech and respect for all religions, but supremacy for none. Voltaire noted this attribute of the English three centuries ago, when he wrote: "If there was just one religion in Britain there would be despotism. If two, there would be civil war. But as there are 30, they all live at peace with each other."
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It is worth returning to Voltaire on this issue. The struggle is not between religion and secularism, nor between the West and Islam, and still less between Bush-Blair and the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. It is the ideologisation – an ugly word for an ugly thing – of religion that needs confronting. Return to Voltaire who noted, "Neither Montaigne, Locke, Boyle, Spinoza, Hobbes, or Lord Shaftesbury lighted up the firebrand of discord in their countries; this has generally been the work of divines, who, being at first puffed up with the ambition of becoming chiefs of a sect, soon grew very desirous of being at the head of a party."
The row ignited by Jack Straw has, so to speak, ripped away the veil over the failure of British policy-makers since the 1980s to come to grips with growing ideological Islamism in our midst.
In David Blunkett's diaries, he refers to the arrest of the Finsbury Park radical Islamist imam, Abu Hamza, in January 2003. Mr Blunkett records: "We had been to-ing and fro-ing on this for months." For months! For years, every other politician in Europe had been complaining about the failure of Britain to act against Hamza and the other ideologues of hate who were turning young Muslim minds – long before 9/11 or the Iraq conflict – into cauldrons of hate against democracy, and some, tragically, into self-immolating killers of innocent men, women and children.
Where Blunkett and previous ministers failed to act, it has taken a young, devoutly religious Christian politician, in the form of Ruth Kelly, who knows the difference between private faith and public politics, to come forward and to speak en clair to organisations and ideologues who believed that their world view would – and should – overcome British values and traditions.
An all-party commission on anti-Semitism that I chaired reported recently. Our most worrying discovery was the complacency on many university campuses about harassment of Jewish students. Jew-baiting behaviour that would have had the Left outraged in the 1930s is now actively encouraged by an unholy alliance of the hard Left and Islamist fundamentalists, and the odious anti-Semites who have infiltrated some lecturers' unions. Ruth Kelly, whose fealty to her faith matches that of any deeply religious British Muslim, is right to make clear there are now limits which must not be overstepped.
As a Foreign Office minister, I tried to get Whitehall to take the issue seriously. I argued that diplomats who spoke relevant languages should go and talk, discuss and report back to ministers.
Chinese walls in Whitehall prevented effective inter-departmental co-operation. The Home Office, in addition to allowing Hamza to poison the minds of a generation, refused to return to France Rashid Ramda, who was wanted for questioning in connection with the 1995 Paris Metro bombings – a foretaste of our own 7/7. I hated having to go on French television and waffle defensively at a policy of not extraditing this evil man. But the prevailing culture was to deal with religious leaders, not elected politicians. Whitehall sought the advice of friendly theologians from Cairo, or Muslim ideologues such as Tariq Ramadan. This denied political space to British citizens of Muslim faith, women as well as men.
Late in 2003, I made a routine speech to my constituency. It followed the murder of British and Turkish men and women at our consulate in Istanbul by Islamist terrorists. At the same time, a young South Yorkshire Muslim had gone to Israel and killed himself in a suicide bombing attack.
The two events led me to make a speech in which I said: "It is time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice: it is the democratic, rule of law, if you like the British or Turkish or American or European way – based on political dialogue and non-violent protests – or it is the way of the terrorists against which the whole democratic world is now uniting." I thought my remarks were banal. After 7/7, everyone used them.
But, three years ago, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips wrote a whole page in the Observer denouncing me. The Foreign Office and Downing Street would not allow me to defend my position. It was an ugly, uncomfortable time, as no one in Whitehall or the media showed any support for efforts to get a debate going on issues that today rightly predominate. Red boxes are here today and gone tomorrow. But if a minister is to be dismissed for telling the truth, even if the telling of the truth is not perfectly timed, then this or any government is in trouble.
Islamist politics is now one of the most important issues for the future of democracy. Getting the right answers will define the world's future. All main parties, other than the odious BNP, rightly shun Islamophobia. British Muslims will be welcome at Eid parties in the Commons to celebrate the end of Ramadan. But we have to find answers to calls for censorship, to celebrations of jihadist terror, or a religiously ordained world view that denies equal rights for women or gays here and in Afghanistan.
Some difficult politics lies ahead. It is bizarre that neither David Cameron nor Sir Menzies Campbell have spoken. At some stage, the metro-populism of Notting Hill will have to engage with the worries of British citizens who understand a problem long before Whitehall gets it.
There is a new generation of British Muslims who want to engage in politics and reclaim the issues that concern their communities from religious-based outfits or those who see their task as importing foreign conflicts into domestic British politics.
They must be encouraged before it is too late. From Margaret Thatcher, until very recently Tony Blair, political leaders have been in denial. It is time to wake up.
Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and worked at the Foreign Office as PPS and minister, 1997-2005
'Arrogant' US has failed, says spin doctor
Jonathan Steele
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian
Washington's top foreign affairs spin doctor has described US policy in Iraq as "a failure", and accused his government of "arrogance" and "stupidity". Speaking in Arabic on al-Jazeera television Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy at the state department's bureau of near eastern affairs, gave viewers an unusually sharp assessment of the administration's efforts in Iraq. He spoke in the past tense, as though it was all over.
"We tried to do our best [in Iraq], but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq," he said. "If we are witnessing failure in Iraq, it's not the failure of the United States alone. Failure would be a disaster for the region."
The Bush administration often condemned the Qatar-based al-Jazeera, and even bombed its studios in Baghdad and Kabul. But recently it has adjusted policy and started using its few Arabic-speakers to appear on discussions and debates. It thought it had found a good way to get its line across. But Mr Fernandez was franker than his paymasters expected.
A state department spokesman, Sean McCormack, yesterday claimed Mr Fernandez had been mistranslated, and said he had disputed the description of his comments. Asked whether he thought Washington could be judged as arrogant, Mr McCormack - who was in Moscow with Condoleezza Rice - snapped "No". However, a transcript by the Associated Press confirmed the accuracy of Mr Fernandez's reported quotes.
Among several controversial statements, Mr Fernandez ruled out a military solution in Iraq. He said the US was ready to talk with any Iraqi group - with the exception of al-Qaida in Iraq - to reach national reconciliation and try to end sectarian strife and the nationalist insurgency. "We are open to dialogue because we all know that at the end of the day the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation," he said. "Sooner or later we and all those who are concerned with Iraq must sit together and establish some dialogue. This is the only way forward."
The Iraqi government and some US commanders have made fleeting efforts to contact the insurgency's leaders, but have always insisted that there can be no amnesty for people who have killed Americans. Mr Fernandez's comments suggest that some US officials now admit that there must be a broader attempt to negotiate an end to Iraq's bloodshed.
The independent study group under the former secretary of state James Baker, which is due to report next month, is expected to recommend a number of new options for Washington, but it is not clear whether it will go as far as Mr Fernandez in pressing for a political, rather than a military, solution. Leaks have suggested it may call for more emphasis to be put behind the regional talks which Iraq's government is holding with its neighbours. The US has not taken the talks seriously.
Mr Fernandez made some of his most critical remarks when he was asked by his Arab questioner about splits between the Pentagon and the state department over who had made the "mistakes" in Iraq.
"It is difficult for any politician in whatever administration to admit mistakes, because people in the east as well as the west don't like to admit they have made mistakes or are wrong," he replied. "This is the mentality of the people, the mentality of power, authority, autocratic thinking. This is reality."
He at least satisfied Washington by taking issue with those in the Middle East who gloat over Iraq's problems. "Saving Iraq is vital for the sake of Iraqis and the whole region, not just for the US," he said.
UK warned against invasion
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian
On the day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, senior British intelligence officials told their American counterparts that they would not support retaliatory action against Iraq, a new book claims.
Tyler Drumheller, who worked for the CIA for 26 years and rose to become head of the agency's European operations, says the former CIA director George Tenet received a "powerful delegation from a very close European ally" at the CIA's headquarters on September 12 2001.
According to Drumheller in his book, On the Brink, the head of the delegation told Mr Tenet that "his government stood by us ... and that we could count on it for any and all support." But the official continued: "I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq." According to Drumheller, Mr Tenet replied, "Absolutely, we all agree on that."
Although Drumheller does not disclose the nationality of the delegation, two former intelligence officials confirmed to Newsweek magazine that the officials were Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, and David Manning, then a British foreign policy adviser and now the UK ambassador to Washington. British sources confirmed to the magazine that the delegation visited Mr Tenet on September 12.
Sir Richard was the source for the assertion in a Downing Street memo of July 2002 that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of taking military action against Iraq.
Mr Tenet, asked in the run up to the invasion of Iraq how confident he was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, told President George Bush that it was a "slam dunk", according to an account by the journalist Bob Woodward.
(1) Stop al-Qaeda from growing in Afghanistan and in Iraq;
VIDEO: Cheney Still Lying About Iraq-Al Qaeda Link »
Nevertheless, in an interview with a South Bend, Indiana television station yesterday, Vice President Cheney falsely asserted that Zarqawi was proof of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Watch it:
Cheney's statement is a lie. Here's precisely what the Senate Intelligence Committee found:
Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi. [p. 109]
revel wrote:
ERIC LIPTON wrote:Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
Such a "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.
Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush's use of the term "axis of evil," the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.
American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.
The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look "to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation," a statement by the department said.
It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.
"We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate," he said.
Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.
"It is just creepy and Orwellian," said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.
"This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government," Mr. Sitov said.
The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.
The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like "this spaghetti is good" and "this spaghetti is not very good-- it's excellent," said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell.
Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first.
The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.
One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania, hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in response to Mr. Bush's use in 2002 of "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, said: "The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons."
The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles.
But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence rating for each "opinion" that it evaluates and would allow an official to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates contains an intense anti-American statement.
Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information.
"That is really chilling," Mr. Rotenberg said. "And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security."
Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies from building such a database on American citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the software were premature because the department was just now financing the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.
Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.
"There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government," Professor Wiebe said. "But it doesn't mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world."
If successfully developed, such a program would analyze already published foreign source material to perform a "sentiment analysis" intended to identify potential threats to the nation. Let's suppose it would also be subsequently used to do such analysis of already published domestic source material.
Are you afraid that such analysis could be permitted as evidence in a trial to convict alleged potential perpetrators of merely contemplating a crime they have yet to commit?
If so, why are you afraid that will happen?
Are you afraid that such contemplation would be legislated to be a crime?
If so, why are you afraid that will happen?
Or are you afraid that such analysis would be used to identify alleged potential perpetrators contemplating a crime they have yet to commit, in order to aid preventing the crime from being successfully committed?
If so, why are you afraid of that happening?
"We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate," he said.
As you can see ican there was no reason for us to invade Iraq.
xingu wrote:Oh but there was. It just wasnt the reason Bush gave, and Ican parrots ad infinitum.As you can see ican there was no reason for us to invade Iraq.
