Afghanistan
Afghan civilian death toll reaches record high guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 February 2012 12.53 GMT An Afghan civilian is carried away after being killed in a bomb attack in Jalalabad. Photograph: Rahmat Gul/AP The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths. The number of deaths caused by suicide bombings jumped to 450, an 80% increase over the previous year, even though the number of suicide attacks remained about the same. "A decade after the war began, the human cost of it is still rising," said Georgette Gagnon, director for human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan. The single deadliest suicide attack since 2008 occurred on 6 December, when a bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest at the entrance of a mosque in Kabul, killing 56 worshippers during the Shia Muslim rituals of Ashoura. Roadside bombs remain the biggest killer of civilians. The homemade explosives – which can be triggered by a footstep or a vehicle and are often rigged with enough explosives to destroy a tank – killed 967 people in 2011, nearly a third of the total. The figures come as Nato begins to map out plans for international troops to withdraw and hand over responsibility for security to Afghan security forces. |
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Piss on war: death, desecration, and Afghanistan Most sickening of all are politicians who sit in office chairs and start wars and wave flags as young men and women go off to kill and die and be psychologically and emotionally damaged for life. By Hamilton Nolan Cartoon by Steve Bell The outrage machine grinds into motion. The media bestirs itself from its slumber. Americans momentarily pay attention to the war in Afghanistan again. Politicians rush to add their names to the chorus of identical statements. All inflamed over the least bad thing that soldiers do in war. Do you know what is worse than having your dead body urinated upon? Being killed. Being shot. Being bombed. Having your limbs blown off. Having your house incinerated by a drone-fired missile that you don't see until it explodes. Having your children blown up in their beds. Having your spouse killed. Having your hometown destroyed. Being displaced. Becoming a refugee. Having your entire life destroyed as a consequence of political forces far, far beyond your control. War is horrible. War is sickening. Wars started for supremely righteous causes are just as horrible and sickening in their consequences as wars started for less than righteous causes. Politicians who sit in office chairs and start wars and wave flags as young men and women go off to kill and die and be psychologically and emotionally damaged for life are the most sickening of all. |
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US troops seen urinating on bodies The US Marine Corps said it would investigate a video showing what appear to be American forces in Afghanistan urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. The video could aggravate anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan after a decade of a war that has seen other cases of abuse. The Marine video release comes at a sensitive moment, with Washington trying to promote Afghan reconciliation as US troops gradually withdraw from the country. The video, which was posted on YouTube and other websites, shows four men in camouflage Marine combat uniforms urinating on three corpses. One of them jokes: "Have a nice day, buddy." Another makes a lewd joke. "While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," the Marines said in a statement. "This matter will be fully investigated." Two US military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the video appeared to be authentic at first look but Reuters could not independently verify the video or its source. A Muslim civil rights group in the United States condemned the alleged desecration of corpses in a letter to defense secretary Leon Panetta. "Any guilty parties must be punished to the full extent allowed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and by relevant American laws," the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in the letter, a copy of which was sent to media organizations including Reuters. Strong reaction to the story spread on military-related websites, including on Stars and Stripes, the leading US Defense Department-authorized news publication. |
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Tariq Ali - guardian.co.uk Exhausted by war and the resultant suicide terrorism within its borders, Pakistan is in a terrible mess, worse than at any time in its recent history. The war in Afghanistan, as I argued a decade ago, was a potential threat to the stability of the system in Pakistan. Events have long confirmed this view. The US raid on a Pakistan border position a few weeks ago that killed 24 soldiers was only the latest disaster. Motives for the attack remain a mystery but its impact is not. It will create further divisions within the military, further weaken the venal regime of president Asif Ali Zardari, strengthen religious militants and make the US even more hated than it already is in Pakistan. Was it intended as a provocation? Is Barack Obama seriously thinking of unleashing a civil war in an already battered country? Some commentators in Islamabad are arguing this but it's unlikely that Nato troops will occupy Pakistan. The death of soldiers stirred the mind of the nation to new activity. "Save us from our friends" is a growing sentiment even within the ruling elite. The overall effect has been a growth of dissent within the military and the uncovering of related scandals. It was one of these, described as "memogate", that may have led a frightened President Zardari to flee the country to Dubai, supposedly for health reasons. Though why Pakistani doctors in the country are considered inferior to their kin in the Gulf is a question posed by many in the country. Army doctors who, according to some reports, did examine him said he was "fine". A US government official is reported to have said that Zardari was "incoherent" when he spoke with Obama last weekend. His own official admitted he was unfocused. This too is nothing new. |
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Eamonn McCann - Belfast Telegraph Belfast Daily Telegraph columnist draws up a balance sheet of the West's war in Afghanistan--and finds nothing for the plus side. SO WHO are you going to believe, then: the svelte dude at the White House podium or the grimy character preaching from a hut in the Hindu Kush? Barack Obama or Zabihullah Mujahid? On October 7, Obama declared that "our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure" as a result of 10 years of the Afghan war, which his administration was now "responsibly ending...from a position of strength." In a message delivered to Reuters the same day, Mujahid took a different view: "Even with scarce weapons and equipment, [we have] forced the occupiers, who intended to stay forever, to rethink their position. If we hold tightly on to the rope of Allah, our enemy will be forced to leave our country completely." "Rope of Allah" falls strangely on the ears. A problem in translation, perhaps. But no problem deciding which of the two leaders offered the more accurate assessment. Nor is there any reason to believe that the streets of Western cities are now safer. The July 7 bombing in London was perpetrated in 2005--four years after the invasion of Afghanistan. One of the bombers, Shehaz Tanweer, left a "suicide video" explicitly citing the presence of British troops in Afghanistan as justification for the massacre he was about to inflict. None of the 19 September 11 hijackers had come from Afghanistan. All but one were Saudis. Obama has just concluded the biggest arms deal in history with the Saudi dictatorship. |
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By Laura King - Los Angeles Times US-NATO knows the game is up in Afghanistan and all that's left to play for is to find a way of dressing up defeat as "success" and "progress" and declaring "victory" as they leave. The young U.S. Army sergeant had lost nearly all the blood in his body by the time he was rushed into a military field clinic at this dusty base in eastern Afghanistan. As his distraught unit mates converged on the surgical suite, some of them weeping, the entire camp pitched in for an emergency blood drive. But military doctors' frantic efforts were futile, and Sgt. John A. Lyons, a 26-year-old from New Jersey who had studied Latin in college, died of the wounds he had suffered in a Taliban ambush. As the U.S.-led war against the Taliban grinds into its second decade, the life-and-death struggle taking place daily across Afghanistan has gotten entangled in increasingly divergent narratives of the Western war effort. In this high-stakes phase of a waning conflict, perceptions of success have become crucial, perhaps more so than reality. Yet even as the question of what constitutes success has become more urgent, it has become more difficult to pin down. With an American troop drawdown underway and expected to accelerate in the coming year, the NATO force insists that violence is declining, that the insurgency's strength is flagging and that Afghan forces are demonstrating a growing ability to take the lead in safeguarding the country. |
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By Yifat Susskin - CommonDreams.org If you look only at Afghan "culture" to explain the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, you miss the fact that US militarism has contributed to the crisis of Afghan women. Two years ago, a 19-year-old Afghan woman named Gulnaz turned to the police after she was raped. For months, she had kept quiet about the attack. She was afraid of the retribution she might face for having tainted her family’s “honor.” She had already begun to show signs of the pregnancy conceived through the rape. What happen next only worsened her trauma. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the crime of adultery, for having had sex outside of marriage. She was given a choice: marry her rapist or go to prison. Recently, Gulnaz’s case has grabbed headlines. Her lawyers have mobilized a petition that gathered nearly 5,000 signatures in just a few days, demanding a pardon for Gulnaz from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. So far, there has been some good news. Karzai has agreed to her release, but accounts differ as to whether she will still be required to marry her rapist. Meanwhile, this case has revealed how far we still have to go when it comes to the conversation around Afghan women’s rights. Some have taken this opportunity to remind us women of how glad we should be to live in the US. It’s a convenient story that too many like to tell themselves—that human rights violations only happen “over there.” It puts forward the falsehood that women’s rights are the property of “Western” cultures. |
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By Lindsey German - Stop the War Coalition If we were to believe the stories coming out of the Bonn conference on Afghanistan, the occupying armies are the thin blue line protecting women there from something much worse. Isn’t it incredible how much the military operation in Afghanistan relies on the arguments about women’s liberation to justify its continuation? If we were to believe the stories coming out of the conference on Afghanistan which took place in Bonn on 5 December, the occupying armies are the thin blue line protecting women there from something much worse. They went to war justifying the killing of thousands in the name of women’s rights. Laura Bush and Cherie Blair endorsed their husbands’ warmongering. In the ensuing decade since war began ten times as much money has been spent on the military in Afghanistan than on reconstruction -- and most of that reconstruction has been related to military aims. So women’s position has not altered fundamentally in those ten years, and the billions of pounds spent on war have never been channelled towards social projects which might have improved the positions of women. Now some women fear that secret talks with the Taliban will weaken their position even further. They also fear that austerity cuts in overseas aid will harm the projects over women’s education. |
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